I introduce myself to non-Burmese as follows:

• My name is Hla Min.
• Hla means “handsome” and Min means “king”.

My name has two words and six letters.

It is interesting to note that my name has been misspelled and mispronounced in more than six ways.

They include

• HAL
  HAL is an American name.
  HAL is also the name of a rouge computer in science fiction. The letters precede those of IBM (International Business Machines) by a position.
• HALAL
  HALAL is “clean food” for Muslims.
• LA
  LA is a musical tone.
• LAH
  LAH is Singlish (Singaporean English)
• MINH
  MINH is a common name for Vietnamese.
• MING
  MING is a Chinese name (e.g. Ming Dynasty)

Speeches on names

I gave a series of speeches:

• Meaning of names
• Naming conventions
• Names of people
• Names of places
• Names of companies
• …

At Toastmasters meetings, I asked the attendees if they know the meaning of their names.
A few tried to Google their names.

Remembering names

One way to remember names is to register them with an association.

Examples:

• Stein means a rock.
  Einstein means “one rock”.
• Peter means “the rock”.
  Variations include Bedr, Pedro and Peta.
• Deep means “light” and “wisdom”
  Deepavali (or Diwali) is the Festival of Lights.
  Deepak is an Indian name.
• San is a prefix for male saints.
  San Francisco is the Spanish name for St. Francis.
• Santa is a prefix for female saints.
  Examples include Santa Clara and Santa Barbara.
• Santa Cruz (Holy Cross) and Corpus Christi (Body of Christ) are names of cities in California and Texas.