Hiya, could anyone tell me what are the Chinese characters for the girls name “Shannon”. If it helps, the origin of the name is:
SHANNON f,m English
Pronounced: SHAN-awn
From the name of the Shannon River, the longest river in Ireland. It is composed of the Gaelic elements sean “old, wise” and abhann “river”.
Thanks for any help. It would be good if you could provide it as some sort of image so I know it’s properly done. She’s only young and will meet people who speak Chinese, so no obscene joke characters please! Also, could you tell me if this is an appropriate name for a girl in China? It doesn’t even seem like one in English but I think it was just picked up because it sounded OK.
AFAIK, there -is- no way of writing Shannon, at least not as-is. You could go about this several ways;
Break the pronunciation of “shannon” down into the way Chinese would pronounce it, and from there choose characters that are pronounced in that manner. You could probably come up with a whole bunch of meanings this way.
Use the original meaning of the name (old/wise/river) and choose Chinese characters based on those meanings.
If someone could give me both and also the closest Chinese equivelent, that would be fine…it’s for a friend, and I’ll let them decide which is most appropriate…
Hmm…wish I’d also put something about Irish into the title now. …in Scottish Gaelic “sean” means “old” and only implies “wise” in certain contexts…is it the same in Irish Gaelic? Now I’m not even sure how the name should be translated! Oh well, perhaps there’s a word in Chinese that also implies both…
based on your pronunciation, you could use
“shan” pronounced like first syllable of the English drink “Shandy” and means mountain.
+
“an” pronounced like “and” without the “d” and means “peace” or “tranquility”. Another “an” would mean “shore” but that’s a little nonsensical.
I’m not a native Chinese speaker, so not sure if the above two characters would sound like a real name. On the plus side, they are easy to write and a non-Chinese speaker could learn them reasonably easily.
There are other words with the same pronounciation, but none that jump out to me as good names.
On a somewhat unrelated note, there is a Japanese company, based in the village next to mine, that makes soy sauce and miso called Yamayasu, which is written with the same characters China Guy proposed.
Anyway, I was curious, and I asked my best friend, Google, and I found out that the correct characters for Shannon, as in the Irish river, but also as in Claude Shannon are read xiang nong. The first character means “fragrance” and is also the first character for Hong Kong (Xiang Gang in Mandarin), the second character means “agriculture”.
No guarantee as to accuracy; however, Get a Chinese Name is kind of entertaining and provides you a name in Chinese, and you get to select from four sets of “desired essences.”
It is kinda fun (btw, I very much doubt Mandarin Tools is a data mining site, YMMV), however, try inputing the same name three times, and you’ll get three different results, so I’d take it with a grain of salt.
Further searching confirms that the characters I gave above seem to be the correct simplified characters for Shannon. That’s fine for mainland China, less so for Hong Kong and Taiwan. The problem is that the second simplified character (nong) corresponds to three traditional characters. Searching traditional characters-only sites, I find that:
Mathematician Claude Shanon’s name is written:
“fragrance” + “agriculture”
The Shannon College of Hotel Management is written:
“fragrance” + “thick” (as in soup)
Actress (?) Elizabeth Shannon’s name is written:
“sedge” + “I”
That last combination is read “Sha Nong” rather than “Xiang Nong”, which I guess is closer to the original pronunciation.
jovan: You get different results each time because of two reasons: (a) there is no one standard way to select a character to represent a particular sound in one’s name (if you’re translating, say, an English name), and (b) you could end up selecting a direct translation of what the meaning of your name is and, again, there may be more than one word in Chinese for that.
I’ll hazard a guess and surmise that there are probably quite a few links on the web for translating one’s name.
Thanks folks! I’m sure one of these will be suitable. ruadh: They didn’t…I meant English language, in that “old river” isn’t really a nice name for a girl
Also, could you tell me if this is an appropriate name for a girl in China? It doesn’t even seem like one in English but I think it was just picked up because it sounded OK.
