Yeah! A name translation!

[Guest chorus]

Hello everybody,

I'm sure you get this all the time, but I'm interested in translating my English name to Chinese. And no, I'm not planning on tattooing it to any part of my body...

The reason I want a translation is because my father is Chinese so I've inherited his last name (Lee, Li, 李). But he doesn't speak Chinese...

So I've tried translating my first name "Jonathan" which means "God has given" and I've come up with 神给了. I dunno if first names usually have 3 characters though... I thought I read they usually only have 2 although I don't know if this is a hard and fast rule. But I came up with a two character version anyways: 神给 ("god gives" I hope). Or alternatively my nickname: 合唱 ("Chorus").

So just a few questions:

1) Do any of these make sense?

2) Is it arrogant to have "god" in your name... I wouldn't go around in English saying "Hi, I'm god's gift" but "Jonathan" is ok

3) I kinda like the idea of "Chorus" but I have a feeling it means more "a group of singers" then it does "a repeated portion in a song" which is what I really want...

Any help is much appreciated

Thank you

--Chorus

[Quest]

李天赐 (Lit. Lee Given by Heaven) is a good name.

神 is not used in personal names. 神给 would be one of the oddest names. It would be equivalent to Godgive Lee in English..

[skylee]

天賜 is a very good name, but not an uncommon one.

Sometimes I think this name is too good. In the past when the mortality rate of children was high, parents used to give children very common and standard names, such as 阿牛, so that they wouldn't be the subject of jealousy of gods/ghosts etc, and the parents got to keep them.

[Quest]

Chinese first names use one or two characters, almost never three.

[skylee]

Another way of naming a child is to name it after its birth place. If the child was born in Beijing, it could be 京生, 滬生 for those born in Shanghai, and 港生 for those born in HK. Such names can be used on male and female.

[smithsgj]

> almost never three.

Ever? I thought maximum total length including family name was 6: a woman can in theory takes her husband's family name and add it to hers, so if her family name is Ouyang and his is say Duanmu that's 4 plus a given name is 6.

But very few people have two-syllable surnames and of those only a tiny minority would marry someone else with one *and* decide to compound the names.

But if a 3 character given name is possible then the total length is theoretically 7, right?

There was a recent news story where a native Taiwanese (shandi ren, aboriginal, whatever, I'm not making a political point!) applied for his jianbao ka (health card). His name was *really* long and because the thing was computer-generated there wasn't enough room in the name field on his card, and it had to be shortened.

[Quest]

first name = given name in my post.

[Quest]

I think 复姓s are cool. I read somewhere that most ancient 复姓s were lost after the mongol conquest, because the mongols killed too many people, and wiped out many families.

[Guest chorus]

Thanks everybody for your replies!

Quest, in your original post I cannot see the third character in 李天赐... but my browser will let me copy and paste it into a Chinese-English dictionary and I get the same thing as I would with 賜. Is it the same? I don't know why my browser won't show that particular character...

Also, another quick question: It was mentioned that there are sometimes 2 syllable surnames. I remember being told that my surname originally was Li Ji (or possibly Li Chi ?) but the second syllable was dropped when my grandparents moved here. Would this be a common Chinese surname? Or would it be a concatenation of two names? I thought from smithsgj's post that this was a practice only common for women to do (?)

Thanks again everyone

--Chorus

[ax]

want an uncommon name?

李一榮 [li yi rong]

一 means the One, the First, the Creator of Heaven and Earth. the big 大 one 一 [大+一] is 天 [tian]

榮 [rong] to honor, to flourish.

Hope you like it.

ax

[Quest]

I dont like 一榮.

yes it is 李天赐, or 李天賜

Here is an intersting article on 复姓:

http://www.china.org.cn/chinese/feature/427900.htm

[pazu]

I don't really like name with 健, 賜, 榮, 昌, 聰, etc. They sound too rustic and seem to be lacking some kind of refinement. But it may be just my opinion.

And Jonathan, it's weired to have "GOD" as your name, 李神 would be strange, a better alternative, as Quest has said, is to substitute it with 天 (heaven).

And if you like the idea of "God has given", then how about 李天命 (Li Tianmin)? It's indeed quite a good name, but you'd have problem using this name because Dr Li Tianmin is actually quite a famous philosopher in Hong Kong, he's teaching at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

And I would suggest 李如昊 (Li3 Ru2 Hao4), because:

1. Ru means "as if", "something like..."; Hao4 means heaven, big, great, etc.

2. Because 如 usually has no meaning in itself, so you should combine the second character to form a valid meaning, and 昊 isn't a very common Chinese character, but most people should know how to pronounce it. The meaning of HAO4 is abstract, something more philosophical, reminds me of a borderless ocean or sky, something natural, freedom, life without burden.

3. It has something to do with the sounds too. In Chinese there're two groups of sounds (as in poems), "平" (flat tone) and "仄" (oblique tone). One rule to make a good name is to follow the patterns of 平仄平, or 仄平仄. Imagine you have a name with all 仄 tones, then it'd be difficult to pronounce, or the sound won't be clear.

李如昊 follows the pattern of 仄平仄 in Mandarin, but not in Cantonese.