The invented Chinese names of the 2019 Canadian federal election – ranked
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I also don’t understand the author’s lack of love to just using the straight phonetic translation (either first-last or only first/last name).[1] Sure it’s nice to have a Chinese name that sounds familiar, but would you expect your (say) Indian immigrant colleague to adapt an English-sounding name when moving to Canada? Yeah, we don’t mind you using your native name either.
Oh and the semantics don’t matter either. Lietarally zero native Chinese speaker would read 希拉里 and think “huh, hope pull inside, wierd name”, we recognise immediately it’s foreign, just like you know Kazuhiko and Jinping don’t have Bible reference. Heck, we don’t even think too much about meanings of our own names that often. When’s the last time you see a guy named Chris and think how he bears Christ?
Anyway. I don’t dislike the article, especially the latter part where the author digs into actual examples. It is always a fun exercise to read Chinese names, I do that a lot as well. But it’s just that, fun exercise. That’s not how we read names in daily life, and as long as you’re happy with your Chinese-character-spelled names (be it Chinese-style or otherwise), we are happy to use it. Over-interpreting people’s names (especially non-native speakers’), now that’s unsophisticated.
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[1]: I am Taiwanese, so maybe there’s some cultral different to communities with China origin.
For example, many learners of Japanese consider English loan words inferior to Sino Japanese words, even though in modern Japanese, they are equally Japanese.
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=%E6%96%B0%E9%87%91%E5%B1%B1
See also: "New Forest", England, 1079.
It also happened just a few years (very much less than a decade) after the California Gold Rush, and there were other gold rushes after that, so I'm not sure why it's "new" either.
Chinese translators really like to translate names and locations which impart some meaning but still sound kinda similar to actual word. Bai-lao-hui sounds kinda like Broadway to a Chinese person. Also, presumably NYC's Broadway is an avenue of a hundred old people because affluent (older) people go to watch musicals more.
There might be specific conventions which compel them to print the full name (if it's a very formal thing?) but they'd do it once maybe, then revert to 希拉里.
I remember watching a comedian doing a bit about this phenomenon of people adopting names from other cultures, where there were two Caucasian ladies at an ashram, both called Lakshmi, and an Indian lady by the name of Pam. I wish I could find a video of this.
Yes, this is especially strange given that the Chinese script evolution was mainly phonetically driven. Most characters cames from writing a word with a same sounding word then disambiguate it by adding a determinative (radical). Even in the PRC simplification scheme, one of the key method was to replace an existing character by one that is read the same (which overload the meaning of a single character).
> Sure it’s nice to have a Chinese name that sounds familiar, but would you expect your (say) Indian immigrant colleague to adapt an English-sounding name when moving to Canada? Yeah, we don’t mind you using your native name either.
In the Indian case probably not, but in my (European) country people are often glad that Chinese people have a local name, even if they find it funny. Chinese phonology can be quite hard for foreigners, and the pinyin system with consonants that are not transparent (h, j, q, x, zh, ch) and hide some vowel letters doesn't help at all when names are written down. I noticed for instance that I'm the only foreigner calling my Taiwanese girlfriend by her Chinese name or a derivative, while other people don't even ask her given name past the English one she chose for herself.
However, in the communities where these politicians are campaigning, there’s a really sizable number of Chinese voters, and I think the thinking is that a more native Chinese name will be more memorable for people. Foreign names are often less memorable than native ones, and if someone doesn’t define their Chinese name at all, multiple transliterations can arise which affects searchability. After all, as a politician, your name is a big part of your brand.
If you accept that premise, then spending time to choose an appropriate name is an important step - after all, semantics do matter to some extent for native names in any language. Perhaps not to the extent shown in this article, but (for example) you would not want to accidentally choose a name that misgenders you or (worse) offends your voters.
I'm not sure if this is correct. IIRC, in at least some areas/families, it's a tradition to alternate between giving a one or two character name from generation to generation. So if your parent has a two character given name, you'll have a one character name, and vice-versa.
Another interesting characteristic of Chinese names is that given names are very diverse and varied, while family names come from a small set (something like a hundred or so). This is opposite from the West (or at least America) where given names are pretty restricted (e.g. lots of Johns and Emilys) but family names have a lot of variation (probably due to all the immigration).
Wikipedia goes into extreme detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_name
>I'm not sure if this is correct.
It's not. The distribution of one- and two-character given names is pretty even in China.
>Another interesting characteristic of Chinese names is that given names are very diverse and varied, while family names come from a small set (something like a hundred or so). This is opposite from the West (or at least America) where given names are pretty restricted (e.g. lots of Johns and Emilys) but family names have a lot of variation (probably due to all the immigration).
