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ArchivesRe: My guess is it is Wen Na
in reply to a message by Ylva
I invite you to play around a little with a Chinese dictionary, e.g. the one at:
http://www.mandarintools.com/chardict_u8.html
If you enter "wen" in the box for "Pinyin lookup" and then click the button "Search by Pinyin" the large number of results will quickly tell you that a statement like "wen means culture" is not wrong, but certainly misleading as "wen" can mean culture and about two dozen other things. (Maybe, as a speaker of English and seeing this, one immediately asks oneself how such a language can work at all!)
What is interesting: The Cantonese lookup for "wen" does not give any results. Of course this could have all kinds of reasons, among them: incomplete dictionary, wrong Romanization of the name in question, or the mother of the poster being Cantonese but carrying a Mandarin middle name after all.
As a already said in my first posting: This exercise, given only the information "Wenna, Chinese", is quite futile.
Rene www.AboutNames.ch
http://www.mandarintools.com/chardict_u8.html
If you enter "wen" in the box for "Pinyin lookup" and then click the button "Search by Pinyin" the large number of results will quickly tell you that a statement like "wen means culture" is not wrong, but certainly misleading as "wen" can mean culture and about two dozen other things. (Maybe, as a speaker of English and seeing this, one immediately asks oneself how such a language can work at all!)
What is interesting: The Cantonese lookup for "wen" does not give any results. Of course this could have all kinds of reasons, among them: incomplete dictionary, wrong Romanization of the name in question, or the mother of the poster being Cantonese but carrying a Mandarin middle name after all.
As a already said in my first posting: This exercise, given only the information "Wenna, Chinese", is quite futile.
Rene www.AboutNames.ch
This message was edited 10/27/2005, 4:34 AM
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Replies
Yes, but not all words are good names
For a word to be part of a name, it must have a good meaning. And "wen" is such a word. I doubt that "question", "behead" or "plague" would be a good word in a name.
Of course, without knowing the Chinese characters, one can not really know. It is just a speculation built on Chinese names I know of.
But seeing this page, I think I would guess "stable, firm" since the Cantonese word is the somewhat similar "wan". I also see that the pinyin "na", which means "graceful, elegant", is "no" in Cantonese.
"You sought a flower and found a fruit. You sought a spring and found a sea. You sought a woman and found a soul. You are disappointed."
"It does not become me to make myself smaller than I am." (Edith Södergran 1891-1923)
For a word to be part of a name, it must have a good meaning. And "wen" is such a word. I doubt that "question", "behead" or "plague" would be a good word in a name.
Of course, without knowing the Chinese characters, one can not really know. It is just a speculation built on Chinese names I know of.
But seeing this page, I think I would guess "stable, firm" since the Cantonese word is the somewhat similar "wan". I also see that the pinyin "na", which means "graceful, elegant", is "no" in Cantonese.
"You sought a flower and found a fruit. You sought a spring and found a sea. You sought a woman and found a soul. You are disappointed."
"It does not become me to make myself smaller than I am." (Edith Södergran 1891-1923)
1