Tonight’s episode of “Lost” is titled: “Ji Yeon”.
I think that is a female name, but not sure. Is there a translation that might mean something?
It is a girl’s name.
I did a little googling to see if there was some deeper meaning. I’ve never seen Lost. There are a lot of discussions going on in Blog’s about just whose name it is, and what deeper meanings it might have. But I don’t want to repeat any of those spoilers.
~~~~LINK IS TO SPECULATIONS AND SPOILERS~~
I haven’t seen the spoilers, but my guess is that…
… it’s the name Sun has picked out for her baby.
Korean names are made from classical Chinese characters. Girls’ names often include the character for “beautiful” which can be Latinized as Mi, Mee, Me, or a variety of other ways. One would have to see the characters to be sure what the name Ji Yeon means in this particular instance. Many names are very beautiful and poetic.
Having an auspicious name is very important. It is not unusual (or wasn’t when I lived in Korea) for a couple to go to a name maker to get an auspicious name for their baby, based on astrological calculations incorperating the exact date and time of the child’s birth. It is also not unusual for a family to rename their children if they have had a stretch of bad luck, which may be attributed to having chosen an inauspicious name for one’s child.
Bad luck can also be caused by having buried grandpa or granny in the wrong spot. If it is a burial issue, the family will exhume and rebury the loved one, sometime several times. A low-level flight over the very mountainous Korean terrain shows thousands of family tombs on the mountainsides and tops.
For all of the amazing technological progress Korea has made, it was one of the most superstitious places I have ever lived.
Not all names are chosen from Chinese characters. There are native Korean names, such as A-reum (아름 Beauty) and Ha-neul (하늘 Heaven) that are fairly popular.
In the Entertainment Weekly recap of the episode it states that the name means either “delay” or “flower of wisdom”. Since the writer of the article is neither Korean or knows how to speak Korean I’m not sure where he got his info. He does have the Time Warner Corporation behind him so I hope he has access to a decent research department.
Oh, bullshit (the writer, not you). Ji-yeon could mean all sorts of things. There’s no way to know unless they reveal the Chinese characters behind the name.
Jiyeon as a word does mean “delay.” It could also mean “kite” or “relationship based on geography” (like in the context of favoring someone simply because you’re from the same city/state/region). But seperately, “ji” and “yeon” have multiple meanings. Ji could mean: wisdom, delay, earth, paper, or to point out. Yeon could mean: to be as is, research, wideflung, stretched out, kite, lead, burn, fate . . . etc, etc. There are too many possible name combinations to say for sure.
I know of a lady who just adopted a little girl from Korea whose name is 사랑. When I first saw that I said, “Huh? That’s not her name, is it?” But yep, that’s her name.
I’m going with “paper burn”. So, whose running the baby name pool?
Poor girl.
There was a girl I knew in middle school named 미인 (translation: a beauty; a beautiful person). And I’m sorry to say this, but she was ugly. The boys teased her relentlessly about it. Seriously, some parents just need to be smacked.
I’m imagining the “??” says something different on other people’s screens?
It says sa-rang, in Korean. It’d be like naming your child “Love.”
Well a lot of girls have “Ae” in their names, which means love (based on the Chinese character), but I’d never heard “sa rang” (native Korean word for love, with no Chinese character) used as a name.