You know, maybe we should change how we think about the ordering. Instead of family-given or given-family, it's clearly restricted-arbitrary.
so the thee characters would be: family-generation-given name
Internet archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20191021142028/www.nikobell.ca/t...
My Chinese name is 司馬文 "Sima Wen", with the surname being that of several series of famous Chinese historians, emperors, and generals, and my given name meaning culture.
My teachers were very proud of that one because it closely resembles my English name and they said it sounded dignified. I can only assume they knew what they were talking about.
I would feel weird about giving myself a rare and ultra-high-prestige name. But, I have no idea how the Chinese would perceive it.
I've read that a number of Chinese with the surname 欧阳 [Ouyang] logically chose the English surname O'Young, confusing a lot of people who were led by the name to expect someone more Irish.
My teachers at DLI were really into historical dramas. I'm more into shows with lasers and robots.
Er... 司馬 isn't that rare, and people would rather advise you to select a rare but prestigious family name, rather than a rare and unknown one.
It's like given names in English: if you pick a rare and unknown name (or even a common one with an unusual spelling), people are just going to go "huh?"
马丁 not only captures the english sounds somewhat reasonably, but it also surprisingly captures the meaning in an interesting way: martin is based on mars, the god of war, and is also a famous figure in christian history as a roman soldier on a horse.
the chinese characters are: 马(ma): horse, and 丁(ding):soldier
you can hardly get any closer with a resemblance of the meaning in both languages.
https://statisticalatlas.com/place/California/Cupertino/Race...
... So, they count Asian as Asian?
But I'm surprised that BBC use "Asian" to refer "East Asian". I'm under the impression that in UK, they use "Asian" to refer "South Asian".
For sure, Richmond is the most East Asian city in North America.
> Chinese investors bought about 70% of free-standing houses on the west side of Vancouver in a six-month period
And 40% of the population is chinese:
> 40% of the residents of a large portion of Southeast Vancouver are Chinese.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Canadians_in_Greater_V...
>> 40% of the residents of a large portion of Southeast Vancouver are Chinese.
So... 40% of the population of Vancouver are not Chinese, as you seem to imply with your intro to a quote that specifically contradicts your implication?
As an average across Vancouver, are Chinese really 25%+ of the population?
I think to say it has "a large Chinese immigrant population" would probably be an understatement? None-Chinese would be a minority in Richmond for example.
So, besides the high percentage of Chinese people in Vancouver, isn't the point about how many of them can vote but cannot read English?
European Canadian: 46.2% Chinese: 27.7% South Asian: 6% Filipino: 6% Southeast Asian: 3% Japanese: 1.7% Latin American: 1.6% Mixed visible minority: 1.5% Korean: 1.5% Aboriginal: 2% (1.3% First Nations, 0.6% Metis) West Asian: 1.2% Black: 1% Arab: 0.5%
http://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/vancouver-popu...
And some suburbs have a much higher percentage. Richmond (pop ~200k) has over 50% of it's population claim Chinese descent, and
> Nearly three quarters (74.1 per cent) of Richmondites identify with having some sort of Asian origin.
https://www.richmond-news.com/news/chinese-reach-majority-in...
[edit] - Which I think is awesome, in part because of the absolutely amazing food/restaurants we have here :)
In my experience, Chinese versions of foreign words, including foreign names, usually don't approach the sound of the original as closely as Chinese phonology allows. That is, they aren't really meant as "phonetic transliterations"; there are other options available purely within Chinese that would approximate the original sound more closely.[1]
Instead, the goal seems to be that you're in the right ballpark on the sound, and then you tweak the name for other factors such as character semantics while staying somewhere in the ballpark.
And of course, once a name is conventionalized, you'd want to use that rather than innovating a new version.
[1] Of course it's possible in general that while my foreign ears think a different Chinese syllable would better match the foreign one, the Chinese disagree and really believe they are using the closest available match. There are plenty of ready examples, such as Coca-Cola, where this is obviously not the case.
There is no one central authority in regard to Chinese names. Reporters in China, Hong Kong, or Taiwan — each of these regions is its own trademark jurisdiction — often have their own ideas. This results in multiple Chinese names for the same person, each with its own meanings and connotations that often are not the best.
And likewise for candidate names -- IIRC lots of people moved to BC from HK, but perhaps a minority by now?
Yes, it is the norm for older loanwords. Compare Mandarin jia-na-da [Canada] from Cantonese ga-la-da, or Mandarin mo-xi-ge [Mexico] from Cantonese mak-sai-go.
EDIT: it's worth observing that the Chinese themselves are generally not aware that the older loanwords came through Cantonese.
