8 ms·

My wife is Chinese and has told me many of the ridiculous English names people have. We've heard Cinderella before. My favorite that we've encountered was a you

My wife is Chinese and has told me many of the ridiculous English names people have. We've heard Cinderella before. My favorite that we've encountered was a young woman named Pancake. It's not just a problem of limited access to information, but also limited knowledge of what qualifies as a good English name. All of the people we've encountered were from Hong Kong, which has no Great Firewall to contend with. We've also seen many people using names that haven't been popular in the West in a long time, like Eugene or Doris.

cafard 10y ago
I guess that one could regard that as the counterpart to the odd Hanzi tattoos Americans get without having the slightest idea of whether they are done right. And plenty of Americans choose odd names for their children--out of TV shows, movies, comic strips.
- kirubakaran 10y ago
  http://myapokalips.com/show/23 http://myapokalips.com/show/23
- aidenn0 10y ago
  As an example of one such name becoming common, it is hard to find reliable instances of the feminine first name "Madison" before 1984: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088161/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088161/
masklinn 10y ago
> We've also seen many people using names that haven't been popular in the West in a long time, like Eugene or Doris. Those are both proper names and awesome though, it's a far cry from using random english/engrish nouns (or the reverse, getting random — and miswritten — hanzi inked on).
tP5n 10y ago
My favourite is still 'Ding Dong'. Makes me smile everytime I think about the kid, sadly he was later renamed to Marcus or something equally boring :)
- Asooka 10y ago
  If my last name was Dong, I don't think I would have been able to pass the opportunity to change my first name to Maximus.
dilemma 10y ago
I have friends named Dolphin, Fish and Shadow and they know perfectly well that their names are funny. I'm certain that Pancake does too. Having an English name is a bit unreal for them just as it would be for you and me getting a Chinese name, so why not get a funny one? Also, naming in another language is difficult. Microsoft knows that, as "Bing" means disease in mandarin.
- princeb 10y ago
  "Bing" also means stellar.
  - stephencanon 10y ago
    ... and "ice" and ...
    - dilemma 10y ago
      That doesn't negate the negative homonym.
      - yoz-y 10y ago
        It kind of does. As previously stated no Chinese word is pronounced as the English word "bing". Mandarin makes heavy use of tonality and the same roman transcript (or pinyin) can have many meanings. You would really need to dig far to find an accent-less syllabe (for the lack of a better word) and not find any negative connotation. Heck, in Chinese even many numbers can be used as insults.
        stephencanon 10y ago
        Add to that the fact that the Chinese love to substitute similar sounding words to make puns, and it's completely impossible to come up with a name that doesn't admit some negative reading.
        dilemma 10y ago
JimmyM 10y ago
It did make me do a double-take the first time I found out that Chthonic's blood-soaked bassist was called Doris. Taiwanese band, not Chinese, but this particular cultural quirk does seem to carry over. There's a Freddy, Zac and of course Doris herself just in Chthonic.
gbraad 10y ago
Queenie, Thunder, Spark, Sky, Heaven, and many more...
- gadders 10y ago
  Alpha, Simple..
planetjones 10y ago
Do you have some context about when a Chinese person uses their English name ? e.g. do their friends call it them, is it only for when they interact with Western websites, etc.
- jmknoll 10y ago
  It depends on the person. Some will use it as basically a replacement for their actual name, others will use for only for business with people who can't speak Chinese. Interestingly, there doesn't seem to be as strong a correlation as you'd expect between a person's use of an English name and their command of the English language. I used to work for a startup in Shanghai where no one spoke a word of English, except for the English names of the other employees. Office chatter was entirely Chinese, with a sprinkling of "Tony", "Leon", and "Francis." At the other extreme, I had a friend who was from Chongqing, but grew up and went to school in the west, who refused to take an English name at all because she didn't see the value in going by a fake name to all her friends.* However, by her own description, this was somewhat unusual, as it meant that people called her by her full given name all the time. And according to her (this could be wrong, I'm just repeating it, and its hard for me to verify as I'm not Chinese), Chinese people generally address each other by some kind of nickname. So bringing it full circle, an English name is not only kind of cool, but doubles as a nickname, which was already a part of the culture anyway. *I can see the merit in this. If you're going to befriend someone, especially someone of a different cultural background, telling him/her your name is basically the first chance you get to introduce them to your culture and language. But I digress.
  - amyjess 10y ago
    > At the other extreme, I had a friend who was from Chongqing, but grew up and went to school in the west, who refused to take an English name at all because she didn't see the value in going by a fake name to all her friends. Interestingly enough, an old friend of mine was the opposite. She's from China, came to the US when she was in sixth grade (she's still here), and I met her in high school. At the time, she mostly used her Chinese name. She only used her English name a little bit and never in class. She graduated a year before I did, we lost contact (this was before social media was a thing), and then a few years later, when Facebook became a thing, we found out we were going to the same college, so we reconnected. The first time I talked to her after that, I called her by her Chinese name, just because that was what I knew her by. She laughed and said she hasn't heard that name since high school. Turns out she dropped her Chinese name like a hot potato as soon as she graduated and has been using her English name exclusively since. I haven't called her by her Chinese name since. As an aside: much later, she got married, and she took her husband's last name, which is a western practice that isn't done in China, which really sums up how much she considers herself American. I never asked, but I get the impression that she felt that all parts of her birth name just othered her and she couldn't wait to get rid of it.
paradite 10y ago
