Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Korean name translation with name meaning?

My name's Jody and my Japanese name's translation is Sanshu, which means "Praise God" in Kanji. I was wondering if through my Japanese name I could have a Korean name, or anything related to that phrase as a Korean name. Please explain the meaning too. A friend has given me the name "jung hee" which kind of means justice, but I'm looking for something that would really match my name. Thanks!

Korean name translation with name meaning?
Praise in Korea is 칭찬 (chingchan) but i am not sure if Koreans give names this way. I think they are not like Chinese whose every name has meaning. In fact your name can be written in Korean 조디.
Reply:Most Korean names DO have a meaning, precisely because they have Chinese characters attached to them.





This is going to be a bit confusing to explain. Besides the Korean hangul writing system, Koreans also use hanja, which are pretty much Chinese characters (unlike many Japanese kanji, which the Japanese gov't gave kunyomi, or Japanese meanings). The Korean language used to use a lot of hanja, but now it probably numbers only about a thousand, and the Korean gov't is still actively phasing it out of the language.





In any case, one certain Korean character can correspond to many different Chinese radicals, thus allowing variety of meaning and personalization for people with the same name. The Korean gov't maintains a list of Chinese characters that are allowable for use in names. Usually one's grandfather (or head of household) will choose the hanja, or the family will pay someone who specializes in this to choose it. Thus I do not have this list, and my knowledge of hanja is like... 10 characters.





Anyways, most likely you CAN find hanja through the kanji of your onamae. It would help if you showed us the kanji, actually, because there's probably more than one hanja combination for "Praise God".


No comments:

Post a Comment