卒償素願 !

Finally, some dream Chinese! The setting was odd: I was sitting on a bench-like structure (possibly a low shed?) attached to the back of a garage. The beach/park began on the other side of the alley and extended to the Lake. The odd part was that the seat I was on was moving northwards through the alley. Somehow, it was the same seat attached to the same building, yet every time I looked up from my book, I had moved further along. It did halt occasionally, much as if I were on the el, and I remember at one point wondering how I was going to get past a mob of noisy revellers.

In any case, a woman noticed my little red dictionary and said something that sounded like "Wo wei gu?" I didn't really register it at first, since she was with some other folks who I found vaguely annoying. But then I looked at her and asked, "Was that Chinese?" When she said yes, I tried to ask "Where did you learn that?" but for some reason it came out as 我學那個的在哪裏的? I don't know what the 的s are doing there, since they add nothing and are totally incorrect. Perhaps I was thinking of 了 and got confused? The 我 "I" for 你 "you" substitution is, curiously enough, one that we sometimes had trouble with in class. Hopefully, if I were actually in this situation, I would have the presence of mind to say 那個你學了哪裏?

Hanzi dilemma

So I'm working on my gift list for China--so many people, so little time, so little space! One of the things I want to pick up is a name chop for my father. He wanted my help selecting the characters before he went over himself, but it was a typical miscommunication: I sent him three or four suggestions and tried to clarify the differences between each option. Only after he got back did he complain that this was confusing and I just should've given him one choice. Belatedly, that's what I plan to do, by choosing one and getting a seal made for him.

The surname is no problem: He can use the same one I do. His given name is William, but everyone calls him Bill. The standard Chinese transcription of "William" is 威廉 Wēilián. On the plus side:

1. It's a good-sounding Chinese name. (The two elements mean respectively "power" and "honest".)
2. It's familiar. Anyone seeing those characters would immediately know that the bearer's Western name is "William".

But the disadvantages are:

1. It's common.
2. The meanings of the characters don't really fit him.
3. Nobody has over called him "William".
4. The shortened form would be 阿廉 Ā-Lián, which bears no resemblance to anything familiar.

There are also seems to be a consecrated transcription of "Bill", which is 比爾 Bǐ'ěr. The problems with this are:

1. It's meaningless. Well, you could read it as "compared to you", but 爾 ěr is really an archaic character that only turns up nowadays in transcribed foreign names. Whereas 威廉 could be a real Chinese name, 比爾 wears its foreignness like a screaming banner. (Then again, so does my dad, so perhaps there's some appropriateness in that.)
2. In sounds closer to "beer" than "Bill".
3. I dislike the look of the characters.

In every way, I prefer the Cantonese transcription of "Bill", 彪 bīu. It sounds closer, looks better, has a great meaning ("tiger cub"), and is a real given name (remember Lin Biao?). The only drawback is that, as you can see, the Mandarin pronunciation is totally different and most of the people who I think would read the seal are Mandarin-speakers. Trying to find a better fit for the Mandarin, I settled on Biyou and then played around with various characters, finally selecting 庇友 Bìyǒu which can be read as "sheltering friend" or "[he] shelters [his] friends".

Of course, part of me has a problem with all sound transcriptions. That's why when it came to selecting a Chinese surname for myself I rejected all attempts to try to find a phonetic match for a very un-Chinese sequence of sounds and went with a "translation". If I wanted to do that with "William", I could break it down into its etymological components--"will" and "helm"--and find corresponding characters for each. For instance, 志 zhī and 盔 kuī. Now no one is going to get the connexion to the original name without having it explained to them at length, but is that a bug or a feature?