Zhang Le -- a Typical Chinese Person Name

The Name

Zhang Le is the phonic transcript of my Chinese name, which is written as (张 乐). The following is a 64X64 bitmap of my name in Chinese Song Ti font:

My name (Zhang Le) in Chinese Song Ti font

It is worth mentioning that in China people place their surname (family name) first, and "first" name last. Therefore 张/Zhang is my surname name, while 乐/Le is my "first" name. This have already caused some confusion when I communicate with English-speaking people. They call me Le Zhang or Mr. Le, which looks a bit odd to me. Some further assume that my family name is Lee, another commonly used surname in China and Korea, and call me Mr. Lee instead :-(.

The Pronunciation

The pronunciation of my name is another common problem facing many non-Chinese. Although people may have little difficulty in speaking my surname Zhang, most of them wrongly pronounce my "first" name Le as "Li" or "Lee". (BTW: Tim is the first person in CSTR who can speak my name clearly and correctly.)

Here is a sound wave I recorded myself saying "Hi, my name is Zhang Le.". The wave is sampled at 16000 Hz when recorded into computer, and can be plotted as a waveform like:

The waveform of the utterance "Hi, my name is Zhang Le."

During audio spectrum analysis, it is usually useful to look at the spectrogram:

The spectrogram of the utterance "Hi, my name is Zhang Le.". The vertical axis represents audio frequencies, the horizontal axis shows positive time toward the right, and the gray shade represent energy at the corresponding time point

And here is the sound generated by an old version of Festival Speech Synthesis System.

The Meaning

Links

• Meaning of Le