Also, naming in another language is difficult. Microsoft knows that, as "Bing" means disease in mandarin.
- 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
And plenty of Americans choose odd names for their children--out of TV shows, movies, comic strips.
Those are both proper names and awesome though, it's a far cry from using random english/engrish nouns (or the reverse, getting random — and miswritten — hanzi inked on).
Status-symbol names aside, I wonder how many of these names get chosen based on the pleasant sound aspect?
It may sound stupid or funny to the native speakers, but there is nothing wrong with the names per se, after all. With so many languages that are not English, there are bound to be many weird English names. I personally like the "ridiculous" names because they are adding something interesting to long list of boring "proper names".
Also, Eugene is a pretty common name here in Singapore, where English is the official instructional language for schools.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Eugene&year_st...
It is declining fast in American English:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Eugene&year_st...
However, not the case in British English:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Eugene&year_st...
It may sound stupid or funny
So, ridiculous then?
Interestingly, there doesn't seem to be as strong a correlation as you'd expect between a person's use of an English name and their command of the English language.
I used to work for a startup in Shanghai where no one spoke a word of English, except for the English names of the other employees. Office chatter was entirely Chinese, with a sprinkling of "Tony", "Leon", and "Francis." At the other extreme, I had a friend who was from Chongqing, but grew up and went to school in the west, who refused to take an English name at all because she didn't see the value in going by a fake name to all her friends.*
However, by her own description, this was somewhat unusual, as it meant that people called her by her full given name all the time. And according to her (this could be wrong, I'm just repeating it, and its hard for me to verify as I'm not Chinese), Chinese people generally address each other by some kind of nickname. So bringing it full circle, an English name is not only kind of cool, but doubles as a nickname, which was already a part of the culture anyway.
*I can see the merit in this. If you're going to befriend someone, especially someone of a different cultural background, telling him/her your name is basically the first chance you get to introduce them to your culture and language. But I digress.
Interestingly enough, an old friend of mine was the opposite.
She's from China, came to the US when she was in sixth grade (she's still here), and I met her in high school. At the time, she mostly used her Chinese name. She only used her English name a little bit and never in class. She graduated a year before I did, we lost contact (this was before social media was a thing), and then a few years later, when Facebook became a thing, we found out we were going to the same college, so we reconnected. The first time I talked to her after that, I called her by her Chinese name, just because that was what I knew her by. She laughed and said she hasn't heard that name since high school. Turns out she dropped her Chinese name like a hot potato as soon as she graduated and has been using her English name exclusively since. I haven't called her by her Chinese name since.
As an aside: much later, she got married, and she took her husband's last name, which is a western practice that isn't done in China, which really sums up how much she considers herself American. I never asked, but I get the impression that she felt that all parts of her birth name just othered her and she couldn't wait to get rid of it.
The canonical example is "cellar door", which is frequently considered one of the most beautiful strings of syllables in the English language. Tolkien was one of its most famous proponents, but a good many writers have said the same thing. And another has said the same about "salad or" (as in "would you like salad or roast vegetables with that?"), which is almost the same thing.
Just forget about the meaning and respell it as "Selador" (it's better if you pronounce "cellar door" with a non-rhotic accent), and you've got a quite pleasant fantasy name.
Another place an English nickname crops up is in online identifiers like e-mail usernames, since for a long time Unicode support was lacking.
Office for national statistics, Baby Names for Girls in England and Wales, 2015; https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
(The last sheet has a list of all names). So, it's an unusual name.
Other information about most common names. (Some Game of Throne names make it into the list.)
Office for national statistics, baby names, 2015 registrations, England and Wales:
http://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdea...
* Less than five girls called Cinderella.
* Less than five boys called Cinderella.
So rare and unusual, but not unique.
(I find it interesting that there are a non-zero number of women called "Steve", because obviously the first thing you do is search for your own forename/surname!)
These names exist in a linguistic spectrum that is different than Indo-European languages, which our brains are tuned for. It's just a lot more practical for Chinese people to get a Western name.
It's not just a problem of limited access to information, but also limited knowledge of what qualifies as a good English name. All of the people we've encountered were from Hong Kong, which has no Great Firewall to contend with. We've also seen many people using names that haven't been popular in the West in a long time, like Eugene or Doris.