I don't see why this is "ridiculous". It is the most natural result of not having the cultural and linguistic background. It is the same for English-speakers choosing Chinese names, or any X-speakers choosing Y names, for that matter. It may sound stupid or funny to the native speakers, but there is nothing wrong with the names per se, after all. With so many languages that are not English, there are bound to be many weird English names. I personally like the "ridiculous" names because they are adding something interesting to long list of boring "proper names". Also, Eugene is a pretty common name here in Singapore, where English is the official instructional language for schools.
- imron 10y ago
  I don't see why this is "ridiculous". It may sound stupid or funny So, ridiculous then?
- tvanantwerp 10y ago
  Nothing wrong with the name Eugene, but it isn't as popular in the West anymore. According to the Social Security Administration, it peaked in popularity among American men at 20th most popular from 1927 to 1929. In 2015, it was 822nd most popular. https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/babyname.cgi https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/babyname.cgi
  - paradite 10y ago
    Google ngram suggests that the name's popularity is relatively stable, no drastic changes: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Eugene&year_start=1900&year_end=2015&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CEugene%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Eugene&year_st... It is declining fast in American English: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Eugene&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=17&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CEugene%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Eugene&year_st... However, not the case in British English: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Eugene&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=18&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CEugene%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Eugene&year_st...
  - 10y ago
DanBC 10y ago
I initially thought that Cinderella wasn't too odd, but there don't appear to be any new born girls called Cinderalla in 2015. Office for national statistics, Baby Names for Girls in England and Wales, 2015; https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/livebirths/datasets/babynamesenglandandwalesbabynamesstatisticsgirls https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde... (The last sheet has a list of all names). So, it's an unusual name. Other information about most common names. (Some Game of Throne names make it into the list.) Office for national statistics, baby names, 2015 registrations, England and Wales: http://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/livebirths/bulletins/babynamesenglandandwales/2015 http://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdea...
- stevekemp 10y ago
  Searching against the Finnish naming index (http://verkkopalvelu.vrk.fi/Nimipalvelu/default.asp?L=3 http://verkkopalvelu.vrk.fi/Nimipalvelu/default.asp?L=3) I see that in the past five years there were: * Less than five girls called Cinderella. * Less than five boys called Cinderella. So rare and unusual, but not unique. (I find it interesting that there are a non-zero number of women called "Steve", because obviously the first thing you do is search for your own forename/surname!)
dharmach 10y ago
I am curious to know why so many Chinese people find it necessary for their children to have English name to visit US/UK in future. Do most of the outsiders in China have Chinese name?
- frandroid 10y ago
  My understanding is that us non-tonal language speakers butcher their names anyway, both in pronunciation and in remembering them. I've asked multiple Chinese acquaintances of mine what their Chinese name is and I struggle to pronounce their names properly even with some coaching, and I very rarely remember them afterwards. And I'm pretty good at languages in general. These names exist in a linguistic spectrum that is different than Indo-European languages, which our brains are tuned for. It's just a lot more practical for Chinese people to get a Western name.
- 794CD01 10y ago
  It's less necessary, because there are more Chinese computer systems that correctly support ascii names than English computer systems that correctly support GB/Big5/UTF16
salmonet 10y ago
Worst I've ever heard is "Placenta." It actually does sound like a really beautiful name, but to a typical native English speaker it is weird.
- kalleboo 10y ago
  That's also long been a joke name in the US referring to people who are less-educated http://www.snopes.com/racial/language/names.asp http://www.snopes.com/racial/language/names.asp
- amyjess 10y ago
  This is the "cellar door" phenomenon. Turns out that when you divorce certain names or phrases from their meanings, names for mundane or gross things can actually sound quite beautiful. The canonical example is "cellar door", which is frequently considered one of the most beautiful strings of syllables in the English language. Tolkien was one of its most famous proponents, but a good many writers have said the same thing. And another has said the same about "salad or" (as in "would you like salad or roast vegetables with that?"), which is almost the same thing. Just forget about the meaning and respell it as "Selador" (it's better if you pronounce "cellar door" with a non-rhotic accent), and you've got a quite pleasant fantasy name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellar_door https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellar_door
Jaruzel 10y ago
As someone who doesn't know China very well, how important is having an English name? Is it legally their name, or just like a nick-name? Is it use daily or not at all?
- smallnamespace 10y ago
  It generally has no legal status and is mostly used for interacting with English speakers; some more Westernized Chinese people who go back to China might choose to use their English names in daily life though. Another place an English nickname crops up is in online identifiers like e-mail usernames, since for a long time Unicode support was lacking.
jmde 10y ago
People also underestimate the market for baby name resources. It's true in the US as well, something I didn't realize until I had my own child. Add to that additional uncertainty about a different culture and language, and it probably amplifies the market appeal.
fallinghawks 10y ago
My mom (Cantonese) once told me at least part of the reason many restaurants have "garden" in their name is because the sound of the word is pleasant to the Chinese ear. "gar-den" means nothing in Chinese (or at least Canto) but it just sounds good, and in the English language it means a pleasant place, making it a good choice for a restaurant name. Status-symbol names aside, I wonder how many of these names get chosen based on the pleasant sound aspect?
baby 10y ago
Juju and Coco were two of my friends when I was there. Diamond was popular.

