伊辛巴耶娃 to 伊娃
Chinese has shifted from a monosyllabic language to a mixture of mono- and bi-syllabic languages. The preferred phonological structure for new words is now bisyllabic. The on-going Beijing Olympics Games presents an unexpected opportunity to testify this.
伊辛巴耶娃 (in pinyin: yi-xin-ba-ye-wa or -va) is the official translation of Yelena Isinbayeva (Елена Гаджиевна Исинбаева), who, for the 24th time, broke the world record for pole vaulter, 1 cm at a time. As beautiful and athletic as she is, her name is too long for the Chinese taste. Guess what? It’s simplified to "yi-wa" in news reports. In the follow piece, her name appears in both 5- and 2-syllabic forms, marked in bold. Doesn’t matter if you don’t read Chinese — each character is always a syllable (except for 1 character, which I will not tell here; let me know if you know the answer).
伊娃很明显冲着破世界纪录而来，标志就是她感觉自己状态很好的时候，就会选择在4米70左右出场，而后看情况再来选择下一个高度，否则的话4米55左右就要开始跳，果然伊辛巴耶娃在万众欢呼声中，在4米70这个高度时登场，伊娃漂亮的一跃而过，过杆的她依然给出飞吻。
How the shortening happens is interesting — instead of taking the first a couple syllables (which would have made 伊辛), its’ the head and the tail put together. It may be phonological, but I suspect it’s more morpho-orthographic. 伊辛 would sound — and look — like a male name, where 伊娃 reads perfectly for a girl. 娃 (pinyin: wa or va - not a phonemic distinction in Mandarian) means a baby or a child, and has a certain diminutive sense. And, it has a female radical 女 on the left.
What’s more, though, the source of this morphological preference may be traced to Russian. According to this fascinating page on Russian names
Surnames must agree with the gender of the subject, therefore all women’s surnames ended in "-a" or "-ia" and men’s surnames generally did not.
So her "real" last name — the surname of his father — is Isinbayev. And it became a "-娃" because her gender. So 伊娃 would be the most appropriate abbriveation in both Chinese and Russian!
August 19th, 2008 at 7:42 am e
So what character is it? Someone once clamed that 卅 is (pronounced “san1 shi2″, but it’s actually “sa4″).
It seems to me that this is a common move among languages, e.g., in English “Worcestershire” –> “Wooster.”
You could spin a story about primacy and recency effects, I suppose…