Something that came up in conversation is that, as far as names go, "Kistaro" is an approximation, and a rather severe one. The "proper" pronunciation is a hissy, lizardy thing, as might be expected from a name for a hissy, lizardy thing such as myself. Try "Kss'tro", through largely clenched teeth with the Klingon sort of pronunciation behind it that tries to gutturally launch whatever you're saying against the far wall.

This is an amusingly full-circle thing. I'd spent a while deciding that "Kistaro" wasn't quite right, and it was kind of that indefinable meditating-seeking-matching sort of process to find out what was, and then I remembered that it's exactly the first thing I'd come to when I was really starting to understand my identity, and at that time had convinced myself that it must be too stereotypical to be named something unpronounceable and snarly.

Well, snarly and not-exactly-fluent-in-conversation it is; I'm certain it fit fine into its original linguistic context. It is what it is, I suppose.

Of course, there's all the tradition you could want of immigrants to a new nation being required to change their names to something more compatible with the new culture, or at least pronounceable; if I claim to be an immigrant from another planet, the Anglicization treatment is only reasonable. So I'm not changing a damn thing, with regard to my general purpose use-name. I just thought it might be interesting to observe what's more technically accurate.

I've migrated to DreamWidth. The original post is at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/459745.html. View comments at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/459745.html#comments ; go ahead and use OpenID to post your own.