mikkeneko:diversireads: So You Want to Name a Sino: A Guide to Not Making a Fucking Fool of Yourself
mikkeneko:diversireads: So You Want to Name a Sino: A Guide to Not Making a Fucking Fool of YourselfNote: this will be long and very, very extensive because god I am so sick of this shit 2k16 I just want absolution and I don’t think that’s too much to ask, and even if it is I’m asking it, I’m not asking it emptyhanded I’m asking it with a WHOLE GUIDE FOR YOUR PERUSAL, because I’ve found that Wiki’s great if you want to know why and how we use names and not really great for when you actually want a name.A theme of this blog seems to be my long suffering, and I want it known, recorded, carved in stone that as of almost 1:00AM on Thursday, December 22nd, 2016, I am officially Fed Up with the way Sino characters are named in fiction.Let us be clear: this is first and foremost An Attack™* on all the white authors whose imaginations can only extend so far to provide us with a glut of Lings and Linglings and Ailings (not that those aren’t beautiful names) and Peonies and Pearls and, god forbid they start getting creative with their Sachas and their Wai-maes, but this is also for the Sino authors who can’t seem to do it either. And like, I get it. It’s not easy. Sinos are a disparate bunch with varying degrees of fluency in varying dialects of Chinese. Romanisation and naming customs are weird.But also can we leave the idea of the inscrutable mysterious unknowable East in the 20th century please? There are resources. This is one of them. Let’s start before I steep for too long in my own bitterness and annoyance. Keep readingA great read even if you don’t have any Sino characters to name, just for the breakdown of different naming traditions and what a concept as fundamental as ‘a name’ means to different cultures. -- source link