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Comment by dilemma | Hacker News Reader

I have friends named Dolphin, Fish and Shadow and they know perfectly well that their names are funny. I'm certain that Pancake does too. Having an English name is a bit unreal for them just as it would be for you and me getting a Chinese name, so why not get a funny one?

Also, naming in another language is difficult. Microsoft knows that, as "Bing" means disease in mandarin.

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"Bing" as it is commonly pronounced in English doesn't exist in the Chinese language. Words with the pinyin 'bing' does, but saying it means 'disease' in mandarin is somewhat disingenuous, because it could refer to any of the four inflection and the very large number of words under each of those, like the word for ice, soldier, sideburns, guests, etc.

Bing's pronunciation in English is exactly the downward inflection used for 病

Not quite:

- B- in Chinese is unvoiced, whereas it's voiced in English

- the -ing in Chinese and English are pronounced slightly differently

- Bing in English is usually inflected somewhere between 1st and 4th tone -- 病, properly pronounced, has a much more noticeable downward pitch slide

It's fair to say though that if you say 'Bing' when you mean 病, a Mandarin speaker will probably understand you.

Source: am native English and Chinese speaker

It is close enough pronouncation wise. Downward inflection is stronger in 病.

Fair enough. For my Chinese name, I chose 凡一正, which I've been assured translates to "Super Awesome Number One".

"Bing" also means stellar.

... and "ice" and ...

That doesn't negate the negative homonym.

It kind of does. As previously stated no Chinese word is pronounced as the English word "bing". Mandarin makes heavy use of tonality and the same roman transcript (or pinyin) can have many meanings. You would really need to dig far to find an accent-less syllabe (for the lack of a better word) and not find any negative connotation. Heck, in Chinese even many numbers can be used as insults.

Add to that the fact that the Chinese love to substitute similar sounding words to make puns, and it's completely impossible to come up with a name that doesn't admit some negative reading.

The 'bing' in cn.bing.com and the logo at the top of the same page isn't read out in English by a Chinese person, but in Chinese, and it has neither tone nor hanzi. "Disease" is a meaning that easily springs to mind when seeing it and it is therefore an unlucky naming choice.

Not really, for example bing1bing1 (冰冰)is my wife's name and means iceice.

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