NOTE: I’d prefer to hear from people who grew up in Japan and are intimately familiar with the culture from an internal perspective. Academics who study a culture are often notoriously out-of-touch with how everyday folk experience their own culture. Thanks for your consideration.
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Dear native Japanese, I have two questions. Before I explain, please tell me:
1. What is your initial impression of meeting someone who’s name is 雷雷, Railei?
As a writer, I often put a lot of thought into the names of my characters. One of my favorite names is Riley. One random day, I thought about how the name might work in a Japanese setting. I remembered “Raijin” and got to work…
According to wiktionary, 雷 (rai) has been used as a given female name.
Also according to wiktionary, 雷 can be pronounced in it’s original Chinese reading (lei).
Hence 雷雷 (railei; riley).
My follow-up question:
2. How bizarre or acceptable is this name?
3. If this is extremely bizarre, how might the child try to avoid problems surrounding their name?
Thank you. 🙂
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(NOTE FOR MODS: If this isn’t the right place for this question, please let me know where to post. I read the rules and thought this was best, but I could be wrong.)
8 comments
INFO:
(1) Is this supposed to be a real/legal name or a nickname for your Character?
– Doubled Character names may be more commonly associated with nicknames.
(2) 靁/雷 has the pronunciation of léi in Standard Chinese
– But this doesn’t make it its “original Chinese pronunciation or reading”
– There are many Chinese Languages with their own distinct pronunciations.
– Is this point particularly important for the name?
(3) Based on your description, how are you expecting a person to reasonably determine
– the correct Japanese reading for 雷 that you chose for the first Character, and then
– figure out that the second 雷 is supposed to be pronounced in an entirely different and unrelated language (Standard Chinese)?
Not who you want to answer your question but:
Firstly, you’re coming into a forum for Japanese language learners and insulting them (academics being out-of-touch), then asking for help. Thanks for that. Anyway:
1) I don’t think this name would fit in a Japanese setting. While 雷 might be used, why are (presumably) Japanese parents naming a (presumably) Japanese child an Anglo name, with a Japanese and a Chinese reading?
2) For the above reasons, it’s kind of convoluted unless the individual has the right heritage. By the way, their name would sound like “lie-lay.” So it sounds weird in English too.
3) Assuming the name is legally acceptable (the Akuma incident), the name fields on official intake forms (medical offices, school enrollment…) provide space for furigana in one of the kana. For example:
黒木佑月 – くろぎ・ゆずき
松原淳太 – マツバラ・ジュンタ
In schools, pictures of students are compiled into dossiers by the class, so teachers will see the students at a glance, but have their names with the reading as above. For 雷雷, the teachers might make a remark about キラキラ names amongst themselves in private.
As a student, name ls will be written in kana until the child starts learning kanji. From preschool through lower elementary school the child will know their name as “らいれい,” until they learn the kanji at whatever point that is. Some may prefer to continue using hiragana (one student I had liked to write her name in hiragana despite knowing the kanji), but that’s a matter of preference.
The name らいれい doesn’t sound Japanese, but sometimes that’s kind of the appeal (キラキラ names). I taught a もね (Moné), a らんな (Lanna) and aもなみ (Mon-amie) to name a few. らいれい – or probably more accurately らいりい – might do quite well for herself.
I think others have already covered how double kanji is weird and how no one would know that lei is a historical Chinese pronunciation. So you’d be in the realm of ‘I gave my kid a reading I made up and they will have to explain it constantly’ (like the character in Death Note whose name is the character for moon but read as light, it makes no sense and in the anime he has to explain it to each new person he meets). I think this kind of thing is more common in fictional media than in real life.
Anyway, the reason I am chiming in is that I also have a name that ends in ly and the standard conversion to Japanese is ri for this sound. 雷 is also rather masculine, searching for names containing that character on japanese-names.info I find 90 and only 3 are girls names. And none of them are common. There is an entry for Rairi 雷莉 on there but I can’t find a real Japanese person with that name on social media. A lot of Chinese named Lei Li do come up (which makes sense). If you change it to a different rai character, still no dice. It does sound rather awkward in Japanese so I am not surprised.