It feels safe to say the second syllable beginning with N in Mandarin was just good luck though. I might have swapped out the N for L anyway if I had known the Jyutping.
An example of a distinction that would have come through fine English -> Mandarin being lost by apparent transmission through Cantonese exists in Los Angeles, 洛杉矶. The Mandarin is luo-shan-ji, which annoys me every time I need to understand or produce the name. Mandarin has no problem distinguishing s from sh.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFEO_Chinese_transcription
Read your own link:
> The transcription of the EFEO did not borrow its phonetics from the national official Standard Mandarin. Rather, it was synthesized independently to be a mean of Chinese dialects, and shows a state of sounds a little older in form
In particular, for the Beijing case, South Mandarin is involved: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_postal_romanization#Ma....
That’s not entirely true. There is bopomofodutunuh [1]. Maybe it’s not as well known as Kana.
Also, I think it would be weird to have a name made of those characters. They're strictly phonetic -- I've never seen a Chinese name made out of bopomofo letters.
Was that joke? At least in Japanese, the two first are a very common colloquial for testicles.
As in Chinese, 金玉 also means "gold and jewels" in Japanese, i.e. treasure, so the semantic distance to testicles is not any smaller. Presumably someone might have heard of "family jewels".
>For a Chinese speaker, using 金玉 (gold+jade/precious) to describe testicles probably wouldn't be too strange
金玉 is used in the idiom 金玉满堂, which can either mean full of riches or knowledge,[1][2] so it would be rather strange.
[0] https://jisho.org/search/%E9%87%91%E7%8E%89
[1] "形容财富极多，也形容学识丰富。" (Describes someone who's extremely wealthy, but can also describe someone who's full of knowledge.) https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E9%87%91%E7%8E%89%E6%BB%A1%E5%...
[2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%87%91%E7%8E%89%E6%BB%BF%E...
Kintama was the first thing I thought of when looking at it though. "Goose balls"?
金 = gold/golden, 玉 = jade, 鹅 = goose
Usually the more chars resembling wealth in your name, the less educated family you may be from. Basically it just shows your eagerness to become rich. Not to mention the last character, which is rarely used char in names, who wants to name their child "goose"?
金 and 玉 are actually common in names, but usually combined with other good words like 诺(promise), 心(heart),... something like that. Decent names are not that straightforward and I think it may be the same in the western world.
鹅 can refer to quite a few birds in Chinese[0], and in this case, since the article noted:
Vancouver city council candidate Jean Swanson’s (金玉鹅) [has a] beautifully phonetic and semantic rendering of her name
鹅 is probably referring to 天鹅 ("swan")[1], which is part of Swanson's family name.
A bit of an explainer: In names, a word that's usually two characters long is often truncated. For example, the name of the kirin (麒麟) is often used in names, but is often truncated to 麟 (麒 is also possible) so that another character (e.g. a verb) can be introduced, e.g. Alan Tam's given name[2], 詠麟, means to rhapsodise about the kirin.
>Usually the more chars resembling wealth in your name, the less educated family you may be from.
Swanson's an anti-poverty activist,[3] so perhaps that may explain something about why 金玉 might have been appealing as a reference to 金玉滿堂.
Her party "has traditionally been associated with tenants, environmentalists, and the labour movement"[4], so I imagine that perhaps she wanted something green in the name as well, and jade (玉) fits the bill.
[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%B5%9D#Chinese
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%A4%A9%E9%B5%9D#Chinese
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Tam
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Swanson
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_Progressive_Elect...
I've never heard of or seen this character until today.
>most people know of it as it's part of the idiom: 燕雀安知鸿鹄之志.
"Most people" usually mean "people around me", so it's not indicative.
There are plenty of ethnic Chinese people not living in China who might not have heard of this idiom -- in part because their knowledge of Chinese may not be as deep as people who've gone through the Chinese education system -- and one of them had probably advised Swanson on her name choice.
>Was that joke? At least in Japanese, the two first are a very common colloquial for testicles.
Probably not, although "beautifully phonetic [...] rendering" is a bit of a stretch: only her given name is phonetically rendered.
Whoever advised her on taking the name probably didn't know the Japanese colloquial meaning of 金玉, but was referencing the Chinese idiom 金玉滿堂[0]. It probably sounded good to Swanson because she's deeply concerned about poverty[1], but it feels like gilding the lily, because the whole name literally means "gold-and-jade goose/swan" (鹅 is probably referring to the "swan" in "Swanson", but "goose" seems to be what people landed upon in this thread).
[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%87%91%E7%8E%89%E6%BB%BF%E...
The McD online ordering website in China is https://www.4008-517-517.cn -- apparently "517" sounds like "I want to eat".
