Tragedeigh

I was at a medical appointment, and the (very cute) nurse was named "Kaelea" pronounced Kaylee.

I would like to provide a counterexample. There are plenty of these people in the US intermountain west, but there are at least some cases where there is no one at fault. Next time you see one of these names without context (though we clearly have the context in this case), before judging, consider Nariaw:

I am a teacher, and one year I found that my roster included a student named "Nariaw". As a public school, we register your student based on what's on the birth certificate. I ask all of my students to pronounce their names for me when I first meet them, for the reason we see in so many of the replies here and with shit like "abcde". However, when this girl came to my class, she said her name was pronounced "Miriam". I spent a good twenty seconds looking at my roster, and had to ask her to spell it for me. I didn't ask any rude and impertinent questions at that point, so it wasn't until a few months later that I got the full story:

Her mother, an immigrant from Ethiopia, was still unfamiliar with Latin script when her daughter was born here in the US. So when she attempted to write out the name, which she wanted to transliterate as "Mariam", she ended up writing only half of the first M, and wrote the second one upside-down. Whoever did the data entry for the government records dutifully recorded the child's name as "Nariaw". Was the mother at fault for being expected to write a name which, while she knew how to represent it in Amharic, she was forced to write in a language in which she was illiterate?

X Æ A-Xii . I could not resist. I apologize.

I once had a student named Dominca. It was supposedly pronounced Duh-mawn-i-ca. She would get very irritated that people “didn’t know how to read” when they pronounced it doh-minca

https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2018/11/29/little-girl-named-abcde-was-mocked-by-southwest-gate-agent-airline-has-apologized/

A girl named Abcde

tbf, it supposed to ve pronounced Absedee. which isn't ugly phonetically, but being named Abcde???

The solution is to put all of the uniqueness in the middle name. Then you still get to feel “special” while not forcing your kid to go by “tragedeigh” or whatever.

When I chose my name - I made my first as milquetoast and appropriate to my age as possible. My middle I went balls out - I guarantee I have a cooler middle name than you do.

I knew a guy so ghetto he got his first name as his Xbox Live Gamertag.

I named my son Jaxin because my wife wanted Jax and I didn't want my son to have a dog's name.

I regret not just naming him Jackson because nobody in Taiwan knows how to pronounce Jaxin.

"Heulyn" pronounced Hay-lynn.

A girl in highschool whose name was Nazanine went by Nazi (Nah zee). Like, why? Your name was beautiful.

Toneigh 🐴🐴🐴. As in Toni or Tony.

Brayden, Hayden, jayden, tayden, kayden, rayden, shayden, cayden, pretty much the whole alphabet ending in den. And yes I met every single one of these