The whimsical vagaries of a young Indonesian man's name
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Sylvain Farrel is a student nurse from Indonesia. He came to America four years ago and speaks perfect English. I asked him how that is possible, how did he learn English so quickly?
Sylvain said that he studied English during his elementary and middle school education. His national language is Bahasa (Indonesia), i.e., Indonesian.
By ethnic heritage, Sylvain is Chinese, Hokkien / Fujian on one side, and I think Hakka on the other side, but I'm not sure.
In the late 1990s, Indonesia experienced severe anti-Chinese racial riots. Many Chinese fled, and, at a minimum, many others ditched their Chinese names and stopped learning / teaching / speaking Chinese language. In the case of Sylvain's family, they ended up not having a common surname. Sylvain's father simply assigned each of them a given / first name and second name, the latter sort of like our middle name, but which also served as a "surname" for passport and other official purposes. So Sylvain's sister, father, and mother all have different "surnames".
Now it gets really interesting. Sylvain says he goes by the name "Ivan"; for all intents and purposes, that's his actual name.
Ivan (Cyrillic: Иван) is a male given name of Slavic origin, related to a variant of the Greek name Iōánnēs (English: John), which in turn derives from the Hebrew יוֹחָנָן (Yôḥānnān), meaning "God is gracious". The name is strongly associated with Slavic countries and cultures.
Ivan is a very common name in Russia, Ukraine, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Belarus, North Macedonia, and Montenegro. It has also gained popularity in several Romance-speaking countries since the 20th century.
Etymology
Ivan is the common Slavic Latin spelling, while Cyrillic spelling is two-fold: in Bulgarian, Russian, Macedonian, Serbian and Montenegrin it is Иван, while in Belarusian and Ukrainian it is Іван. The Old Church Slavonic (or Old Cyrillic) spelling is Їѡан.
Ivan is the Slavic relative of the Latin name Johannes, corresponding to English John and originates from New Testament Greek Ἰωάννης (Iōánnēs). The Greek name is in turn derived from Hebrew יוֹחָנָן (Yôḥānān), meaning "YHWH (God) is gracious". The name is ultimately derived from the Biblical Hebrew name יוחנן (pronounced [joχanan]), short for יהוחנן (pronounced [jehoχanan]), meaning "God was merciful". Common patronymics derived from the name are Ivanović (Serbian and Croatian), Ivanov (Russian and Bulgarian), and Ivanovich (Russian, used as middle name), corresponding to "Ivan's son".
I asked Sylvain how he, as an Indonesian Chinese, got a Slavic name like Ivan for his common name. I was thinking that he, or his father, was playing off the [yvan] sounds of his paternally endowed name, but no, it comes from his Chinese name.
yīfàn 一飯 ("one rice / meal")
Sylvain / Ivan, a fourth generation Indonesian Chinese, cannot speak Chinese, much less can he write any Chinese characters. He more or less flipped out when I spoke to him in Mandarin, and went delirious when I asked him in Hokkien, "Li tsiah ba bueh?" ("Have you eaten yet?") — it was around lunchtime.
Selected readings
- "Ivan Enraged" (2/19/23)
- "Bahasa and the concept of "National Language'" (3/14/13) — with a long list of bahasa languages
J.W. Brewer said,
April 11, 2026 @ 5:51 pm
I'd be more curious as to how he ended up with the French-origin name "Sylvain." The Russian equivalent might be Силуа́н – some early saints who are Sylvanus in Latin are Σιλουανός in Greek. And apparently Silwanus in Indonesian.
Sylvain is not a very common name in the U.S., with one of its more prominent bearers being the immigrant rock musician Sylvain Mizrahi (1951-2021, and known by the variant stage name Sylvain Sylvain), who was born in Egypt to a Jewish family of Syrian origin before. I assume the Francophone colonial legacy in Syria had some connection to the name.
Laura Morland said,
April 11, 2026 @ 7:37 pm
I second what J.W. Brewer wrote.
I read through the etymologies of the most popular male name in the world with some impatience, waiting for the other shoe to drop. I, too, was more interested to learn about how "Ivan" ended up with a very French given name, followed by an Irish surname.
Sylvain is indeed a rare name in the U.S. A Frenchman living in California who also bears that name, but about 15 years ago he changed the spelling to "Sylvan" because he couldn't bear to hear it mispronounced (to rhyme with "pain").
Philip Taylor said,
April 12, 2026 @ 2:27 am
Let me start by confessing my ignorance — I do not know how Sylvain should be pronounced. But all the while that I was reading the article, the sound that was inside my head was /sɪl·ˈvɛ̃/ (and most certainly not /sɪl·veɪn/). May I therefore ask, how should Sylvain be pronounced ?
KIRINPUTRA said,
April 12, 2026 @ 4:39 am
The restrictions on teaching or displaying written Chinese kicked in from the 1960s under Suharto, and didn't impact the spoken languages. The long ban on Mandarin education is actually part of why Teochew, Hokkien & Hakka are so vigorous on Sumatra & Borneo (Kalimantan). The shift to Indonesian on Java (among Nationalist Chinese families) probably happened because they were fragmented linguistically and there was a Malay-speaking Chinese community in place to absorb them — but maybe they believe they could've engineered a Johor-style shift to Mandarin, given the chance?
If Sylvain said his people on his father's side were from "Fujian", they could've been either Hokkien, Henghoa 興化, Hokchia 福清, Hokchiu 福州, or (but probably not, on Java) Chawan 詔安. Along with the 汀州 Hakka, who are "adopted" by the Canton Hakka or even the Cantonese overseas, these are the "Fujianese" tribes of the southern seas.
Michael Watts said,
April 19, 2026 @ 10:24 am
https://dictionnaire.lerobert.com/definition/sylvain has a recording to offer. (I can't vouch for the quality of the source.) French wiktionary has "\sil.vɛ̃\". This obviously is not how the word is going to be pronounced in the United States, not least because we don't have nasal vowel phonemes. (I'm also not convinced that the French vowel in the second syllable is all that similar to the English DRESS vowel, which is what I think of when I see /ɛ/.) Of course it will be /sɪl 'veɪn/.