Re: Bopomofo and pinyin

At 00:19 -0700 21.1.2000, Aidan Grey wrote:

>> Guei Ai-tan (WG)?
>
>
> Wo kanbudong nide hua. Zhe shi Guangdonghua ma? Ni keshi xiang wen wo mingzi
>shi putong shuode ye yao tade yisi ma? Bushi putonghua - shi cong Old Irish
>laide. You huo de yisi.
Sorry, the practical knowledge of Chinese of this phran-po includes only
some such words as have entered general Tibetan ()as opposed to official
PRC Tibetan) usage -- which is still a lot more than you would expect...
I'm the kind of linguist geek who can read a textbook, pick up a
theoretical picture of the grammar and not have learnt a single vocabulary
item! :-)

>    I'm not sure what you're saying. Is that Cantonese (with which I'm not
>familiar)? Maybe you're asking whether my name is Chinese, and what it means?
>It's not chinese - It's from Old Irish and means fire.
>
>    Aidan
>
>
>    Oh I get it now, that's my "Chinese" name, right?
Yes, my befuddled way of saying: "Look, a Chinese terpreter with a western
name that is untypically easy to render in Chinese phonetics!

>Actually, when I was
>translating, it was 'Mo4 ke4lin2'. I'm the Aelya guy  Clinton
>Moreland-Stringham. My husband and I just got tired of 17 letters in our last
>name, and we both HATE those first names, so we're getting them legally
>changed (me to Aidan Michael Grey, him to J. Brent Grey).
I legally changed the *spelling* of my name into something I liked better.
Sometimes I wish I had gone further.  A second change is a lot more
complicated to get, alas!

>But now I wonder what cool meaning I can give my new name (my old one was
>rather lame - 'inky border of the forest'  or something).
Well, since you know the *meaning* of both your names, why not just
*translate* them?

I've decided that if I ever learn Chinese I'll just "transliterate" my
Tibetan Buddhist name {Ngag-dBang sByin-pa} [\Na:/wa~: \tCim\ba].  The
{dBang} part is no problem, since it is an old Chinese loanword (meaning
"king" or "ruler") in the first place, and I don't expect "Jin" or "Jinba"
to be a problem either, but how render an initial velar nasal in (Mandarin)
Chinese?


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