User:Gniw/About

This is the user page of Gniw. For the simiarly-pronounced operating system that Gniw uses, see GNU.

Wing (IPA: [wɪŋ]; Hebrew transliteration: וינג [but more likely written ווינג in Modern Hebrew], in Persian letters: وینگ) is an English transliteration of part of my Chinese name. Reading the Hebrew or Persian transliteration letter-by-letter from left to right and transliterating back to English gives Gniw, which is pronounced /gnju:/ because the English letter “W” is a “double U”.

The Chinese language was originally written right-to-left, just like Hebrew and Persian; and as recently as 30 years ago, some old people still could not understand Chinese written left-to-right, and the virtual non-existence of left-to-right Chinese can easily be felt if you visit, for example, the Hong Kong Museum of History.

It is not possible to determine the original Chinese character from this transliteration “Wing”; in fact, given only the name “Wing”, it is not even possible to determine, without additional information, whether someone with this name is male or female. This intrinsic lack of meaning of transliterations illustrate the difference between kana (alphabetic or phonetic renderings, lit. “false name(s)”) and mana (CJK ideograms; lit. “true name(s)”, more commonly known as kanji) in the Japanese classification.

I don’t know Persian, but many Persian people live close to where I live.

IRL, I am a de facto in-house graphic artist, doing mostly mixed-language (Chinese-English) typography (mostly posters and flyers, and increasingly often print ads); the actual work has virtually nothing to do with my job title.