inconsequential concourse

My friend Gregg surprised me with a Christmas present tonight… A plaque at my regular seat at his bar, Witness! I was surprised, speechless, and maybe even a little weepy…

"We'll always have Paris." Thanks for all the memories, Witness Bar, Gregg Holcomb, and the too many people to list...

explanation time:

At risk of being that person, for the most part this is true. Don’t just slap a bunch of ethnic sounding syllables together and hope for the best.

As has been mentioned, there are a couple hundred Chinese dialects. Each will pronounce a word slightly differently. I’m Hokkien. My name sounds shite in Mando. It is hard-sounding in an onomatopaeically unpleasant way (to my ears). Hubs is Canto. Our daughter’s name has been chosen specifically for the Cantonese pronunciation as she has her dad’s surname and it would be weird to mix dialects.

We have Anglo/western names as well, as in ones that are on our birth certificates and legal documentation. But I know some who have taken on Anglo names as an exercise in convenience or for fashion. Both are valid. Feel free to have a character who ‘chose’ their western name.

Here’s the extra fun stuff.

There will be people who do not use geomancers to select auspicious names based on birth charts (and various other tools of divination). There are definitely people who name their children after their favourite celebrity. When we were choosing our daughter’s Chinese name, we asked the parentals for advice. They were decidedly unhelpful, and when pressed for preferences, one was the name of a celebrity. Short of paying big dollarbucks for a geomancer (and we had none who could be recommended to us) we were going to have to come up with it on our own. Which we did!

There was a lot of time spent on deciding on a generational component. Most Chinese names are two characters[1]. One is the generational component shared between siblings of the same gender. Characters can also be feminine or masculine.

We wanted to find one that had a homophone in both genders with meanings we would be happy with so that should we have male and female children, they could have the same sounding generational component if we decided to roll that way[2].

The other character had to sound nice and be grammatical when paired with the generational component. For female children, it is popular to choose what I’m going to say are aesthetic attributes relating to beauty, or onomatopaeically pretty. Male children tend to get qualities like courage, strength, ambition, etc. It’s a bit bullshit tbqh, so we spent ages looking for characters that had qualities we wanted our daughter to have that weren’t written with masculine radicals.

The masculine and feminine character thing isn’t specifically about gender bias, but I guess the word doesn’t look quite right if they don’t match. I don’t know how to articulate it, some Chinese linguist will probably be able to explain that better. But how you wish to interpret that is entirely up to you. I also have an interesting anecdote about this that I don’t want to share publicly, but let’s just say the selection of a masculine or feminine character is just as important as the meaning and other facets of name selection.

For those world builders out there, I hope someone runs with that as a vague writing prompt.

Anyway, the region and culture will determine how strict they are with names, but in any case, a little courtesy and cultural sensitivity when it comes to these things is good.

–

[1] I said most, some have just the one.

[2] The generational component[3] doesn’t have to sound the same for both genders. Personal preference.

My mother is Hokkien and my father is Cantonese (so I am considered Cantonese because of my father), and the anglicisation of my surname is of the Cantonese pronunciation - though using a non-standard anglicisation. I have a one character given name (no generational name) that was selected for its Mandarin pronunciation and is thus anglicised as its Mandarin pronunciation not its Cantonese or Hokkien pronunciation. But this is an anglicisation problem. If you were calling me by my name in Mandarin, Cantonese, or Hokkien, you would never mix the pronunciations - no matter what my anglicised name is.

My name sounds best in Mandarin, not Cantonese or Hokkien - Peng Yi (Mando) vs Phung/Pang Ngai (Canto) vs Peh Gei (Hokkien). It’s 彭毅 for those of you who read Chinese characters.

My anglicised legal name is a combination of my two given names - an anglicisation of Mandarin and the other an actual English name, and the non-standard anglicisation of my surname in Cantonese. Which has being anglicised in such a way that a lot of people think I’m Vietnamese, when I’m not - I’m ethnically Chinese from Malaysia.

If you ask my mother why I have a name chosen for Mandarin while my surname is Cantonese when she is Hokkien and my father is Cantonese, she will tell you about how Mandarin is the language and the other two are dialects, and... It’s a whole thing. She speaks Mandarin, Hokkien, Cantonese, and understands Teo Chew and Hakka. And speaks English and Malay (also called Bahasa, which allows her to speak/understand/communicate in Indonesian which is another dialect of Bahasa). Yes, my mother is a beast.

My father speaks English, Malay/Bahasa, and Cantonese. I speak English. I’m clearly the failure here. Though I understand a decent amount of Hokkien, and far less Mandarin and Cantonese, and am technically studying Mandarin.