Life In 19x19

Although there are no hard and fast rules, I am fairly comfortable identifying the gender of Japanese players from the name. My success rate is not perfect, but good enough for me. However, when it comes to Chinese and Korean names I am totally lost. Are there any rules which will increase the chance of being correct to higher than fifty percent?

Déjà vu?

http://www.lifein19x19.com/forum/viewto ... 31#p179631

Not sure about Chinese names, but there might be similar patterns given that they're all rooted from Chinese characters.

Thanks Kirby. I will be honest and admit I had forgotten that post even though I read it when posted. but the simple fact is that I was thinking of Chinese names when I posted and added Korean only as an afterthought.

Okay.

Also, I would suspect that you can guess the gender of Japanese names partially because you have seen some examples (maybe i'm wrong).

If you learn several Chinese names, you might start to see patterns.

My suspicion, though, is that gender in Chinese names has more to do with character meaning than character sound (though, probably you can find patterns here, too).

Are there any rules which will increase the chance of being correct to higher than fifty percent?

Yes.

(1) Guess male and you'll be right probably over 95% of the time.

(2) Use the GoGoD Names Dictionary, which I think you already have (either on its own or built into SmartGo), and you'll be right about 99.9% of the time.

DrStraw wrote: However, when it comes to Chinese and Korean names I am totally lost. Are there any rules which will increase the chance of being correct to higher than fifty percent?

Chinese women's names often sound feminine when translated, for example "dream" "summer" or "beautiful" (梦，夏 & 丽）， so tossing the last one or two characters of a name (usually the first character of a name is the family name) into google translate might put your chances above 50%. Another thing to look for is the presence of certain radicals, for example 艹(grass), 女(female) or 王(jade) are common in women's names, whereas 木(tree),亻(person), and 钅(metal) show up more often in men's names.

I guess that we can first make a list of the female go players and then figure out the pattern.

I couldn't find one in English, but I'm surprised to find a Chinese blog listing 99 Chinese female professional go players in 2008: http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_532f81fd0100adfz.html

From the list I find the following characters that typically appear in female names:
with radical 艹(grass): 芳(Fang)茜(Qian)莹(Ying)菲(Fei)薇(Wei)蓉(Rong)芬(Fen)莉(Li)蕊(Rui)萍(Ping)
with radical 女(female): 妙(Miao) 娜(Na) 娴(Xian)娣(Di)媛(Yuan)婷(Ting)
with radical 王(jade): 璇(Xuan)玲(Ling)
flowers: 梅(Mei)兰(Lan)
bird: 鹃(Juan)
beauty: 艳(Yan)丽(Li)倩(Qian)
red: 红(Hong)
peaceful: 静(Jing)
poetry: 诗(Shi)
clouds:霞(Xia)云(Yun)
elegant: 雅(Ya)
clever: 颖(Ying)慧(Hui)
full: 盈(Ying)

Some pronunciations sound more likely to be feminine, such as Na, Mei and Lan. However, since in most cases multiple characters could be pronounced the same, telling from the Chinese characters is more accurate than from the Pinyin. For example, Li could be 李(surname), 力(force) (as in Gu Li), and 莉/丽 in female names.