Cho's name

[Florentine Maier]

No: HPFGUIDX 67778

Petra Pan wrote:
> > Though it is true that Cho COULD be 
> > the Japanese name meaning butterfly, 
> > it is far from conclusive that it IS.  
> > There's no reason to eliminate the 
> > possibility that Cho's got a Japanese 
> > first name...but...isn't it just as 
> > likely if not more so that it matches 
> > the last name in being of Chinese 
> > origin?
> 
> Pi-chi wonders (in part):
> > I think it's quite plausible that
> > Cho means butterfly in Chinese, 
> > though as I've never had any classes
> > I couldn't say for certain.
> 
> Well, I don't know if I qualify as a 
> certifiable expert but I did study 
> Chinese for four years in order to 
> to satisfy the foreign language 
> requirements for graduation (and did well 
> enough to become a teacher's assistant <g>).  
> I've checked my dictionaries and I can 
> definitely tell you that I couldn't find any 
> link between c-h-o and "butterfly" which is 
> to say personally, I don't find it all that 
> plausible.  My mind remains open though, if 
> only someone could point me...
> 
> But at this point, there seems to be no 
> basis whatsoever denotation- or definition-
> wise for concluding that JKR intended Cho's 
> name to mean butterfly.


Hi, I've studied Chinese at university, and I've lived in China for 
two years, so I finally feel compelled to put my oar in on Cho 
Chang's name.

"Chang" is definitely a Chinese surname, even though it is not 
spelled according to the standard pinyin-romanization system, where 
it would be "Zhang". However, many Taiwanese and overseas Chinese 
spell it that way. - Freestyle romanisation, sort of.

For "Cho", let's simply look at the official Chinese translation of 
the Harry potter books. The sound "Cho" doesn't exist in pinyin-
romanization either. But it could be equivalent 
to "zhuo", "chuo", "chou", "zhou", "zhe", "che", "qiu" or even "jiu". 
However, not many of these sounds have matching meanings that are 
commonly used as girls names. The Chinese translators chose "Qiu", 
meaning 'autumn'.

However, Cho Chang's strange spelling doesn't necessarily mean that 
Joan K. Rowlings made a mistake. In fact it is quite common for 
overseas Chinese to have "wrongly" transliterated names, because it's 
usually not academic sinologists who do the romanisation, but the 
Chinese themselves (who know perfectly well how to write the Chinese 
characters, but couldn't care less about romanisation) or some 
immigration official.

So, we can savely assume that Cho Chang is of Chinese ancestry.
But since there are Chinese minorities living in Korea, Vietnam, 
Indonesia,... her parents or grandparents easily may have been of 
chinese ethnicity but korean nationality, or something like that.

Clear as mud?
Florentine Maier