New 中文名字... why is this one character so weird?

[erinmg85]

大家好！

I have been studying Chinese for one semester, and asked my Chinese friend to give me a Chinese name. My name is Erin, so she chose 爱玲 (aì líng) for a similar sound. She said she thinks it is a beautiful name for a pretty, skinny girl, and that there is a writer she likes with this name.

My question is about the second character... It appears in two different formats when I copy and paste it different places... please see http://en.wiktionary...wiki/%E7%8E%B2. My friend wrote the Mandarin Hanzi, but it often pastes as the Kanji. Is this just an issue with the way my computer is set up to write Pinyin? I'm using a Mac with the Pinyin - Simplified keyboard option.

谢谢！

Erin

[edelweis]

Hi,

it seems the Hanzi and the Kanji are a single character. The variation is only due to the font.

You could check this by pasting the character into a text editor and then changing the font.

The wikipedia page you gave a link to has the following:

<p><font style="font-size:125%"><span class="Hani" lang="zh-Hani" xml:lang="zh-Hani">玲</span></font> (<i>Yale</i> ling4)</p>

<p><font lang="ja" style="font-size:125%" xml:lang="ja">玲</font></p>

As you can see, for languages "ja" (japanese) and "zh-Hani" (hanzi?) there is a single character, but the formatting parameters are different (font style and language). So your browser probably uses two different fonts to display these characters.

[jollibee]

爱玲 is a very good name.

There are some character both in Chinese and Japanese. But They are just looks similar, They have different pronounce and different meanings.

[iangreen]

Erin,

according on my understanding, the reason is this.

There are sometimes more than one way to write the same character. It has to do with the progression over the years and the fact that the calligraphy forms evolved over time.

The modern digital fonts on computers have taken the variations and made it possible to type either of them.

example: these are both two variations of the same character:

為爲

PS kanji is hanzi, "kan ji" is "han zi" pronounced in japanese - but written the same (漢字）

[aurora-kid]

玲（ling2） is a very popular character in Chinese girls‘ name. 爱玲 is a pretty name for a girl. There is a famous writer in China and her name is 张爱玲. Many Chinese poeple love her works.