Cho's name: The battle rages on!

[Tabouli]

No: HPFGUIDX 35996

[Note: This thread is starting to slide off-topic into Chinese linguistics, as usual!  We should probably continue further debate over Cho's name on OT-Chatter]

saturnvenus84:
> The given name 'Cho' has to be guessed at. The sound 'cho' doesn't 
occur in pin'yin, but could be equivalent to zhuo, chuo, chou, zhou, 
zhe, che, qiu or even jiu - take your pick! The problem is finding a 
nice-sounding, plausible character that would be suitable as a girl's 
name. The translators choose Qiu1, meaning 'autumn'."<

Just to let people know, the "1" in Qiu1 and Zhang1 refers to the the way the sound is pronounced, i.e. at a high, level pitch (called "first tone", hence the number 1).

greyshi:
> As a Chinese speaker with 
familiarity of two different Chinese dialects and other East Asian 
dialects, I never thought that Cho was Chinese. You'd really have to 
do some creative spelling and discount pronunciation to get "Cho" out 
of Mandarin or Cantonese.<

(Tabouli takes her half-Hokkien-Chinese non-native Mandarin speaker with token smattering of Japanese life in her hands, and decides to debate this...)

In my experience turning the sound of a Chinese character into a romanised spelling in the absence of a standard romanisation system (like Hanyu pinyin) is renowned for its creativity!  I know people in the same Chinese family (my mother's family, even!), with the same character for their family name, who spell their "English" surnames differently.

I don't think getting a sound like "Cho" out of Mandarin takes all *that* much creative spelling and dubious pronunciation.  There are, as saturnvenus84 mentions, quite a lot of sounds in Mandarin which are similar to "Cho".  In fact, I think this spelling is much more likely to elicit a reasonably correct pronunciation from a native English speaker than the pinyin "chou" (closest equivalent), or "qiu" (autumn, chosen by the Chinese translator).  The fact that the spelling "cho" isn't used in the pinyin system doesn't mean it's not a perfectly good one which a Chinese person living in an English speaking country might adopt to make life easier for the English speakers.  I have a friend who quite happily changed the spelling of her Chinese given name so that French speakers would pronounce it closer to the actual pronunciation.

Can't vouch for Cantonese (as my knowledge there is limited to counting to ten and a few yum cha dishes), but my Hokkien speaking mother thought "Cho Chang" sounded like a Hong Kong name.  Of course, she's from Malaysia not Hong Kong, but she certainly mixes with Overseas Chinese from all over the place who have been living long-term in an English-speaking country.  Certainly the sound "cho" exists in Hokkien, and from vague memories of the couple of Hokkien classes I attended in China, I think it's even spelt that way in standard Hokkien romanisation (e.g. cho kung = work).

Tabouli.


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