My name in Chinese characters is 郁聞遠.
The first character 郁 is my family name. It's read 'yu' in Chinese, 'yoo' in Korean, and 'iku' in Japanese.
郁 means 'fragrant, rich aroma', and can also mean 'prosperous' as well as 'brilliant' (like 華). According to a Korean friend, 郁 is a common Korean surname. It's rare in China though, isolated to a region south of Shanghai. It's also a Japanese surname, and albeit very rare, it's popular in first names. Generally speaking I guess it's a Korean surname!
聞遠 is my first name, transliterated from Chinese as 'wen yuan'. In Japanese it's read 'bun en' and in Korean it would be 'moon en'.
聞 means 'to hear' and 遠 means 'far', hence it could be naively translated as 'hear afar'. However the meaning is rather artful and thus cannot be simply translated as such. I think it means 'to profoundly inquire and illuminate'. In this case, the 聞 takes on the meaning of 'to inquire/to illuminate/to make known' and 遠 means 'complete, profound, distant'.
For those of you that have names with Chinese characters, I'd like to know what they are. =) Typing them might be a hassle though...
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
A wee parcel of thought amidst a sea of others
5 comments:
Neat-o, from Shanghai :)
My Japanese kanji dictionary tells me that 俞 means 'consent'. 「｛感｝『はい』と承諾する返事。」, lit. "the emotion or feeling of saying 'hai'"
Just for curiosity, your name in Japanese would be read 'yu i-bun'.
蔡長豐
Last name: 蔡 (Choy) probably has something to do with greens, vegetation or the like
First name: 長豐 (Cheung Fung); 長 means growth or prolong; 豐 means rich, plentiful, prosperous
Or something of the like.
蔡 is the name of a small weed, but it can also refer to a lot of other things, including a vassal state in the Spring and Autumn period about 2500 years ago. Presumably, 蔡 was the family name of the nobility of that state.
Your name is read 'sai cho-hou' in Japanese! :)
Dang, how did you guys type those Chinese characters? I can't figure out how to get it to work on my comp...
Anyways, as to my name, it's funny how me, Ray, and Jay all the same sounding last name in English, but have totally different surname characters. I have no idea what the "Yu" in my name is supposed to mean, but I know that "Wing" is from "Choung-Wing" or something like that, which is supposed to mean 'smart'. Also, "Hong" is supposed to be from "Geen-Hong", which means 'healthy'. All of these bad phonetical translations were done by me, and I'm just saying what my mom told me, as I hardly have any knowledge of Cantonese myself. :P
So yeah, take the three characters together and you get "Yu Whing Hong" which is how my name sounds like in Cantonese. Perhaps someone can help me figure out how to get the literal Chinese characters to show up, and then I can figure out what my name would've been in Japanese.
And it's funny, I always knew that "Choy" sounded like the Cantonese word for "vegetable", but I never thought it actually was that word, heh.
Post a Comment