Friday, August 31, 2012

A name...!?!

Back from Copenhagen, my flight was delayed so I had no time for boat building today. Instead I thought perhaps I should tell you about the name for the boat that I have been thinking of.... (A lot of people have been bugging me about this).

So here we go, the name I have been thinking of is Xiǎo fēng, 小风 .

Now you may be thinking WTF is this.....?????

It means "Small Wind" and why did I choose this name?

Well, there are several reasons:
- I used to live in China so I would like a Chinese name
- She is quite small
- I would like her to experience wind but not too much and the name is the exact opposite of Typhoon (Hurricane for most of you), which means Great/Big Wind....

Any objections or other suggestions is welcome in the comments!

The below is cut from Wikipedia:

(台风 Tái fēng, Great Wind)
From Wikipedia:
Etymology and Usage
The English word typhoon appears to be related in pronunciation to the Chinese word 大風 (meaning "great wind") as spoken in southern Chinese dialects such as Hakka and Cantonese. The modern way of writing typhoon in Chinese (simplified Chinese: 台风; traditional Chinese: 颱風; pinyin:Táifēng), as well as in Japanese (台風, pronounced 'tai-fū'), uses a different first character, though, and may have come about based on the re-importing of the word from English. (Another theory is that the initial 'tai' sound of the word was a reference to Taiwan, where, from the point of view of mainland China, the winds came from.) Another possible etymology of typhoon is from the Greek word τύφειν (typhein), meaning "to smoke", which later made its way into the Arabic language (as طوفان Tufân) to describe the cyclonic storms of the Indian Ocean.[2] In plural, one can add an "s" at the end in English although in Chinese, "Táifēng", as with "Taifū" in Japanese, is always pronounced the same in both singular and plural usages. Typhoon is the regional name in the northwest Pacific for a severe (or mature) tropical cyclone,[3] whereas hurricane is the regional term for the northeast Pacific and northern Atlantic. Elsewhere, storms of similar strength are termed tropical cyclonesevere tropical cyclone, or severe cyclonic storm.[4]

No comments:

Post a Comment