cafard 10y ago

I guess that one could regard that as the counterpart to the odd Hanzi tattoos Americans get without having the slightest idea of whether they are done right. And plenty of Americans choose odd names for their children--out of TV shows, movies, comic strips.

kirubakaran 10y ago
http://myapokalips.com/show/23 http://myapokalips.com/show/23
aidenn0 10y ago
As an example of one such name becoming common, it is hard to find reliable instances of the feminine first name "Madison" before 1984: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088161/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088161/

masklinn 10y ago

> We've also seen many people using names that haven't been popular in the West in a long time, like Eugene or Doris. Those are both proper names and awesome though, it's a far cry from using random english/engrish nouns (or the reverse, getting random — and miswritten — hanzi inked on).

tP5n 10y ago

My favourite is still 'Ding Dong'. Makes me smile everytime I think about the kid, sadly he was later renamed to Marcus or something equally boring :)

Asooka 10y ago
If my last name was Dong, I don't think I would have been able to pass the opportunity to change my first name to Maximus.

dilemma 10y ago

I have friends named Dolphin, Fish and Shadow and they know perfectly well that their names are funny. I'm certain that Pancake does too. Having an English name is a bit unreal for them just as it would be for you and me getting a Chinese name, so why not get a funny one? Also, naming in another language is difficult. Microsoft knows that, as "Bing" means disease in mandarin.

princeb 10y ago
"Bing" also means stellar.
- stephencanon 10y ago
  ... and "ice" and ...
  - dilemma 10y ago
    That doesn't negate the negative homonym.
    - yoz-y 10y ago
      It kind of does. As previously stated no Chinese word is pronounced as the English word "bing". Mandarin makes heavy use of tonality and the same roman transcript (or pinyin) can have many meanings. You would really need to dig far to find an accent-less syllabe (for the lack of a better word) and not find any negative connotation. Heck, in Chinese even many numbers can be used as insults.
      - stephencanon 10y ago
        Add to that the fact that the Chinese love to substitute similar sounding words to make puns, and it's completely impossible to come up with a name that doesn't admit some negative reading.
      - dilemma 10y ago

