Difference between revisions of "Talk:Chinese Names"

Latest revision as of 22:52, 21 August 2010

Speculations[edit]

I'm not sure whether to delete the speculative name readings or to add more... for example, it's possible that Lien's name is based on 蓮 ("lotus"; Pinyin lián, Wade-Giles lien²), but without confirmation from NN there's no way to know. --Wombat1138 15:52, 10 August 2010 (PDT)

Should we add Qin, Shen and Yu to this (used for Imperial, "Spiritual" and Jade, respectively)? -Almaron

Added. I'm not really happy with the format of my additions, but I don't have the patience at the moment to come up with a more elegant/compact table, esp. in some way that indicates most of the probable entries' speculative and unofficial nature. --Wombat1138 18:52, 11 August 2010 (PDT)

It looks pretty good to me. It's speculation, but upon reading your note about Lung Li Po, and that "Li" refers to Plum. At several points in Throne Of Jade, several small purple dragons are seen throughout China, so you could assume that these are the "Plum" dragons. We could add it as a point of speculation.

Just thought I'd add this here; it was removed from the main page a while back; "Xian - 1) immortal; 2) to fly; 3) in advance, first (suitable for a Celestial born of two Imperial parents, who might be expected to sire a line of Celestials)"

While that list isn't wrong per se, it's sadly inadequate to deal with the horrors of toneless translitertion. At least the spelling limits it to pinyin instead of Wade-Giles, but each of the four single-character tonal variations linked from Wiktionary's Xian entry still has about fifty different possibilities. (Conversely, Zhongwen doesn't list any single-character options for xian at all, but their vocabulary database may be more limited for historical reasons.) Also, "3)" is somewhat based on the identifying Lung Tien Xian as "Grandfather", rather than one of his female descendants who might've had one Celestial parent to start with. --Wombat1138 07:51, 17 August 2010 (PDT)

Something I found interesting; I was browsing through a booksale, and I found a book about Dragons. In the section on Chinese Dragons, it listed four different types;

• Tien-Lung (Celestial Dragon), who hold up the palaces of the Gods.
• Shen-Lung (Spiritual Dragon), who control the wind and rain.
• Ti-Lung (Earth Dragon), who rule the rivers and streams.
• Fut's-Lung (Subterranean Dragon), who guard treasure and metals.

I found it interesting that the first two share the same meaning there as they do in the Temeraire universe. If these are actual mythological Chinese dragons, then maybe these breeds will be seen at some point. Almaron 18:47, 20 August 2010 (PDT)

Interesting. The last transliteration is a bit wacky, and looks as if it might've undergone some copy-degradation through multiple sources; this 1890 Smithsonian report, which lists it as fu-ts'ang-lung, looks like it might be one of the early sources. The pinyin version of ts'ang would be cang-- and as an example of the importance of Wade-Giles apostrophes, the pinyin for tsang would be zang. --Wombat1138 19:46, 20 August 2010 (PDT)

Update-- this list could be useful; it does list 神龍 for the Wade-Giles Shen-lung, although the traditional description does not much resemble any of NN's dragons. --Wombat1138 15:52, 21 August 2010 (PDT)