2011-04-29

Chinese Names

The Celestial Empire provides basic rules about creating Chinese-sounding names for your players characters.
However, once the players have chosen a surname for their PCs using the list on p8, they may become stuck during Step Ten of character generation if they want a real Chinese-sounding given name — the guidelines given on p46-47 are pretty brief and concentrate on the kind of names that one expects in Chinese fiction.

I suggest the use of this web-site for the creation of Chinese-sounding names. This tool was originally meant to provide a Chinese translation for Western names, but it works perfectly well for our intent.

Just enter any character string (even rubbish) in the first two fields, adjust the following two fields to your personal taste, and voilà! here's your instant Chinese name.

Example:
Given Name John
Family Name Doe
Desired Essence of the Name: Mind and Intelligence
Your Gender: Male
Your Birthdate: 1 January 1951 [Warning: early birthdates return an error message]
Result:
譚皎翰 Tan Jiaohan [actually Tán Jiǎohàn] -- you were born in the Year of the Tiger.

1 comment:

  1. Wonderful piece of information, I had come to know about your blog from my friend Nandu , Hyderabad, I have read at least 7 posts of yours by now, and let me tell you, your website gives the best and the most interesting information. This is just the kind of information that I had been looking for, and I would regularly watch out for the new posts, once again hats off to you! Thanks a ton once again, Regards, Baby Boy Names

    ReplyDelete