I realize that there is no single language called Chinese, but I have read that Yo-Yo Mau in Chinese means Happy-Happy Mau. I have a neighbor whose given name is Yau-Yau and I am wondering whether this is something similar. Or even the same thing in her native dialect. I’ve met her parents and they seem to be most cheerful (although not speaking either English or French).
As explained in your other thread, finding the true meaning of any word or name depends on how it’s written (in traditional Chinese as simplified Chinese may not capture it’s true origin) and what Chinese dialect/language they’re speaking. Also, what you’re hearing as “Yau-Yau” may be completely different to what’s actually being said in their native tongue. Tell a foreigner your name is Rob and they may hear Bob, Lob, Cob or any of a number variations depending on that they’re used to hearing and of course each has a completely different meaning. And if they looked up the meaning of Rob without understanding the proper context, they’ll think you’re named after something negative.
Also, Yau-Yau may be a nickname or Chinese “little name”, which is more than just a nickname.
A few years ago, I was talking to a co-worker about her daughter and she said her Japanese name was Akemi. Since it’s a common middle name for locally born Japanese, I asked her what it meant and she said that even her mother (who’s from Japan) was unable to explain. When I looked it up, I found there are at least eight different ways to write it with some completely different meanings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akemi. Note that Japanese doesn’t have tones like Chinese dialects / languages do, so Akemi is always pronounced the same (with possibly a slight emphasis on different syllables depending on context).
My apologies, I thought the thread about “yu-yubai” was started by you, but I see it wasn’t.
Well, it’s not a nickname because is a professor at McGill and her name on her department web site is shown as Yau-Yau ____. But I take your point about different transliterations.
I once asked a Korean whether the names Lim (his name) and Rim (a mathematician I knew of) were the same and he said that unless he saw them in Kanji he couldn’t tell.
But I wouldn’t have raised the question had I not known of Yo-Yo Ma.
Well, the answer to the thread title is “yes”, because all Chinese names have a meaning.
In this article, Yo Yo Ma talks about his name. “Yo” (友) means “friendly” not “happy”. To get a definitive answer about your neighbor we’d need to see her name written in hanzi, or at least pinyin (which “Yao-Yao” is not).
Ah…the joys of Korean romanization!
As stated on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Im_(Korean_surname), Lim, Rim, Yim, Im can all be the same name or they may not be depending how it’s written in Hangul. Kanji is Japanese and Hanzi if Chinese.
Your point about seeing the name in Chinese characters (it very rarely matters if it’s in simplified vs traditional) is correct.
Not to be snarky, but “yao” *is *proper pinyin. I would point you to basketball star Yao Ming (姚明). There are plenty of proper names with non-standard pinyin transliteration but “yao” is standard pinyin.
Yeah, I mistyped that. I meant to say that “Yau-Yau” (what the OP wrote) is not pinyin. In typing that, I misspelled the name by “correcting” it to pinyin.
Well pinyin would include tone marks. But pinyin sans tones is also commonly used / seen.
“Yau” occurs in Yale romanization of Cantonese; not sure how much that narrows anything down. A quick search finds several people named Yau-Yau, spelled with different characters.
Random example: 優遊
“謂之堯者何? 堯猶曉曉也。 至高之貌。 清妙高遠，優遊博衍，眾聖之主，百王之長也。”
I should have checked first. Her name on the web site is Yaoyao.
Any Chinese characters on the website? Eg 夭夭 or 瑤瑤
Her web page says she went to Beijing University.
Kind of scary what a quick Google search can bring up. I suggest the OP not give too much more personal info so as not to invade the woman’s privacy.
That said, I found a number of Professors with the name Yao Yao. But the only one I could find the Hanzi for was one in Hong Kong, 姚 瑶 one example of what the person’s name of the OP could be. I’m assuming the surname is 姚 (a proper surname) and the first name is 姚. I’ll leave it up the the native speakers to give the proper meaning to the name.
I wasn’t trying to narrow it down to a specific named individual; it just seems that there are many ways to spell “yaoyao” in characters, and any interpretation will depend on the characters used.
耀, 遙, 謠, 瑤, 杳, etc.
There must be a database of popular names online somewhere. If the OP does not have the original name, perhaps someone can extract the top 5 or 10 ways to spell the given name “Yaoyao” and we can leave it at that.
No worries. Christ, between Wade-Giles, Yale, the bastardized romanization in Taiwan, Cantonese romanization, don’t get me started on Bopomofo, all the really really really bastardized proper Chinese names Romanized across SE Asia, and pinyin, it can make your head spin. Pinyin may have it’s issues, but it works pretty well and has become the standard used by the vast majority of Chinese speakers. Plus I have it really wired, so there’s that. 
That would be like guessing your name by throwing a dart at a list of first names used in the US.
Have a look at Wikipedias list of common names (last + given) in china (Chinese given name - Wikipedia)
As you can see, “yao” doesn’t make the top 50. In addition, place fifty (刘芳) is used by an astounding 152189 people. Compared to the 1.4 billion inhabitants of china, that is a popularity of 0.011 %.
To get to the same level of popularity in the US, you need to look somewhere around place 600 (Popular Baby Names).
In fact, you can do better by just using a dictionary. Knowing hardly any standard chinese, and nothing about classical or poetic meanings, I can find about ten characters that would be spelled “yao” and that I would consider for a child.
Thank you for the link. However, that list counts each combination of surname + given name separately; for example, Wang Wei and Li Wei and Zhang Wei are listed separately, whereas I would like a list that counts only different formal names— Wei, or, in our case, Yaoyao. I admit it may not be the most popular name in the world, but for our purposes that is not really important (unless we cannot find a dataset that includes it). My suggestion was simply, absent any additional information, to answer the OP’s question by finding the most common ways of spelling “Yaoyao” and translating those.
ETA I downloaded a list of 700k Taiwanese names from here, but there seem to be no Yaoyaos. Huh. Perhaps someone can double-check, and-or get a list from the mainland.
There are some 耀耀’s and 瑶瑶’s and similar (遥遥, 摇摇, etc.; a lot of reiterative locution for whatever reason) online; the question is how to tell the formal names apart from nicknames.