Re: Vietnamese Name in Chinese Characters

[Matthew Malone]

Hello-

Can anyone help me translate the following Vietnamese name into Chinese characters: Nguyen Be Van? Nguyen of course I know...

It is a female's name, I am pretty sure that Van is 云 "cloud", not the common 文 which is for men's names. "Be" is what I'm having trouble with. Baby name sites say there are two used in girls' names: one means baby (bé , as in em bé ), the other doll (bê).

But I cannot find a character in Chinese or Chu Nom to match it. I've tried the Han-Viet lookup and Omniglot's 4000 character Chu Nom dictionary. Thanks~

[vinhlong]

If it's baby then it might be the same character the cantonese use for baby (bibi). Unfortunately I have no idea which that is.

[Lu]

Any chance you can just ask the person who has this name? She or her parents probably know what the characters are.

[HashiriKata]

There are a large number of Chinese borrowings in Vietnamese but this does not mean every word in Vietnamese is a borrowing. Both bé and bê (mean/ indicate "smallness", so are often used as names for babies) are Vietnamese indigenous words.

The fact that the sounds in baby-talk tend to be similar in many languages (baba, mama, papa, dada, baby,bibi, etc.) is just because they're baby-talk, and not because they're borrowing. In fact, baby-talks are so basic that borrowing is even less likely (except for "stylistic reasons"! : ) .