What's in a Name?

The Chinese language gives me a headache, not only because it is a pictorial language, but also there can be many pronunciations of the same pictorial character that can make translation very difficult and confusing. There are several major dialects in China, the most predominant is Mandarin, which is the official pronunciation standardization, but there are also the Cantonese and Shanghainese dialects, as well as even smaller regional dialects.

While my father's generation are Cantonese speakers because they grew up in Hong Kong, we are not Cantonese. The Cantonese are southern Chinese and have their own customs, language, and traditions. I would say Cantonese compared to Mandarin, the official language of China, is like comparing German to Dutch; both are Germanic in origin and have similar sounding words, but are distinctly different.  The culture and customs are also different. My cousin is married to a Cantonese and for their wedding, there was a hair-brushing ceremony, a roasted pig delivered to the bride’s family, my cousin had to go to the bride’s house and chase her out, and a whole assortment of other rituals and superstitions too many to enumerate here.  I asked my mom if these were “Chinese” traditions.  She just shook her head no and indicated these were rituals and superstitions specific to southern China and not to the greater Chinese culture.

So, what is my family? We are Shanghainese, which is also distinctive in China.  The Shanghainese come from Shanghai and also have their own language, customs, and traditions (including the famous soup dumplings it is known for). Shanghainese compared to Mandarin is about the same as comparing German to English; again Germanic roots, but with far less similarities in this case than with Dutch. When I hear Shanghainese, I can’t understand any of it, it is completely unintelligible to me.

So with this long explanation about languages, let me go into names. My first name in Chinese is 恩 and means grace, kindness, or favor. In Cantonese, it is pronounced Yan (rhymes with Dan). In Mandarin, it is pronounced En (like “un” in under). In Shanghainese, it is pronounced An (as in “an” in another). As I mentioned, I grew up only knowing the Cantonese transliteration of my name, but found out in college that my name could also be pronounced as En.  My maiden name is 張. In Cantonese, it is Chang (and can also be Cheung, Cheong, Chong, or even Jang depending on which decade one might have immigrated and what was popular at the time).  In Mandarin, it is Zhang. And the Shanghainese is somewhere in between the two. So depending on who I was talking to, it is possible to get many different pronunciations of the same word!

And then there are transliteration problems as well.  For years, westerners used the Wade-Giles system of transliteration, leading to the Chang romanization. After 1949 and reform of the Chinese language to simplified characters, Hanyu Pinyin, which is what I learned, began to be used and is responsible for the romanization of 張 to Zhang.

Another problem that existed up to about 2-3 years ago was looking up characters in the dictionary. When I learned Chinese in college 25 years ago, I had to look up each character in the dictionary, which is “alphabetized” by radical. Looking at my last name, 張, for example, it is made up of two radicals, the left and the right.[1] If I didn’t know how to pronounce the character, I would have to guess which radical is the dominant one – the left or the right, and go to the dictionary section with that radical and then scan the entire list, which are organized by sound, looking for that specific character.  It’s kind of like going to the “p” section of the dictionary and looking for all the words with the letter “a” in it.  It was extremely tedious, time-consuming, and slow. More modern dictionaries were organized by romanization of characters, but again, one would have to know how to pronounce the character in the first place!

Now, however, with Chinese dictionary apps, the Chinese language is now my oyster!  Chinese dictionary apps have two innovations that make research much easier.  First, there is a live OCR scanning function.  I can just hover my phone camera over the Chinese character and the app will do an optical character recognition scan and automatically pull up the character, its romanization, and definition. Another function is writing the character with my finger in the app, which it will then recognize and pull up the definition. I can also cut and paste text into Google Translate, for example, and it will give me a rough translation.

Given the difficulty of the language, transliterations, and with translation back to the original Chinese characters, I thought it would be impossible for me to conduct genealogical research. But thanks to modern technology, I’ll be able to start research on my family name and history soon!

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[1] 張 is made up of two radicals: 弓 (gōng, "bow") and 長 (cháng, "long" or "wide"). I have told people that my maiden name means long bow, but really it means archer.