Chiloi

[jnp]

Hi everybody,

 

I have a friend whose name is Chiloi (pronounced chee-loy, chee as in cheese, loy as in alloy). Her mother gave her that name because she heard it once and thought it sounded beautiful. Her mother claims it's a Chinese name

 

Unfortunately we have no idea what it means and our previous searches have not been successful.

 

If anyone could help us with finding the meaning we would be very grateful. 

[Demonic_Duck]

It's definitely not Mandarin. Could potentially be Cantonese in any of the various romanization systems that use "ch" for [tɕʰ] or [tɕ].

• "Chi" ("ci" in Jyutping romanization) could be one of these characters: https://cantonese.org/search.php?q=ci+&searchAlphaEN=false&searchAlphaPY=false .
• "Loi" could be one of these: https://cantonese.org/search.php?q=loi+&searchAlphaEN=false&searchAlphaPY=false , most likely 萊 as I think that would be the most common in girls' names.

 

I've deliberately left those URLs as text to copy rather than hyperlinks, because there's a weird bug that makes them show different results when opened from a link (?!?)

 

Does her mother have no idea as to what the name means? Or which Chinese language (Cantonese or a different one) it comes from?

[jnp]

On 9/14/2021 at 12:32 PM, Demonic_Duck said:

 

Does her mother have no idea as to what the name means? Or which Chinese language (Cantonese or a different one) it comes from?

No, unfortunately she doesn't 

[amytheorangutan]

On 9/14/2021 at 11:57 AM, jnp said:

No, unfortunately she doesn't

If she only heard it once but doesn't speak/understand the language, this could potentially mean nothing especially if she misheard it and/or mispronounce it when replicating the pronunciation. Fortunately Chinese has a lot of homonyms so you can pick a character that sounds similar that has good meaning. 

[mikelove]

On 9/14/2021 at 6:32 AM, Demonic_Duck said:

I've deliberately left those URLs as text to copy rather than hyperlinks, because there's a weird bug that makes them show different results when opened from a link (?!?)

 

Thanks, on our to-do list.

 

FWIW, Wikipedia says Chiloi is a village in northern Burma, and if my recollection of Burmese romanization is correct it would be pronounced more-or-less the way you're describing - any chance this could be Burmese instead of Chinese? (I believe it's also the Greek equivalent of 'kilo', but in that case the 'ch' would be pronounced 'k')