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Li-Mei Lin. Lin as in forest, and Li-Mei as in beautiful, but with the characters reversed.

Chinese names (and the language in general) is made of characters. So, in order to explain it to people, you have to point out which characters the name has.

Does this count as spelling? If not, what's a more suitable word? "Explaining"?

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    Sounds more like a literal translation.
    – user66974
    Commented Jul 16, 2015 at 1:31
  • Sounds like you are trying to tell someone which Chinese characters to use for certain pinyin names, where the latter are used without pinyin accents. And just what is reversed here - do you mean only to say that Lin is the last (i.e., family) name and Li-Mei is the first (given) name?
    – Drew
    Commented Jul 16, 2015 at 2:26
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    @Drew Oh, I mean that beautiful is written Mei-Li, but the name is Li-Mei. In other words, beautiful with the characters reversed. Maybe I didn't word it well?
    – wyc
    Commented Jul 16, 2015 at 4:21
  • No, you worded it fine.
    – Drew
    Commented Jul 16, 2015 at 5:16
  • Seems like you are differentiating or specifying between words/whole characters. As there are two or more words with the similar sound, you are saying which you mean. This would be similar to the case in English when some might say, "Cate with a C not a K". Both are legitimate ways to spell the name (so not a spelling problem), but only one is correct in context.
    – 21hr
    Commented Jul 16, 2015 at 8:21

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I would not say lin as in forest, but the word-sign lin means forest, and li-mei means beautiful. This is explaining the meaning of the Chinese word-signs. And I would not use the vague term characters. Character can mean a lot of things. Chinese signs are signs for a whole word, so word-sign would be the clearest designation. Often these word signs are compound signs for single words which taken as a whole express a new meaning.

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  • Re: "Chinese signs are signs for a whole word": That's a common misconception (not least among the Chinese themselves). Most linguists now agree that the great majority of words actually have two syllables in both Mandarin and Cantonese (not sure about other Chinese languages), whereas almost every character represents only one syllable. But even if that were not the case, I don't see how you could suggest that "the clearest designation" would be an ad hoc coinage that no one uses or recognizes, as opposed to the familiar "character" that is widely used with this exact sense.
    – ruakh
    Commented Jul 16, 2015 at 7:08
  • When I use the term word sign this implies I speak of the writing system and not of the pronunciation of the words. This dictionary shows that most signs are compound signs. mdbg.net/chindict/… - There are signs for sounds, syllables, and words. These are no ad hoc terms, but simple, systematic terms, and characters, glyphs, ideograms are either vague or complicated.
    – rogermue
    Commented Jul 16, 2015 at 7:49
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This is not transliteration, and I would not use the word spelling to describe this. Do you just want to tell people how it works, or are you trying to do some kind of translation?

Here is a general explanation: Chinese writing uses characters, instead of letters, to write names. People will tell you how to write their names by giving other common compounds that use the same characters. For example Lin as in forest ...

You can't just use a single verb to get this across, you need to use a phrase, such as "tell ... how to", "explain how to", "describe ... by", etc.

later note

This is also the way that the pronunciation of a particular character is described. An example of this is in the English translation of the novel Rose, Rose I love you, by Wang Chen-ho:

While introducing Dr. Yun as the next speaker, he wrote the surname on the blackboard, saying that contrary to what anyone might think, it was not pronounced hui, as in a dirty face, or hun, as in the word for low-down bastard, but yun, as in pregnant, with child. The congregation laughed at this little joke.

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The word is likely transliteration, which is defined as "the conversion of a text from one script to another."

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    I think not. The original ideograms may represent a variety of phonological entities in diffferent dialects, including those transliterated as 'lin', 'li' and mei; but none of those entities is forest or beautiful, which are translations of the entities into English words, which in turn are represented with the Roman alphabet according to the orthographic conventions of English.
    – StoneyB on hiatus
    Commented Jul 16, 2015 at 2:04
  • You're right. I completely misunderstood the question and took the OP to mean he was explaining how to spell a Chinese name in English.
    – Jake Regier
    Commented Jul 16, 2015 at 2:23

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