Comments on: Wanted: Chinese Name Gender Reference

By: Albert

Albert — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 00:41:02 +0000

Found it! See this.

By: Translation Compaany

Translation Compaany — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 13:32:06 +0000

Hi, 娟definitely is a woman’s name. 平安is very neutal. I tend to say it’s a man’s name. 平安is not frequently used.

By: baomingguang

baomingguang — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 02:06:00 +0000

Cojak.org has pages for Male Given Names, Female Given Names, and Ambigender Given Names. You could look up the name on each page and see from the bar underneath each character the likelihood the name is male or female. For example, you’ll find that 娟 appears only on the “Female Given Names” page and it has a large bar underneath.

By: Michael Robinson

Michael Robinson — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 06:49:57 +0000

Great idea Corpus!

I’m still going to try to make the db thingy, but to be honest I think your idea is sufficient for most people.

My wife tells me that my idea of giving “gender weightings” to each character won’t work – sometimes parents give their children one character names because they sound pretty when combined with the surname.

I found a massive list of Chinese names (500,000+), awaiting permission from the creator to use them.

By: C. Callosum

C. Callosum — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 02:58:17 +0000

Is there a possibility of exploiting Google for this? If you search for “张安平他” you get 123,000 hits, while with “张安平她” it’s zero. For “李娟她” it’s 1,330, while with “李娟他” it’s 708. We can deduce that 张安平 is male and 李娟 is female. I think that’s right, right?

I’m banking on most of the combinations of name + pronoun to be something like “as for person X, he/she…”, which is obviously not 100% true. So it’s not a foolproof scheme. But I suspect it would be a good first approximation, which you could supplement with component analysis and other cleverness as amake has suggested.

By: Michael Robinson

Michael Robinson — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 01:41:50 +0000

If you give me a list of names + genders (Male, Female, Either), I’ll look at making this.

Problems:

Names are often multi-character. This means that there will be a rather large set of names to be added to the database. Some characters could be ignored – 在 for example.

Each character could be given a “gender” weighting, and the result could be the sum of the gender weights. More negative = more likely that it is female, more positive more likely that it is male.

Some characters could be triggers for gender, like 龙 and 花.

Need:

List of all characters used in names.
Values for each character.

By: Nicki

Nicki — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 23:46:16 +0000

I think this would be great, and it could have other applications as well, such as helping laowai who want to choose a suitable Chinese name, but don’t want to accidentially choose one of an inappropriate gender. Also, it could help us choose a name that is common and culturally acceptable. I still haven’t picked one out, partially because I’m afraid of ending up like so many of my students with weird English names, like King and Stone and Baby and Yoyo and Dragon.

By: amake

amake — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 07:43:13 +0000

Interesting question. I’d guess that 娟 is a woman’s name based on the radical, but that’s purely an uninformed guess.

In Japanese name genders are pretty obvious, with the first clue being that if it ends with 子 then it’s a girl. Names ending with 男, 夫, 雄, etc. are boys. Of course there are a lot more patterns out there, but I can only think of one gender-neutral name off the top of my head: Mizuki (for which there are many possible kanji combinations).