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I've got a whole bunch of folks in my WIP whose is names are designed to evoke an East Asian flavor. I tried to keep away from real Chinese, etc. in creating them, but there's still the chance that, regardless of how I Anglicize them, a speaker of an Asian language might be put off by my prattling on about a clan whose name could be translated as "yaks' bottoms!"
I'd rather avoid that, or worse, if I could.
I've got a little text file to send to anyone with the time to take a quick look and tell me if there's any problems with the words.
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This site has first names from all sorts of ethnicities, their meanings, and their history. I often take names from here and tweak them (there's a random name generator I like). The first names site is extensive. Its sister-site for surnames is not so much...but still good.
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I just think names are cool, and those are really good ones on that list. Some of the ones Robyn_Hood has there are derived originally from Arabic, which I have no problem with since the Army sent me to a couple of good Arabic language courses many, many years ago (just a couple years earlier and it'd have been Vietnamese).
It's those non-Semetic and Non-Romance languages that I'm clueless about. I've got to invent more names for other peoples, but I'm concentrating on one bunch at the moment and they're decidedly East Asian, and since two other groups are descended from the same line they're going to be close to the same, too.
I've already got SOME names. I just need someone to look at the list to help me make sure I'm not calling someone something that a native speaker of a major Asian language might read as "a camel's reproductive parts" or some such embarassing concept.
Nice links Miriel. I found several of the syllables I'm using on the Chinese page there. Bookmarking that one for sure.
I would get a used copy of a travel phrase book that deals in whatever area interests you most, and make up names from words that either A) sound nice to you, or B) describe the character. "Tall", "Fierce" etc..
That way, you'll have good names AND know what they mean.
(Just don't mispronounce any tonal language-derived words at international book conferences...)
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I don't see the point. You're writing this in English, after all. Pretty much anyone that reads it will understand that the name doesn't look all that funny written out in the English alphabet.
Unless you choose something that does look funny written in English, but you would be able to spot something like that yourself.
If you do want to come up with Asian names, it is simple enough to get a character dictionary for the language in question. Just go to http://www.euroasiasoftware.com/ and download some software. Install the anguage packs for windows as instructed (or not, if you only want the romanized spelling). Type in the individual word elements of the desired name, like "Electric Rat", one word at a time. For Chinese you should get something like "Dyan-Shoo" (depending on what romanization scheme is used).
posted
Another idea would be to go to a government website of the countries of origin you're interested in. Sure to be plenty of government officials' names on the site. I'd suggest newspaper sites but those are less likely to be in English.
Posts: 87 | Registered: Aug 2005
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Chi Dinh Fuju Fuyo Hanh Hiroshi Igo Kiyomi Lam Phuong Vu Yem Ying Yoko
Last Names:
Chan Chen Cheug Chew Chow Chung Dang Ha Han Hong Hu Iwabuchi La Lau Li Liu Lui Luo Ma Mah Nakamura Ng Nguyen Nisi Okimura Poon Quan Quon Tan Tang Thai Tran Tsang Tsukishima Vuong Watanabe Woo Wu Yamada Yee Yick Ying Yu
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It would be nice to know which names go together (which ones come from which countries). A name like Lam Watanabe might make a reader say "huh?"
[This message has been edited by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (edited August 19, 2005).]
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LOL, Varishta, that's a great name! I can see that belonging to someone in a parody of a hard-boiled detective story.
Posts: 8826 | Registered: A Long Time Ago!
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Yeah, that list of "first" and "last" names isn't sorted for language at all. Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese names are all distinctly different in basic form from each other. Korean names tend to follow the Chinese pattern, though the actual names are Korean rather than Chinese.
Also, you want to remember that most East Asian cultures put the family name first, and it is sometimes only permissible to use the family name (or even more often, not permissible to omit it). Japanese is like that big-time, Korean and Chinese somewhat less so (formalities of language usage differ a lot across a country as diverse as China, though).
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I believe Koreans have a similar tradition.
Supposedly, you can tell how long a Korean family has been around by the first syllable of the male names in the latest generation. That syllable is a letter of the alphabet, and the further along in the Korean alphabet the syllable is, the older the family is.
(At least, that's what a Korean male told me once.)
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That's cool, Kathleen. Names are just so danged interesting.
Everybody has given some great input. Though I had originally just wanted someone to take a look at a list of pseudo-Chinese names I had created for the clans, I realized that Survivor is 100% correct. This is going to be written in English after all, so using those names I had invented would come off badly in a reader's eyes.
Glen Cook's The Black Company series has the mercenaries speaking with a more contemporary voice because he felt that those guys would be speaking to one another in their usual colloquialisms and not some high-falutin' speechifyin', so his handling of it was akin to just translating their dialogue to English. I plan to abandon my idiotic plans to name everything in my mock-Chinese invented language and just use English instead.
Back to why all your input is still useful, I do plan to use foreign-sounding personal names, and follow a foreign naming conventions, that I hope will convey an Asian flavor.
I just figured that a reader will be more receptive to a character belonging to the "White Horse Clan" than had I tried to mash together bai with ma and renmen. It just doesn't benefit story that way, so it's outta here!
It's amazing the depth of cumulative knowledge around here. I never cease to be impressed.
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Hmmm, a good point to consider. I wasn't actually thinking about it, but most Asian names are made up of actual words. Both personal names and place names.
Posts: 8322 | Registered: Aug 1999
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posted
It would also help if you knew - or we knew - what part of East Asia the names are supposed to come from.
In Sri Lanka, for example, there is one set of naming conventions and standard names for the Tamil people, another for the Sinhalese, another for the Moors (Muslims), another for the Dutch Burghers, and yet another for the Veddahs. The names used for Sinhalese people only rarely get mixed with Tamil names, and so on. Many places are like this.
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My original post referred only to a list of names of my own invention that were designed to have an East-Asian flavor, not names from any actual Asian language. I've since discarded that idea after Survivor's first comment above, which I took as sound advice.
But, for the record, the people for whom I had invented the names are loosely patterned after the Mongols in most aspects, with some influences from the Saracen faris who served under Salah ad-Din (Saladin) and some bits taken from the Lakota. I have decided to have the handful of them who actually appear in my WIP called by names borrowed directly from the Mongols.
I've borrowed widely from the histories of a variety of other peoples to populate my fantasy world. (Though much is patterned generally after the medieval period, +/- a century, the European Caucasian is intentionally the overwhelming minority.)
Regardless, all the information you folks have shared here just goes to show the depth and breadth of knowledge and experience any one of us can call upon for help from fellow Hatrackers. And I think that's absolutely fantastic.
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