At the moment I am developing a mini-obsession with Kanji, the Chinese characters imported into Japanese. One little thing I have been doing is matching Kanji to my family's names. Most Kanji have several readings and a Japanese person will know which one is meant based on the context of a sentence. When Kanji are used in names a Japanese person will not know for certain how the Kanji should be read. That makes it quite convenient for a westerner to take a Kanji for their name and then decide themselves how it should be read.
Western names are normally written in the syllabic Katakana script. My name would be written as E-I-DA-N which is エイダン. My name means little fire so I can take the kanji for little and fire and say that this is my name 小火. A Japanese person would read this sho-hi or sho-ka in a normal sentence but names are more flexible so I can just say that the Kanji meaning is 小火 but it should be read as エイダン.
So here is my family in Japanese:
Aidan - 小火 (little fire) read as エイダン
Aga - 清 (clean, pure) read as アガ
Luna - 月(moon) read as ルナ
Daisy - 雛菊 (daisy) read as デイジー
Nadia -望 (hope) read as ナディア
I think that the next step must be to get some t-shirts printed, I am sure that there must be plenty of kanji t-shirt specialists out there.
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3 comments:
Cool. Suspect this would be difficult in my case.
You would be surprised. We could reverse the syllables and maybe end up with the kanji referring to ladies of easy virtue or gangsters. Of course we could use the kanji for marnálach. The katakana for your name is well know because of the many movies featuring your name.
Sweet!
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