Am grappling with the complexities of choosing a Chinese name at the moment. (Why am I doing this, you ask? See this post.) Actually when I think of describing how I feel the word grappling isn’t the word I want, the only word that fits how I feel is the Malay language word bergelumang*, literally “soiled, dirty, besmeared”. It’s not that this process is making me feel dirty in any way, it’s that I feel like I am wallowing in hundreds and thousands of Chinese characters, which I read in Mandarin, and which I am trying to turn into Cantonese. And the word bergelumang always makes me think of water buffaloes in a muddy pond trying to get out and constantly falling back in and getting muddier and muddier in the process…
And as for why I’d be thinking in Malay when I’m trying to find Chinese names – who knows?
*bergelumang – pronounced something like brr-guh-loo-mung. Guh as in “girl” and mung as in bean.
One Comment
Tricky. As if choosing a name for a child in your own language isn’t hard enough! 🙂 Maybe try and think of some concept or attribute that you would like the child to personify?