# Name and surname



## dihydrogen monoxide

When you want to write down your name and surname in hanzi how difficult is it to find the hanzis that every Chinese dialect would pronounce it the same way? In case if you're in Wu area or Beijing your name and surname would be pronounced the same? I would imagine that in a lot of areas in China people would call president's name differently if they read it written down.


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## ovaltine888

I'm afraid I don't quite understand your question.

If you are asking whether a Chinese name is pronounced differently in different dialects, it is usually true.  Same spellings sound different in English and French too.


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## dihydrogen monoxide

I know that Chinese name is pronounced differently in different dialects. If you were to write Li Chang in hanzi it's not going to be pronounced the same in every Chinese dialect, maybe only in one. What I'm saying is can you write name or surname in hanzi in words where every dialect would pronounce hanzi the same way. Meaning hanzi for one word where the pronunciation is the same in every dialect.


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## yuechu

Hello!


dihydrogen monoxide said:


> What I'm saying is can you write name or surname in hanzi in words where* every *dialect would pronounce hanzi the same way.


No, I don't think there are any given names or surnames which are pronounced exactly the same in every Chinese dialect.


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## dihydrogen monoxide

To ask another way, how many hanzis are there that are pronounced the same in every dialect, so you can use those to write the name down.


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## Skatinginbc

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> how many hanzis are there that are pronounced the same in every dialect


None. (Note: I also take into account dialectal differences in tone)


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## ovaltine888

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> To ask another way, how many hanzis are there that are pronounced the same in every dialect, so you can use those to write the name down.


This is an unanswerable question.

It is the Mandarin that allows Chinese people to communicate with each other but dialects can be quite different. It is very common that we can barely understand a dialect from another part of China.

As you can see the land area of China is almost equivalent to the entire Europe continent, just think about how different the European languages are, then you can imagine how big the difference between Chinese dialects can be. Sometimes a Chinese dialect is not just about a few tone changes but simply another language.

【Edited】
To give an example of Shanghai dialect, I can't pronounce  the verb 玩  (to play) in Shanghaiese because there is no such verb in our dialect and we use a two-syllable word "白相" instead. And many existing Chinese dialects have already lost their writing system, which means you can only speak it but you are not able to write it down.

If you seek for some words pronounced the same in different dialects, you may end up with a set of words that do not really exist in dialects and thus they have to be pronounced in a standard way (Mandarin).


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## Oswinw011

Interesting question. I haven't noticed or counted how many words are pronounced the same in different dialects, but to my knowledge, a plain analogy is that Cantonese is to Mandarin what Japanese is to English. Of course you can find a few loan words in Japanese from English, but you certainly distinguish readily between the two languages. The same applies to Cantonese and other dialects. 
I don't remember that many Cantonese words shared the same pronunciation with Mandarin. Nor had I found it easily to understand sichuan dialects, despite having been exposed to Mandarin, Cantonese, Chongqing dialect and Xi an dialect.

Here's the one word I learned almost pronounced the same everywhere. It's "mom". In Cantonese, it sounds like "mar".


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## SuperXW

1. Your question is not about Chinese names, but all Chinese characters.
2. Dialects are too different, that's why the government promotes Putonghua (standard Mandarin). In any formal occasion, people are supposed to speak Putonghua, not their own dialect.


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## dihydrogen monoxide

You would write name in characters. There would be a possibility for two or three dialects to pronounce the name the same way?


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## yuechu

I think that 王 (Wang, Wong) and 汪 might be pronounced the same (or similarly) in Mandarin and Cantonese, if one does not take the tone into account. 马（馬）is pronounced similarly (Ma) in Mandarin and Cantonese as well.
I'm sure others will have some ideas!


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## SuperXW

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> You would write name in characters. There would be a possibility for *two or three* dialects to pronounce the name the same way?


Yes. two or three, or more, highly possible.
In fact, it is hard to define "dialect". Two neighbor towns may have 97% same or similar pronunciations, a little further away there's a third town, which has 95% similarity. They all have minor differences in accents, should we call them "three dialects"?
By the way, I'm not quite sure the purpose of your question. The names may be pronounced differently, so what?


yuechu said:


> I think that 王 (Wang, Wong) and 汪 might be pronounced the same (or similarly) in Mandarin and Cantonese, if one does not take the tone into account. 马（馬）is pronounced similarly (Ma) in Mandarin and Cantonese as well.


Chinese will not think 王 is the same in Mandarin and Cantonese. We would surely take the tone into account, and we will notice the difference between Wang and Wong.
Anyway, Mandarin and Cantonese are two typical "big dialects" with significant different phonics. If we want to find similar dialects, we will look for neighbor regions such as "Beijing and Langfang (a small city next to Beijing)" or "Hong Kong and Guangzhou".


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## dojibear

What OP calls "dialects" include roughly 7-10 different "languages", as different as European languages (French, Italian, German). They are not the same in writing. They differ in syntax and vocabulary, as well as pronuncation. Each of the them has several dialects, like European languages do.

A common mistake (that westerners make) is to imagine that Chinese "dialects" are the same language with different pronunciations.


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