Lori in the Ori-ent
What’s in a Name 2?
Posted on 9 March 2014 by Lori
Call me Bird’s Net Jasmine. Those of you who landed here before will know I’ve already posted about my name, Lorelei, and its meaning here. It’s a common custom in China for people to work out a Chinese version of their name and likewise for Chinese people who work with Westerners as guides and translators or teachers to take on an English name. Among the Chinese friends I’ve made are Rosemary (Mo Li) and Oliver (Zhong Pengfei). Looking online, thanks to www.wearyourchinesename.com, I came up with these suggestions for Chinese versions of Lori. Lori is made up of two characters. The first means ‘net’ or ‘bird’s net’ or ‘sieve’ or ‘twelve dozen’, among other things. The second comes from the word ‘jasmine’. I could go for Li instead, meaning ‘plums’ or Lei (pronounced Lee), a ‘flower bud’. This might be a slight improvement on ‘alluring rock’ (see earlier post). My surname is Maddox. This is not a reference to a deranged bull but apparently comes from the Welsh name Madog, meaning ‘goodly’. Maybe I should just call myself Manchester or I could double up on the Lei and call myself Lei Lei, or Lilo? Lo means ‘dredge’. ‘Plum dredge’?
The jury’s still out. All suggestions gratefully received in the comments below.
Lxxx
From:
loreleimx@gmail.com
Date:
11 March 2014 22:19
To:
joannamaddox70@hotmail.com
Subject:
Hello
Hi Mum,
Tell Nick I hope he gets something soon and that it’s way better than his old job. Yep, I’m busy. I have some school-age students, little ones that I teach in the evenings, three different families on different days. Then a graduate who wants to improve his spoken English, and I’ve just taken on a friend of his too. There’s a couple who are learning together (Saturday) and some high-school students – their parents clubbed together. It’s quite a big deal here if they can speak English: more opportunity for jobs in tourism and business. I get stopped all the time by people asking me if I can teach them.
I found some lesson plans online. It’s hard for us to learn Chinese, the way one word can have so many different meanings, depending on the tones, on how it’s pronounced. I’ll never get used to that. But English is hard for them too – all the tenses we have and they just don’t. Dawn is fine. She is working full time at an English school out near the 3rd Ring Road (more lesson plans for me!) and is looking for an apartment there. It’s still cloudy here and it would be nice to get to a beach sometime and catch some rays but she’s not sure what holiday she can take. It’s pretty restricted.
