Detlef, Alan still refers to this pursuit as the name game --- he just doesn't get angry about it these days and tends to find the whole thing rather amusing.
Kai, in respect of the variant spellings of the same name, there is more than just the different dialects and accents of the users involved, there is also the way in which a Dutchman, or a Portugese, or an Englishman would represent on paper a sound that he heard.
Then there are the peculiarities of the Malay family of languages such as letters that sound the same to an untrained ear, or empty spaces that actually contain letters, or sounds other than sounds that can be represented by letters.
In transcription from native scripts to roman scripts it sometimes becomes necessary to guess at the actual letters that are represented by the native script, and this can occur even with educated people who use the language involved as their own language.
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