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deepfriedscallops · 1 year

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A Personal Guide to Chinese Names (Specifically Historical)

If you are looking for a starter guide, there are better posts floating around. If you are at least somewhat familiar with Chinese as a language and culture, read on.

Maybe you are a new Chinese learner, or perhaps you are a heritage speaker like me. Either way, you are probably aware of the vast amount of homophones that Chinese has and all sorts of accidental puns that you might run into. Have you ever heard the joke where two people meet and their conversation goes like this?

-你叫什麼名了？(What's your name?)

-倪繈仙 / 李廣仙。(Ni Jiangxian / Lei Gong-sin.) (Misheard as 你講先 "You tell me first.")

-……??

I heard it first in Cantonese, so please bear with the rough Mandarin equivalent I whipped up. Anyways, my mother told me this joke sometime in elementary school as a warning: Chinese names can be a double-edged sword. Sometimes parents can come up with a seemingly great name, only for their surname to turn the name into a joke later in life. Looking at the surname Wu/Ng/吳 in particular (be careful with this surname unless you want to intentionally make it into a joke, because it rhymes with "not" and will reverse the meaning of most names related to traits).

With that said, this is my personal process for choosing names:

1. Family background. Were their parents/caretakers scholars? Royalty? Farmers? Generally, parents who are at least somewhat educated in poetic texts will be much more careful when naming their child in order to avoid any faux pas, whether making an accidental pun or choosing a name that can be perceived as unlucky. As for parents who don't have access to that kind of education, they commonly relied on fortune-telling from the local taoist in order to choose an auspicious name for their child. On the flip side, you might see instances like Marquis Gu Yun's backstory in Sha Po Lang by priest, in which his parents named him Shen Shiliu (meaning "sixteen") due to his sickliness.

2. Meaning. I'm glossing over this because there are more in-depth guides out there about this. Figure out your intentions for your character. You don't always need to put a lot of thought into it since realistically, the names given to them at birth don't always align with their character at the current point of your story—however, if your character has a courtesy name, you should take more time to pick a name, whether they choose it themself or their family does. Here are some conventions I have noticed though:

Three-character names with a single-character surname are the most common, but two-character names occur somewhat frequently historically as well (i.e. Cao Pei in the Three Kingdoms era). Two- or more-character surnames are usually associated with old clans (like Zhuge and Sima) as well as non-Han Chinese ancestry (like Aisin Gioro), and they may be paired with a single- or two-character first name. Unless you are transliterating from other languages and making a point that a character isn't of Han descent, you generally don't want to exceed 4 characters.

Gendered names get really foggy once you look beyond obvious ones like Meili (美麗) and everything else that means "beautiful." Generally, characters with 花/玉/女 radicals are more commonly feminine (especially 女), although there are notable exceptions like Jia Baoyu (假寶玉) from the Ming Dynasty classic, Dreams of the Red Chamber. Scenic meanings tend to be more feminine while character meanings skew masculine—but, as always, there are exceptions, like scenic names that utilize herbal medicine meanings.

Names taken from old poems, such as those by Li Bai, are generally very safe, although it's not always considered "classy" because sometimes the name can lose some meaning without necessary context.

You can get pretty creative, if you feel pretty daring. For example, Guo Jing and Yang Kang from Legend of the Condor Heroes by Jin Yong are named after the Jingkang Incident, a historical event nearing the end of the Song Dynasty.

Names have changed in convention over time, so some traditionally feminine names today were masculine at one point in time. For example, Feng (鳳) is commonly used in feminine names today, however historically 鳳 referred to male phoenixes whereas 凰 (pronounced Huang) referred to female phoenixes.

3. Poeticism. Not everyone cares about it, but it is something to consider if you are crafting a blue-blooded aristocrat who recites poetry and debates with their scholarly peers, or if you want to whip up a really catchy and memorable name. Generally, you want to pay attention to the tones and the consonance, but keep in mind the dialect. If you are expecting Mandarin to be the spoken dialect among your characters, then only focus on Mandarin. If you are playing with multiple dialects, then you might want to take some care in checking if the name also sounds decent in Cantonese. Here is what I learned:

You need variance in one word to the next. Easiest way is to measure by high versus low tonal fluctuations. If the surname is a low tone, go with high next, then low again; if it starts high, go low, then high again. For example, Andy Lau's name, 劉德華 (Liu Dehua or Lau Dak-waa), goes low-high-low in Cantonese, but does not flow as well in Mandarin since it goes low-low-low.

Consonance helps make words flow into each other. Generally, if the first word ends in a long vowel, you don't want to start the next word with another vowel—although there are some exceptions, such as Xie Bi'an from Wu Chang Jie by Shui Qian Cheng. Bi (必) and An (安) notably have hard vowels and can be read reasonably distinct from each other ("Bi" hard stop "ahn", instead of "bee-ann"). Of course, always sound it out first, and if you have a friend who can speak, read it to them and see if they can read it back fine. Avoid tongue twisters.

4. Random name generator. When all else fails and you don't have the brain juice for naming everyone in your cast, use a random name generator. If you don't ever expect to translate your work into Chinese, you'll probably be fine with a generic generator on Google since the decent ones use an aggregate of common pinyin to draw from. I, personally, look for the generators that come with hanzi and copy the name into a separate doc for reference purposes. In my experience, they're not the best for particularly poetic names and you may need to cherry pick and combine new names from the random list. It does a good job for one-off characters, though. If you want to see what I use, I can link it in a reblog.

5. Google. Run the pinyin/jyutping through the search engine, just to make sure your name doesn't sound like a colloquial saying. Unless that is in fact what you are trying to do (looking at Feng Xin from Tian Guan Ci Fu). Dictionaries are your best friend (in my case, CantoDict is a savior because it also comes with full phrases with both jyutping and pinyin). Fun fact, when my mother was coming up with names for me, one of them was Qiuyan (秋煙) but good thing she did not name me that because it sounds like the Cantonese colloquial phrase for smoking cigarettes. Please don't name your child the equivalent of "stoner."

Anyways, this isn't meant to be a proper guide, but rather me just sharing my process that can be used in conjunction with the other helpful guides around here. I hope this can help somewhat in the namehunt for your OCs. 加油！

#chinese language #chinese history #resources #danmei #linguistics #three kingdoms #ming dynasty #writing #writing resources #oc writing #historical resource #yueqqi rambles

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