Expert: Terry Thatcher Waltz - 4/24/2011

Question
QUESTION: I'm trying to come up with a name for a Chinese girl in a modern story I'm writing but I'm unfamiliar with the Chinese naming conventions. Is something like, say, Yung-yian Cho Soon viable? What does it mean? If it's not, can I get some help coming up with a better name?

ANSWER: Chinese names consist of the surname, which comes first, and a given name.
There is actually a list of surnames -- a little over 100 of them. That's why so many Chinese people have the same name -- there just aren't many surnames available.
Given names can be literally anything. Some families have an ancestral poem that they follow, with all the girls or boys in a given generation having the same first syllable of the (usually two syllable) given name, that comes from a certain word or line in the poem.
The name you propose doesn't look Chinese for two reasons: its syllables don't fit the sounds of Chinese, and it has three parts, which would be unusual.
I would advise you to use the standard Pinyin system for writing names.
A typical girl's name could be something like Sun Yung'an, or Song Yi'an (there is a spelling rule in Pinyin romanization that requires the apostrophe in the middle of these names, because your second syllable starts with an 'a' and could lead to two possible readings (yun-gan or yung-an).)
In Mainland China, there would not be a hyphen in the middle of the two syllables of the given name, but in Taiwan there usually is. Also, in Taiwan people usually use the Wade-Giles system to Romanize (spell) their names, but that's changing, and it's really impossible to predict how someone wlil spell his or her name these days.

There's no way to tell what any of these names mean without having a Chinese character version to refer to.

What I do when I name students (to make sure there isn't any hidden bad meaning in the sounds of the name) is to get a copy of the latest university entrance name list from Taiwan, and use those given names with the (already limited) list of surnames. That way, even as a non-native-speaker, I can be pretty sure a name is "okay". Let me know if you want me to pick one more or less at random from that list. If you can give me a few ideas about what your character's, well, character will be like, maybe I can pick one that has a meaning that might fit more or less.



---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Thank you for the advice on the name, I appreciate the information.
At this point in the story the character is a new transhuman (not transexual, transhuman in that the mind has been digitized and changed into data) who was a human Western male that decided to purchase a starting grade Asian female body, and has affected a black-and-white panda-style clothes coloring. In order to raise the money for the process and the body, he spent a decade as a private detective, pinching every penny he could to afford the process and the new body. She's decided to discard her old name and choose a new one to go along with her new body. Also, can you provide a link to those university entry lists? It'd be useful to look over.

Answer
Sorry, I didn't get notified that your follow-up was waiting at allexperts...  :-(

The University entrance exam list is only useful if you can read Chinese characters. I'm assuming you can't, or you'd be able to find sources of Chinese names on your own anyway.

I would bet that if a Chinese girl went through everything you describe, she probably would pick an English name. People in Taiwan, at least, who are very cutting-edge often go by English names (and they are often rather, um, strange. I knew a guy named "Chaos" once, for example.