English names tend do just get characters that sound phonetically like their English pronunciation. As such, a lot of names, especially longer ones, don’t mean anything. If you directly translated them, a lot of the time you’d get like “cabbage the horse wheel” or something.
If you directly translated them, a lot of the time you’d get like “cabbage the horse wheel” or something.
That reminds me of the “Password Strength” comic by xkcd. All right, it’s settled. Next time I need new password, I’m feeding random names into a phonetic name translator.
So the characters are still words, right? As in not phonetics? Would it be like someone named Tristan getting the Spanish word Triste because it sounds like Tristan?
Most likely yes. All characters in Chinese are defined jointly by the way it’s written, the pronunciation, and meaning. You can’t invent new characters like you would a new English word and have something that can be read out loud because there’s no system for deriving pronunciation from the written character itself.
I say most likely because there are still some characters that are phonetic in that their meaning is just the sound, but these don’t cover the whole spectrum of possible sounds in the language as far as I know. They also wouldn’t look as nice in tattoo form since they all use the same radical.
English names tend do just get characters that sound phonetically like their English pronunciation. As such, a lot of names, especially longer ones, don’t mean anything. If you directly translated them, a lot of the time you’d get like “cabbage the horse wheel” or something.
That reminds me of the “Password Strength” comic by xkcd. All right, it’s settled. Next time I need new password, I’m feeding random names into a phonetic name translator.
So the characters are still words, right? As in not phonetics? Would it be like someone named Tristan getting the Spanish word Triste because it sounds like Tristan?
Most likely yes. All characters in Chinese are defined jointly by the way it’s written, the pronunciation, and meaning. You can’t invent new characters like you would a new English word and have something that can be read out loud because there’s no system for deriving pronunciation from the written character itself.
I say most likely because there are still some characters that are phonetic in that their meaning is just the sound, but these don’t cover the whole spectrum of possible sounds in the language as far as I know. They also wouldn’t look as nice in tattoo form since they all use the same radical.
Tristán is a proper local name in Spanish
I’m aware, it was just the first English name and Spanish word I could think of that sounded similar for the example.