Write May-Ling in Chinese
Sun, 01/31/2010 - 04:23
Q: How do you spell the name Meil-Ling or May-Ling in chinese. Or with chinese calligraphy?
Nowadays the standard way to spell the name of Madame Chiang Kai-shek, in China's official Pinyin system, is Meiling Song. It used to be Mei-ling Soong or May-ling Soong. The characters appears like this:
The first character is "Song," and the second and the third are "Meiling." "Song" is the family name. "Mei" means "beautiful." Ling means "age" or "years."
fellow-traveler on Thu, 04/01/2010 - 00:34.
It seems sometimes they write Chinese names with words together, like Meiling, sometimes as individual words, like "Mei Ling", with space in between...
CTA Editor on Fri, 04/02/2010 - 10:41.
Right. Mei Ling are two individual characters, but when latinizing Chinese given names, most people would write two words as if they were one - "Meiling" instead of "Mei Ling." That's mostly how people do it today.
There are also given names that contain only one character.
Almost all Chinese surnames is single-character words - Wang, Zhang, Han... There are only a handful exceptions - Sima, Situ, Ouyang...