I’m sure someone must’ve asked this before, but I can’t find it in a search.
Since Chinese isn’t phonetic, how would they write a person’s name. Like how would the Chinese write Arnold Schwarzenegger?
Also I’d be interested in other languages besides Chinese that use characters instead of an alphabet.
Very roughly speaking, they split up the foreign name into segments V - CV - CVC and then try to match each segment to the pronunciation of one of their characters. Since multiple ideograms have identical pronunciations, they try to choose a combination that has an appropriate meaning in Chinese as well. This offers an opportunity for puns, by choosing a combination of characters that has a humorous, or sometimes disparaging, meaning.
It’s sometimes great fun, as in the infamous “coca-cola” = “bite the wax tadpole” which although not wuite true, is still possible.
It’s basically impossible to come up with a translation without also making a potential statement about the qualities inherent to the person or product.
FWIW, here’s Schwarzenegger’s name in Mandarin:
阿诺·施瓦辛格
The first two characters stand for “Arnold”, the next four for “Schwarzenegger”, with a dot separating the names. I am not how each character should be pronounced.
Those six Chinese characters I gave for Schwarzenegger’s name are rendered as follows in pinyin:
ā nuò shī wǎ xīn gé
Cool! Plugging that into MDBG Chinese dictionary, we get:
Arnold is [informal prefix attached to names, usually rendered “Ah”] + [promise, assent, approve]
Schwarzenegger is [bestow, name] + [tile, earthenware] + [tired, laborious] + [to rule, pattern]
His actual etymology is something like Eaglepower Darkfield, which ought to sound pretty good in Chinese.
An alphabet is composed of characters, just like the Chinese writing system. It’s just that many Chinese characters are often composed of radicals which give hints about meaning and pronunciation. Others are straight-up pictograms that look like what they mean, and these pictograms might get used, rebus-style, for their phonetic value in a more complex character, where they would be paired with a semantic determinative to decide what specific word of that pronunciation is meant. For example, a picture of a bow-and-arrow plus a tree would mean ‘bough’. (Mandarin*, for example, is full of words that sound the same, so this makes more sense than it would in English.) Other characters are composed of multiple ideograms that somehow logically add up to a given meaning: ‘Grain’ + ‘Fire’ = ‘Autumn’, for example. (They burn their fields too, it seems.)
(Mandarin is a specific spoken language that shares a common written language with Wu, Yue, Min, and others spoken in mainland China, Taiwan, and other areas. These languages are only somewhat mutually intelligible: Speakers of the various languages can pass notes* but they might not be able to carry on a conversation.)
**(Oh, do not mention the Traditional/Simplified split. I’m going nuts trying to simplify this as it is.)
Modern languages that use this scheme borrowed it from the Chinese, including Japanese and (historical) Vietnamese and (historical?) Korean. (Vietnamese now uses a Latin alphabet with many diacritical marks, borrowed from the French colonists. Korean uses its own alphabet with letters traditionally grouped into one-syllable blocks.) As you can see, it’s not used to write very many languages these days, even if you realize that ‘Chinese’ is really a family of languages.
Historically, though, it was very common among cultures first developing literacy: Cuneiform worked broadly in this fashion, when it was used to write Sumerian and Akkadian in Bronze Age Mesopotamia. So did Egyptian heiroglyphs (in broad strokes, I said) and Maya glyphs.
I found the rendition of “Schwarzenegger” to be somewhat unusual, but I don’t have intimate familiarity with how names are exactly rendered in Chinese.
“ā nuò” makes sense, as I figured the final -ld would get lopped off. But I’d have expected “Schwarzenegger” to come out as something more like “shua tse ne ge” (excuse the lack of tone marks). However, those may not be actual Mandarin words.
MDGB is a great site. You can type “Arnold Schwarzenegger” right in there and get fully annotated response in Mandarin.
Here’s Mikhail Gorbachev’s surname (can’t find Mikhail at MDGB, for some reason, but Wiki would have it):
戈尔巴乔夫
Gē ěr bā qiáo fū
The Wikipedia is a good source too, because articles on the same subject in different languages are linked:
阿诺·施瓦辛格 is the article in Chinese, and
アーノルド・シュワルツェネッガー is the article in Japanese.
Sorry for the hijack, but can someone tell me how I can view these characters on my computer? I’ve done it before on an older laptop, but I can’t seem to figure it out this time around. Just changing the character encoding through the View menu doesn’t do anything, and I don’t want to have to do that on every page anyways, even if it did work.
I have an EeePC with WinXP and Firefox 3.
Thanks!
On-topic, a Chinese coworker of mine had an English-Mandarin dictionary with a section at the back with common (British) English names, and typical translations for them. It was pretty interesting to see how they looked and to have her pronounce them to see how close they were (or weren’t!)
I got the fonts from the Wikipedia. It kept telling me “To view this properly you need to download the following fonts:”
Thanks for the replies and the website. It’s still confusing to me though. But languages are not my thing.
So is there more than one correct way to write a name? I guess like in English one could write Mark or Marc, or something along those lines, so it wouldn’t be all that different
Yes, there may be variations in the way a foreign name is written. Sometimes, it’s intentional, in order to impart a favorable or disfavorable secondary meaning.
Apparently it’s so complicated that the government is forcing simplification in some cases.
Yes, not least because each language has its own rules about how sounds can be arranged. These rules are called the language’s phonotactics. For example, English phonotactics don’t allow the ‘ng’ sound to occur at the beginning of a word: It always has to occur after a vowel. Therefore, a Vietnamese guy named Nguyen will effectively be renamed to Nooyen when he goes to an English-speaking country.
A better example for your question is the fact Japanese phonotactics don’t allow ‘Chris’, which happens to be my name. According to this little online tool, I’d be ‘Chiisu’ in Japanese and my name would be spelled to represent those sounds in Katakana, which is a syllabary (each character represents one syllable).
This tool claims I’d be Kurisu, which makes more sense: The ‘ch’ phoneme doesn’t actually appear anywhere in my name. Either way, though, simply being ‘Chris’ is right out as far as Japanese phonotactics are concerned.
I’m wary of the sophistication of that tool. I’d suspect something more like Kurisu instead (which, it turns out, is what it reports for “Kris”), but I don’t really know anything…
OK, so I guess the second tool I cited is correct. 
Ah, yes, there you go. I hadn’t yet seen that edit (even when I edited my own wording…).
Thank you, I found the correct wiki! It’s been annoying me for a while; I’m glad it’s resolved!