The argument about anglicized names usually works because there are lots of shared names by way of shared religion. Иван can be anglicized as John because it's

The argument about anglicized names usually works because there are lots of shared names by way of shared religion. Иван can be anglicized as John because it's an important name in the foundation of both western and eastern european religion, not because someone just decided they seem similar. > I met dozens of Sorens and none of them pronounced it differently. And none of them were named the same as Søren Kierkegaard, being named Soren and all. Being from MN, by the way, you would think actually naming your kid the same as the person you're naming them after wasn't such a big deal, considering there's lots of scandinavian heritage there. I think the big takeaway here is that americans, for all their talk of heritage and mixed culture are still super resistant to actually embracing and getting things from other cultures right. In general I'd say native English speakers are extremely lazy when it comes to other languages. This assumption that you can remove umlauts and diacritics from letters and everything will be fine is everywhere in US media and it's pretty ridiculous. Both umlauts and diacritics specifically mark a difference in pronunciation. That's their entire purpose.