They sell a "Land, Air, Sea Warfare" combo menu which sounds ominous, but apparently it's commonly known "secret menu" item on ordinary McDonalds combining a Big Mac, McChicken and the McFish.
I:我:wo, want:要:yao, eat:吃:chi
Note the following are not nicknames. These are given names.
Some I can chalk up to probably being purely phonetic spellings (不寿 a.k.a. Not-Long-Lived a king of Yue 越, who doesn't seem to have lived a particularly short life, but his date of birth is unknown). Others to their names later taking on negative connotations because of their own actions (嫪毐 Lao Ai where 毐 later became used to describe immoral people, presumably because he pretended to be a eunuch, slept with the mother of Qin Shihuangdi, the first emperor of China, and then led a failed revolution against the emperor's father, the king of Qin. His whole story is insane. He's a performer who does tricks with his large penis who got used in a game of political intrigue by Lu Buwei to protect Lu Buwei from the king of Qin.).
There still others that maybe had their names invented or twisted to suit stories. See for example 牛缺(Lacking Niu), a high-ranking scholar who appears in 吕氏春秋 (Master Lu's Spring and Autumn Annals) who goes on a trip through the desert, has everything stolen from him, and then is later killed by his robbers for good measure.
And yet others may be a result of trying to ward off evil or encourage modesty by intentionally giving children modest or unappealing names.
However, there's some, especially from the Warring States and earlier, that just seem to be inexplicably absurd names, with a large focus on "not."
晋黑臀 (Black-Butt Jin), also known by his title Duke Cheng of Jin. Perhaps he just had very literal parents.
叔孙不敢 (Doesn't-Dare/Not-Brave Shusun), a Lu court official. Sure his father tried and failed to help Duke Zhao of Lu, but the historical account makes it sound like that probably happened after Doesn't-Dare's birth.
韩不信/韩不佞 (Not-Credible Han/Unworthy Han). Granted the latter could also mean not given to sophistry, but still why would you take that chance with a child (both meanings are attested to in fairly ancient sources)?
秦非 (Not Qin, note order is flipped compared to English names so it's literally Qin Not). A disciple of Confucius.
皇非我 (Not-Me Huang). An official of the kingdom of Song. Again maybe a result of traditions trying to protect children from evil spirits, but I still find it rather amusing.
I've never really heard a good explanation for these, other than given names didn't really matter back then, rather it was adult honorary names (e.g. Zi or 字) that mattered more, which sure I guess I can believe. On the other hand, if that was the case I'd expect a cornucopia of awful names rather than the comparatively few, but still abnormally many, that I observe now.
I'd think that, since 皇 means "emperor", the name is protective in the sense that it's trying to say "no, no, I'm not the emperor".
>I've never really heard a good explanation for these, other than given names didn't really matter back then, rather it was adult honorary names (e.g. Zi or 字) that mattered more, which sure I guess I can believe. On the other hand, if that was the case I'd expect a cornucopia of awful names rather than the comparatively few, but still abnormally many, that I observe now.
Presumably, honorary names are the ones that are recorded, since they mattered more, not the awful names given by your parents or nicknames.
When recording names in historical records usually the given name as well as honorary name are given as well (honorary names of these figures are all recorded alongside these given names and are far more ordinary).
Good to know.
>When recording names in historical records usually the given name as well as honorary name are given as well (honorary names of these figures are all recorded alongside these given names and are far more ordinary).
I think the unusual names you've come across are those that've slipped through the cracks. In any case, Chinese men back then would have been given a few names before they reached adulthood: usually, a "milk name" from their parents and another (usually more dignified) name when they attend school. The honorary name comes much later. The unusual names may have been "milk names" that survived the cull because the bearers might not have attended school, for example.
Of course, the practice hasn't survived into the modern age, but you still see this practice in the Arabic world, where people can have multiple aliases. So what you labelled as the "given name" need not be the "given name" we understand today, but just the name that's survived to adulthood that's not the honorary name, which comes later.
I know the writer spent a bunch of time in China but a bunch of the "nuance" of how the names are interpreted seem either excessive or overinterpretive.
Just-another-opinion: As a Chinese person I actually prefer direct translations such as 川普 (Trump) as the name is usually pretty distinct, and people who share the same surname can have different characters to represent them.
Off-handedly, the characters used to translate a person's name often times can convey additional info - I can't think of too many specifics by country, but it's very easy to tell who's from Japan because they just take the kanji and use the Chinese translation (which butchers the pronunciation), or Korean because certain characters are almost always used for translating certain surnames (such as 金 -> Kim).
Agreed. Also, most Chinese names are "invented" anyway, so why is that in the headline?