The example of a character I am referencing in media is this one [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_Yagami](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_Yagami) where above the kanji the reading in written in katakana 夜神 月ライト. ‘Raito’ is not a Japanese reading and neither is lei so your character would have to do much the same (katakana). But only for the second character of their name, which is just a step too bizarre. Like someone else said, an anglo name with a half-Chinese reading, why would Japanese parents do that?
**Not native or academic**, just live there. Slung a quick question to Japanese boyfriend asking has he ever met someone with the same kanji in their name twice, he said no. Now he wants to know why I am asking weird questions when I should be working. He also pointed out that in words where the kanji is twice you usually use the repeated character, so 雷雷 would actually be 雷々 if you were to write it as a word, which would be too weird in a name.
Hope something in that ramble was vaguely helpful.
Echoing u/Sad_Title_8550, I too knew a ねね, but I think she used 音音. It’s been a while.
雷雷 is a commen given name or a nickname in China.
Here are two Chinese footballer whose formal given name is 雷雷 :
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Leilei](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Leilei)
(This guy was the goalkeeper for the Chinese National team, so he is famous)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gao_Leilei](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gao_Leilei)
The character 雷 (thunder, kaminari) is more commonly used in male given name, and is a family name as well. So there’re even more people whos nicknamed as Leilei.
In female given names, we use 蕾 (flower bud, which would be rai or tsubomi in Japanese).
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I didn’t know any japanese name that include the character 雷. Though there’re many female whose given name is Rei, Rui or Mirai
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Just googled and found this:
[https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%AC%E3%82%A4%E3%83%AA](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%AC%E3%82%A4%E3%83%AA)
[https://myanimelist.net/manga/93564/Reiri](https://myanimelist.net/manga/93564/Reiri)
1. Maybe it’s a Chinese character’s or Panda’s name, read as “Rairai” (if this name appears in Japanese media).
2. Extremely bizarre. It’s not how Japanese and Chinese language work. It’s something like to write Stravinsky/Страви́нский as “Stravinский” or “Страви́нsky”.
3. If someone has this name, it means the one who named doesn’t have any knowledge about Japanese and Chinese language, culture and names. So most likely most of the people around the child are also not familiar about them, and maybe they rarely write their name in Kanji. So the child can write their name just in Alphabet “Riley” as a western name.
If the child has to live among people who know Japanese and/or Chinese, the child can introduce themselves as “ライリー/Riley”, an western name and never write their name in Kanji. If the child lives in Japan, maybe they will try to change their name legally. It’s sometimes denied if the name is not “bizarre” enough to affect their life, but 雷雷/Riley is clearly bizarre enough.
1. I would assume they were Chinese.
2. In Japanese it would be *very* unusual, since it’s the same character repeated yet the pronunciation changes (bizarre), and half of the pronunciation is in Chinese (which, and I know this may be an astonishing revelation, is *not Japanese*, so it’s very likely most Japanese people wouldn’t even know that pronunciation exists)
3. Japanese does not make the phonetic distinction between ‘r’ and ‘l’. Standard ‘r’ is a flap, which is why it’s referred to as ‘r’, though it is a bit more complicated than that; long story short, it would become ‘rairei’.
4. The best way to avoid having these problems is to not have that name. Even assuming it’s something the child was forced to have (which would require some *extraordinarily* cruel/dimwitted parents), I would absolutely see the child adopting a nickname and avoiding using their ‘real’ name as much as possible.
And as a bonus: ‘railei’ is ***not*** equivalent to Riley. Although the way they’re written suggests phonetic similarity, in Modern English the second syllable of Riley is actually an /i/ vowel; presumably as a result of the GVS, the /e/ vowel raised and became /i/. That or it assimilated, since ‘ey’ suggests it may have originally been a diphthong.
One way or the other, the sounds are actually different; you would need ‘rairi’ for it to equivalate to ‘Riley’.
You got some good answers.
“lei” is going to be pronounced “lay” and not “lee”, not sure if you were intending that.
If you give a child a non-conventional name with an elaborate way of being read, it’s a kirakira name and you can read about those online. Some are more tame than others. This one seems pretty tame. It might make people wonder if one of their parents was Chinese. Given the way you’ve spelled it, I’m doubtful anyone would notice it’s from “Riley” as that would be Rairii and not Rairei.
Notably for your name Japanese does not distinguish between R and L, so the person would need to know the etymology of their name to know to write it with R and L when using Roman characters. When using Japanese kana, it’s the same consonant.