Jichang Lulu has just posted a very interesting article titled "the clash of romanisations" (5/12/17). It begins:
Last month the Ministry of Civil Affairs (民政部) published a list of six ‘standardised’ place names in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, a large part of which the PRC claims as part of South Tibet (藏南). This generated the predictable Indian protests, media brouhaha and mandatory Globule sovereignty-reaffirming blather. Analysis of what’s being called a “renaming” of Arunachal “districts” sees it as retaliation for the Dalai Lama’s recent visit to the region. All these hit-back-at-the-DL-to-“re”affirm-sovereignty readings are surely plausible, but I don’t think it’s very clear in which sense these ministerial coinages are ‘renaming’ or ‘standardising’ anything.
In 1993, farmers in China found a Beibeilong embryo and eggs in Henan province. The fossils were sold to an American fossil company called The Stone Co. and brought to the United States. A model of an embryo curled inside an egg was famously featured on the May 1996 cover of National Geographic and was nicknamed "Baby Louie."
There's a town called Hǎbātún 奤夿屯 (where tún 屯 means "village, hamlet; camp; station") in Chāngpíng qū 昌平区 ("Changping District") of Beijing. The name sounds odd and the first two characters are unusual. It is said to date back to the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) when it was a Mongol military encampment. Southerners supposedly referred to the Mongols as "hǎbā".
I've also often wondered about the origin of the name "hǎbagǒu 哈巴狗" (where gǒu 狗 means "dog"), which is the Chinese name for "pug" (it is also called bāgēquǎn 巴哥犬 [where bāgē 巴哥 literally means "ba brother" and quǎn 犬 is another word for "dog"]). Is it possible that the hǎba 哈巴 of hǎbagǒu 哈巴狗 is related to the Hǎbā 奤夿 of Hǎbātún 奤夿屯?
Protestors wearing masks of South Korean President Park Geun-Hye (R) and her confidante Choi Soon-Sil (L) pose for a performance during a rally denouncing a scandal over President Park's aide in Seoul on October 27, 2016. JUNG YEON-JE/AFP/Getty Images
I have a brother-in-law who is originally from Hong Kong and his last name is Yuen. I learned from John McWhorter’s superb series on linguistics that this Chinese name is of Turkic origin. I asked my brother-in-law about this and he said “Yes, family lore is that we originally came from North-West China” (i.e., where Turkic people had settled.)
I wonder if readers have information that contradicts the above – or is it correct? (I’d like to know that our family story is accurate). Is there a Turkish/Turkic equivalent of Yuen or did it remain Yuen?
Also, are there any other common last names that cover such a wide geographic, linguistic, and cultural span, particularly from such ancient times? (obviously, in modern times, people move everywhere).
Thorin Engeseth noticed that, at the end of the Taiwanese video game "Detention", there are some interesting adopted Western names among the people involved in the game's creation — especially Coffee, Finger, and Smiler:
In several recent posts, I have pointed out how Chinese and Japanese announcements and greetings for foreigners are often pronounced in a special way that deviates markedly from what Chinese and Japanese would say to each other:
Travis Seifman noticed something interesting about the announcements on certain public bus lines in Okinawa: the pronunciation of Japanese / Okinawan place names in the English-language announcements is way off.
From the following post, we see that there are three main ways to transcribe Donald Trump's given name in Chinese and two main ways to transcribe his surname:
This morning, an instructor in Jiangsu province, who has been teaching Chinese Culture in college English classes for 12 years and has also been giving lectures on Chinese Culture to international students, wrote to ask about the possibility of becoming a visiting scholar at Penn for half a year. She introduced herself to me as Lǐ Fǔluòwá 李甫洛娃. Her name threw me for a loop.