A Fake Affair - Vol. 1 Ch. 10 - Episode 10

Aggregator gang
Joined
Dec 27, 2018
Messages
537
A little more on the names...

The main characters of the novel they're talking about are Giovanni and Campenella. Gio-van-ni sounds a lot like Jo Ban'ni, and The first character of Shouko's name means "bell" and the second character means "child," which together could mean "little bell", just like campenella which means "little bell" in Italian.
 
Joined
Apr 24, 2018
Messages
43
Thank you, @ThePaulBunyanTrophy. This name talk is a bit confusing, I don't think I have ever heard a conversation in the U.S. where people who are just getting to know each other are talking about their names' meanings. Maybe this is more common in Japan and Korea. She sure is stepping right into it... only in fiction can I stand a situation this messy!
 
Aggregator gang
Joined
Dec 27, 2018
Messages
537
@clebras

There actually a practical reason for it, especially in Japanese. Because Japanese names are required (or used to be until very recently) to be in Kanji, and because Kanjis can have several different pronunciations, they often define the Kanji so the other person would know how to write it. In reality though, most names have common combination of Kanjis that people know but that's usually with the last names. Given names can be a fairly novel combination of Kanjis. But again, if a girl is named Harumi, for example, 9 times out of 10, that's probably a combination of Haru for "spring" and Mi for "beauty."

In Korean, that's not as much an issue because written Korean is completely phonetic and the Chinese characters (called Hanja) are not often used in casual setting.

In English, we have names with meanings too but we usually filter them out. You could have a friend named Fisher or Smith and never think about whether he is a fisherman or a craftsman, which he probably is not anyway.
 
Joined
Apr 24, 2018
Messages
43
Thank you so much for the knowledgeable reply! So this name explanation discussion is probably quite common among people who meet in Japan, but not really in Korea. It might happen in China though because kanji originated in the Chinese. Maybe I shouldn't ask since I'm kind of guessing...
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Top