Finding Meanings of English Names [duplicate]

Solution 1:

I don’t know what your Chi­nese name is, whether us­ing Chi­nese char­ac­ters or in the Pinyin al­pha­bet that works bet­ter for Western read­ers, but you need to know some­thing very im­por­tant about our English-speak­ing cul­ture: English names al­most never ‘mean’ some­thing the way Chi­nese names do, like how 偉 wěi means ‘great’ or 勇 yǒng means ‘brave’. That’s why many Chi­nese peo­ple have those names, but it does not work that way for us. Our per­sonal names have no in­trin­sic mean­ing of their own, so there can be no mean­ing-based trans­la­tion pos­si­ble.

So if you’re 周到 Zhōu Dao or 孝道 Xiào Dao or some­thing else, this al­most cer­tainly ‘means’ some­thing to you that could not have a mean­ing­ful trans­la­tion into English no mat­ter how thought­ful or pi­ous a good son you might be in your own name-re­lated mind.

Some­times peo­ple are named for fa­mous peo­ple with that name like Cae­sar or Cleopa­tra, but this is not all that com­mon. Nam­ing some­one some­thing that has its own mean­ing like Rock or Prince is un­com­mon, es­pe­cially in boys. In girls, you some­times get flower names like Daisy and Rose or virtue names like Faith and Char­ity. This may be a bit less un­com­mon in Span­ish-speak­ing cul­ture than in English-speak­ing cul­ture, but ei­ther way it still is­n’t all that su­per-com­mon here.

I don’t know why you would not sim­ply go by your real name writ­ten out in Pinyin, but you prob­a­bly have your rea­sons. For ex­am­ple, 趙 Zhào and 著 zhāo and 周 Zhōu and 孝 xiào are all com­pletely dif­fer­ent words, as too are 祷 dǎo and 道 dao, so per­haps it is one that when pro­nounced with­out the cor­rect tones sounds like a to­tally dif­fer­ent word in Chi­nese, and this turns out to some­how be ‘not a nice word’ and so you quite un­der­stand­ably don’t care to hear your­self called that un­pleas­ant thing even out of pure ig­no­rance.

Peo­ple from Ja­pan or In­dia sel­dom make up names for Western­ers to call them in­stead of us­ing their real names, but it is not un­com­mon for Chi­nese peo­ple to do this. If for what­ever rea­son you truly find your real name un­ac­cept­able in our mouths, then per­haps you could choose some sound-se­quence that’s closer to your name and which is an ac­tual Western name that peo­ple would ac­tu­ally rec­og­nize and re­mem­ber as a name, like ‘Joe-Doe Jee’ or even ‘Jojo Gee’ be­cause Jojo is a fa­mil­iar and friendly name for us, usu­ally a nick­name for Jonathan, John, or Joseph.

Sum­mary

But my own per­sonal opin­ion, which is worth lit­tle to noth­ing, is that you should con­tinue try­ing to use some­thing as close to your ‘real name’ as our sim­pli­fied Ro­man writ­ing sys­tem and the nar­row rules of English phono­tac­tics can ap­prox­i­mate.

Peo­ple of good in­tent will al­ways do their best to honor your per­sonal name, what­ever you choose.