If you want to name her Siobhan, then do it. Shevaughn? Really, pretentiously badly spelled alternative. Chevonne makes me think of Chevette. What little girl wouldn’t want to be named after a car?
I hate phonetic spellings of names. Unique spellings are equally irritating. I can’t help thinking when I see an unusual variation on a name, that the parents who did this were too stupid to spell their child’s name as it is traditionally spelled and just made something up.
Just call her “Joan” and then say “but we pronounce it the Irish way, which is pronounced (shove-ahn) and spelled Siobhán in Irish.”
Joan is a famly name which I wished to carry on when I named my daughter, but I could not bring myself to give such an old-biddy name to my lovely new little daughter.
So I named her Siobhan. It actually worked out just fine.
“Sio”, pronounced “see-oh”, means “roasted” in Cantonese, and the word most commonly used after that is “Bak”, or “Bakh”, meaning meat. Sio Bak. You’ve probably seen a slab of roasted pork belly hanging in Chinatown before, that’s what it is.
Anyway. thanks for the comments all, and I especially appreciate that some of your daughters named Siobhan love their name! No Chevonnes or Shevaughns in this thread yet, I see…
That’s quite beautiful. Celeste Louise would suit anyone of any age, and is both a name you can take seriously and a rather sweet sounding name. I’m a fan 
Thanks!
My wife has alerted me to the fact that Sio Bak is Hokkien, not Cantonese. I have been duly chastised.
100% this.
y’all are so judgmental :dubious:
I used to work with a woman called Chevoy. I thought it was a very pretty name.
Siobhan is a derivation of Jane or Joan.
Most straightforward spelling is Shavonne. In Singapore I would avoid any versions with silent g’s. But I vote strongly for keeping it Siobhan. People will learn.
As I understand it, the “Siobhan” spelling would set the child up for teasing by other kids, which can sometimes be quite cruel. This seems to be overlooked by those of you who are rather stridently (and sanctimoniously, in my view) insisting on the traditional spelling. Why the hell it bothers you so much how someone else’s kid a half world away spells her name is beyond me. How about some consideration for the person who will be living with the name.
yup, and in Cantonese it could conceivably sound like “roast plank”, or maybe “hot plate”. (Siu Ban)
your daughter’s apparent race would matter here i think.
if she has no Irish roots, giving her the name Siobhan would be seen as stubbornly pretentious since it is obvious that you’ll be saddling her with a name not many know the pronunciation or spelling of. if she is Irish, or maybe if she simply looks caucasian, you should definitely go with Siobhan. teasing would not be a problem, the name is easy to pronounce and it’s really a stretch to associate it with Hokkien or Cantonese roasts imho.
if she has no Irish roots, giving her the name Chevonne would not be remarkable, though you’ll be saddling her with a non-standard name that needs to be clarified for spelling. the name would also fit in well i should think, strippers simply aren’t a thing in Singapore. western names are all adopted anyway, so making up new ones aren’t really remarkable unless you are trying to make up badly spelt variants of common names.
will her Chinese name be a transcription or will she have her own?
I say use the original spelling. If you must phoneticize it: Shavonne.
Just named our new cat Five.
And I hate ‘alternate spellings’ unless it is a real one, not some stupid revisioning. Siobhan or something different.
Sure, if you call someone Cretinia Stupida or something you set them up for teasing, but I think it is a bit exaggerated to say that any name that isn’t 100% absolutely common and idiot proof will make the kid a walking target. From what I get from the OP’s explanation, it is even a bit of stretch to get to the “funny” interpretation. If she is going to teased for that, she would have been teased for something else if her name was spelled phonetically.
Honestly, I don’t buy that naming a kid Siobhan is going to somehow going to traumatise her for life.
Also, since Chinese doesn’t use western letters, how is spelling it phonetically going to change anything?
So at what point can we Anglicize a difficult to pronounce foreign name? I’d assume you guys aren’t running around naming your kids Guinhyfhar, here. Without Anglicization, we wouldn’t have 90% of the names we use today, and it has to start somewhere.
While characters are used for most applications, people learn Western characters in elementary school alongside with characters, and they are used in certain situations (signage, for example, if often romanized.) Everyone knows and recognizes them.
Names can be a little complex. There is no real way to “translate” a Western name into characters. There are some somewhat standard transcriptions of very common Western names, and sometimes people cobble together sets of characters that kind of sound like the Western name. But this isn’t very satisfying, as each character has it’s own independent meaning, and it’s tough to find something that sounds right and isn’t just a string of random meaningless (or even worse, negative) words.
Anyway, the only way around this is to pick a completely separate Chinese name, or to just keep using your Western name as it is written. Lots of people do the former.
Anglicise away, but Chevonne, Shevanne, etc. will have a different set of cultural notions attached to them than Siobhán has. It might not matter, maybe just the sound suffices. Ultimately call your kid anything you want short of Fuckface or Shittyknickers and I’m sure they’ll be fine, but if you like a name so much you want to name your kid it, why the hell would you change it?
A friend of mine has that, it’s a nice way to note the Irish roots without causing too much trouble. That said, her sister’s called Niamh, so I don’t think her parents were that bothered about people having to learn to pronounce it!