JimmyM 10y ago

It did make me do a double-take the first time I found out that Chthonic's blood-soaked bassist was called Doris. Taiwanese band, not Chinese, but this particular cultural quirk does seem to carry over. There's a Freddy, Zac and of course Doris herself just in Chthonic.

gbraad 10y ago

Queenie, Thunder, Spark, Sky, Heaven, and many more...

gadders 10y ago
Alpha, Simple..

planetjones 10y ago

Do you have some context about when a Chinese person uses their English name ? e.g. do their friends call it them, is it only for when they interact with Western websites, etc.

jmknoll 10y ago
It depends on the person. Some will use it as basically a replacement for their actual name, others will use for only for business with people who can't speak Chinese. Interestingly, there doesn't seem to be as strong a correlation as you'd expect between a person's use of an English name and their command of the English language. I used to work for a startup in Shanghai where no one spoke a word of English, except for the English names of the other employees. Office chatter was entirely Chinese, with a sprinkling of "Tony", "Leon", and "Francis." At the other extreme, I had a friend who was from Chongqing, but grew up and went to school in the west, who refused to take an English name at all because she didn't see the value in going by a fake name to all her friends.* However, by her own description, this was somewhat unusual, as it meant that people called her by her full given name all the time. And according to her (this could be wrong, I'm just repeating it, and its hard for me to verify as I'm not Chinese), Chinese people generally address each other by some kind of nickname. So bringing it full circle, an English name is not only kind of cool, but doubles as a nickname, which was already a part of the culture anyway. *I can see the merit in this. If you're going to befriend someone, especially someone of a different cultural background, telling him/her your name is basically the first chance you get to introduce them to your culture and language. But I digress.
- amyjess 10y ago
  > At the other extreme, I had a friend who was from Chongqing, but grew up and went to school in the west, who refused to take an English name at all because she didn't see the value in going by a fake name to all her friends. Interestingly enough, an old friend of mine was the opposite. She's from China, came to the US when she was in sixth grade (she's still here), and I met her in high school. At the time, she mostly used her Chinese name. She only used her English name a little bit and never in class. She graduated a year before I did, we lost contact (this was before social media was a thing), and then a few years later, when Facebook became a thing, we found out we were going to the same college, so we reconnected. The first time I talked to her after that, I called her by her Chinese name, just because that was what I knew her by. She laughed and said she hasn't heard that name since high school. Turns out she dropped her Chinese name like a hot potato as soon as she graduated and has been using her English name exclusively since. I haven't called her by her Chinese name since. As an aside: much later, she got married, and she took her husband's last name, which is a western practice that isn't done in China, which really sums up how much she considers herself American. I never asked, but I get the impression that she felt that all parts of her birth name just othered her and she couldn't wait to get rid of it.

paradite 10y ago

I don't see why this is "ridiculous". It is the most natural result of not having the cultural and linguistic background. It is the same for English-speakers choosing Chinese names, or any X-speakers choosing Y names, for that matter. It may sound stupid or funny to the native speakers, but there is nothing wrong with the names per se, after all. With so many languages that are not English, there are bound to be many weird English names. I personally like the "ridiculous" names because they are adding something interesting to long list of boring "proper names". Also, Eugene is a pretty common name here in Singapore, where English is the official instructional language for schools.

imron 10y ago
I don't see why this is "ridiculous". It may sound stupid or funny So, ridiculous then?
tvanantwerp 10y ago
Nothing wrong with the name Eugene, but it isn't as popular in the West anymore. According to the Social Security Administration, it peaked in popularity among American men at 20th most popular from 1927 to 1929. In 2015, it was 822nd most popular. https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/babyname.cgi https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/babyname.cgi
- paradite 10y ago
  Google ngram suggests that the name's popularity is relatively stable, no drastic changes: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Eugene&year_start=1900&year_end=2015&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CEugene%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Eugene&year_st... It is declining fast in American English: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Eugene&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=17&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CEugene%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Eugene&year_st... However, not the case in British English: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Eugene&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=18&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CEugene%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Eugene&year_st...
- 10y ago

