Writing Chinese names, that is, English names in Chinese is not an impossible task for the Chinese language. Although there is no such thing as the Chinese alphabet, the Chinese characters (or symbols) still have a pronunciation which can be used to write a word that does not exist in Chinese. To be exact, the Chinese would use an existing word, and its written character, to transcribe a foreign name. Now how does this work in reality? As you may imagine, the Chinese read the news of the world and when, say, Bill Gates visits China, they call him in Chinese. They use two words which sound like "gai" and "ci" (pronounced together as "gaitsu") for his surname and "bi" and "er" (pronounced together as "beer") for his first name. So his name in Chinese is Bier Gaici (beer gaitsu). Now all of these 4 characters originally have a meaning but it becomes irrelevant as soon as they are used for a foreign name. A short intro in a Chinese newspaper regarding a foreign expert's visit. His name, Stephen Harner, is written in Chinese as He Siwen.

Now this is not completely true because the Chinese prefer to choose symbols with positive meaning, rather than negative. But especially for writing foreign names, they tend to choose from the same relatively small set of characters, especially the ones that are known to be used in foreign names and are otherwise not in use anymore. This is especially true for names of foreign products or corporations. So even if there is no Chinese alphabet, foreign names can indeed be written in Chinese. So you can have your name written in Chinese. Or Japanese, or Russian, or any other language. In our modern world, all languages are forced to be able to write the names of foreign politicians and rock stars, no matter where they live. © 2005 Logoi.com. All Rights Reserved