易维列(Yì WéiLiè)

My name is composed of three characters. Yi (易) is my family name, historically a name of a state 3000 years ago and now means exchange or easy. Weilie (维列) is my given name. 维 means dimension, and 列 means column. Sounds algebraic? Some people say so.

Compared with most Chinese names, my name is fairly easy to pronounce. The pronunciation is Yee Way Lieh, each of the three syllables has stress on it. But generally however you pronounce my name is fine with me. Americanized pronunciations Why-ly and Way-ly are commonly heard.
If you want to know more about Chinese names, read on.

In Chinese, as well as in most other languages in east Asia, family names are put in front of given names. (Now you understand why I am not using the notions of first name and last name.) For instance, NBA super star Yao Ming's family name is Yao. Confusingly, names of internationally renowned figures are normally written in the order they are in Chinese, while most other names are put in reversed order. So if I were the Prime Minister of China, my name would be written as Yi Weilie.

There are two tricks to help you out of the chaos.

First, with high probability, a family name has only one syllable, while a given name has 1 or 2 syllables. (Note: each Chinese character is pronounced as one syllable.) It is extremely rare that a family name has 2 syllables and I have never seen a given name with more than 2 syllables, even if it is legal to have a long name. So, if you see a name with two syllables, it is pretty safe to assume that one is a given name. This also true for Korean names.

But, if somebody's given name has only one syllable, it is hard even for native Chinese speakers to recognize which part is the family name. Now the second trick kicks in: some Chinese family names are highly popular, for example, Zhang, Wang and Li. How popular are they? Well, there are about 100 million Zhang's in the world. When I see a romanized Chinese name with a single syllable family name and a single syllable given name, I compute the probability of each of them being a family name and pick the more probable one.

This trick can fail too. For example, in a name Zhao Chen, both parts are equally popular Chinese family names. Then you have to ask.

In case of double syllable given names, traditionally, the first character, which corresponds to the first syllable of course, is a generation marker. For example, Mao Zedong has a brother named Mao Zetan. All his brothers have the same generation label Ze, meaning shedding rain. Some times female siblings and male siblings have separate generation labels. Until a few decades ago, double character names were the norm, and families were maintaining family hierarchy charts in which those labels were predefined for future generations, and because of that naming a new born child is just a matter of picking the second character, which could also has morphological association across siblings. But in modern time, people have generally abandoned ancient formations and are using names with less restrictions.

A name with two syllables is written as 2 characters in Chinese, but could take different forms when romanized. Some people prefer separating the two syllables, in which case my name is written as Wei Lie, and some other people prefer adding a hyphen between them, e.g. Wei-lie, while officially these two characters are written as a single word, Weilie, as in my passport.

In Eastern culture, even numbers give a sense of balance and stability. When people are calling somebody's name, they prefer a double syllable version of it. When the name is used in a leisure manner, i.e. without anything like Mr., there are a few common forms to address people.

Addressees with double given names, for example Mao Zedong, can be called by their complete given names, e.g. Zedong, or by adding a prefix to their family names, e.g. Lao Mao. Here Lao means old. It is commonly used to address people older than or as old as the addresser, and is more about respect than age.

Addressees with single given names, for example, Yao Ming, can be called by their full names, or by adding a prefix to their family name or given name. An example would be Xiao Ming, where Xiao means little, a prefix used to address young people. Xiao Yao can be used too.

There are many other ways to call a person, but generally people like double syllable things, and the form also depends on how acquainted the addresser is with the addressee.

Chinese characters have been romanized in many ways. There are tens of thousands of Chinese characters but they are mapped to a mere 392 Latin script readings, in pinyin, the official romanization system for Mandarin Chinese. (The following are all about Mandarin.) Other systems exist but qualitatively all mapping reduce the dimension of character space by 2 in the same way.

First, Chinese is a toned language. Each spelling may have as many as 5 tones. Even if the official pinyin system allows tones in writing, e.g. my last name is actually Yì instead of Yi, these tone accents are skipped when a name is typed in a computer or with a typewriter.

Second, many characters share the same pronunciation. For example, characters 意 and 易 are both pronounced as yì. So, in spoken Chinese, you loose this dimension, while you still have the previous one (because spoken Chinese has tones). Unlike in English, where Tom is always spelled as T-O-M, in romanized Chinese a name could correspond to tens of characters or hundreds of character combinations if it is a double syllable one. When you add a new entry to your cell phone's contact list, you have to ask which characters they are.

A nice introduction to reading and writing (if you can) Chinese on Linux machines at URCS by Dr. Bo Hu is here.