Today, I met with Xu Wenli again. We had a great visit and part of the time we talked about Chinese names.
For those not yet familiar with names in China, the family name (surname, last name) is written first, then the given name (what Westerners would call the first name). The family name is almost always one syllable/character. The given name is usually two.
The most common way to adapt an English name to Chinese is a rough transliteration (based on sound) instead of based on meaning. To me that seems strange since the symbols in the Chinese writing system are mostly based the on the meaning of the word not the pronunciation. This may be the preferred method simply because so many westerners do not know or care about the meaning of their name.
The first thing that he did was to transliterate our given names. Here they are in order from oldest to youngest.
陆客
苔蓓莎
安娜
皮特
菲利普
贝塞妮
堪达丝
Then we talked a while about family names. I really liked 戈 or 隔 or 割 since they have meanings close to Gedeon in Hebrew, which is where the name came from and are all pronounce “Ge”, but Wenli suggested 葛 which is also pronounced Ge but means “arrowroot or kudzu”. He said this was the best option and since I have no clue yet, I will take his word for it.
So after deciding on 葛, he combined that with each of or given names. Notice though that 4 of us had given names that were too long. He shortened those names by dropping the first character in each. Maybe after learning a little more about Chinese, I will figure out why he dropped the first character. Here are the results. I have listed the Chinese characters and also the Pinyin to help with pronunciation.
葛陆客(Gé Lùkè)
葛蓓莎(Gé Bèishā)
葛安娜(Gé Ānnà)
葛皮特(Gé Pítè)
葛利普(Gé Lìpǔ)
葛塞妮(Gé Sāinī)
葛达丝(Gé Dásī)
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