DanBC 10y ago

I initially thought that Cinderella wasn't too odd, but there don't appear to be any new born girls called Cinderalla in 2015. Office for national statistics, Baby Names for Girls in England and Wales, 2015; https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/livebirths/datasets/babynamesenglandandwalesbabynamesstatisticsgirls https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde... (The last sheet has a list of all names). So, it's an unusual name. Other information about most common names. (Some Game of Throne names make it into the list.) Office for national statistics, baby names, 2015 registrations, England and Wales: http://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/livebirths/bulletins/babynamesenglandandwales/2015 http://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdea...

stevekemp 10y ago
Searching against the Finnish naming index (http://verkkopalvelu.vrk.fi/Nimipalvelu/default.asp?L=3 http://verkkopalvelu.vrk.fi/Nimipalvelu/default.asp?L=3) I see that in the past five years there were: * Less than five girls called Cinderella. * Less than five boys called Cinderella. So rare and unusual, but not unique. (I find it interesting that there are a non-zero number of women called "Steve", because obviously the first thing you do is search for your own forename/surname!)

dharmach 10y ago

I am curious to know why so many Chinese people find it necessary for their children to have English name to visit US/UK in future. Do most of the outsiders in China have Chinese name?

frandroid 10y ago
My understanding is that us non-tonal language speakers butcher their names anyway, both in pronunciation and in remembering them. I've asked multiple Chinese acquaintances of mine what their Chinese name is and I struggle to pronounce their names properly even with some coaching, and I very rarely remember them afterwards. And I'm pretty good at languages in general. These names exist in a linguistic spectrum that is different than Indo-European languages, which our brains are tuned for. It's just a lot more practical for Chinese people to get a Western name.
794CD01 10y ago
It's less necessary, because there are more Chinese computer systems that correctly support ascii names than English computer systems that correctly support GB/Big5/UTF16

salmonet 10y ago

Worst I've ever heard is "Placenta." It actually does sound like a really beautiful name, but to a typical native English speaker it is weird.

kalleboo 10y ago
That's also long been a joke name in the US referring to people who are less-educated http://www.snopes.com/racial/language/names.asp http://www.snopes.com/racial/language/names.asp
amyjess 10y ago
This is the "cellar door" phenomenon. Turns out that when you divorce certain names or phrases from their meanings, names for mundane or gross things can actually sound quite beautiful. The canonical example is "cellar door", which is frequently considered one of the most beautiful strings of syllables in the English language. Tolkien was one of its most famous proponents, but a good many writers have said the same thing. And another has said the same about "salad or" (as in "would you like salad or roast vegetables with that?"), which is almost the same thing. Just forget about the meaning and respell it as "Selador" (it's better if you pronounce "cellar door" with a non-rhotic accent), and you've got a quite pleasant fantasy name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellar_door https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellar_door

Jaruzel 10y ago

As someone who doesn't know China very well, how important is having an English name? Is it legally their name, or just like a nick-name? Is it use daily or not at all?

smallnamespace 10y ago
It generally has no legal status and is mostly used for interacting with English speakers; some more Westernized Chinese people who go back to China might choose to use their English names in daily life though. Another place an English nickname crops up is in online identifiers like e-mail usernames, since for a long time Unicode support was lacking.

jmde 10y ago

People also underestimate the market for baby name resources. It's true in the US as well, something I didn't realize until I had my own child. Add to that additional uncertainty about a different culture and language, and it probably amplifies the market appeal.

fallinghawks 10y ago

My mom (Cantonese) once told me at least part of the reason many restaurants have "garden" in their name is because the sound of the word is pleasant to the Chinese ear. "gar-den" means nothing in Chinese (or at least Canto) but it just sounds good, and in the English language it means a pleasant place, making it a good choice for a restaurant name. Status-symbol names aside, I wonder how many of these names get chosen based on the pleasant sound aspect?

baby 10y ago

Juju and Coco were two of my friends when I was there. Diamond was popular.