I am polish my last name is Prochnicki I can go to any store I have a club card say my last name they will almost always know how to spell it
I have a Ruysn/Polish maiden sur name, there are several ways it can be spelled, even in Poland. Visited Poland and have done some research on my surname. Sometimes a W is used and sometimes a V, some people us the letter A at the end after their mothers and sometimes not. Sometimes spelled with 2 l's, sometimes with a C instead of a K.
My name now is Hungarian and they say it like it is spelled but in our case, my husband's family was knighted centuries ago and because of that they were given the right to use ssy at the end of their name replacing the plain spelling at the end of ie or sy.
In fact after WW11 when the communists took over the country my FIL had to actually prove through church records and old documents from the National Archives they he had a right to keep the spelling with ssy. Communists didn't like"fancy" names but since he was able to prove they had the name for so long and that it was never a bought name we got to keep the spelling.
Who knows maybe you have just run into some very good spellers.
In Polish there is a pretty fixed rule for sound for written letter and written letter for spoken sound.
So if both speaker and writer are from the same area, so speak the same dialect and the name is also from the same area, spelling is much less likely than it is in English.
That is because English does not have those fixed spelling/pronunciation rules.
But there will always be people who have to spell their names as the name is not native to the country.
What does being Polish have anything to do with being able to spell peoples names just by hearing them? Everyone can spell every single name there is just by hearing the name! It's not just Polish people, every single person in the world and every single person of every nationality can spell any persons name just by hearing it...That's why being asked to spell names of people are never on a spelling bee, because everyone would spell them right....what the heck are you thinking?
In Finland names are said exactly as they are written.
