What's in a name?

Jonah recently wrote his name much to the excitement of his mother. He did it all by himself. He ran out of space so the n, a, and h were all on top of each other. But still pretty cool. Usually when he is with me he makes me draw this or that or write this or that. But when he was with Grace he just wanted to show off how good he was I guess.

On the way to school he kept asking me what different combinations of letters were and if they possibly meant anything. Like "What does t-o-n-a-h mean?" Or "what does o-a-h mean?" That last one is really they end of Noah. But I think Jonah knows who to write Noah too, after all that is the second name that he pretty much sees all the time.

I guess your name is the first thing you really learn how to write and then you branch off from that into other words, using that as a sort of key or Rosetta stone to decipher the rest of the language. That is, if your language is one with an alphabet.

Jonah had actually written yun person (the Chinese character) and san mountain a long time ago. Because they are pictographs, in some ways Chinese is easier to pick up in the beginning. Because you are just naming things and drawing them like a cave man. But then of course it becomes incredibly hard. You could say i am biased because I am American born, but let's look at it this way. Ask someone from China to write a word for you in Chinese that is obscure. I think even a professor might have to pause at the word "fist" or I don't know some other random noun that isn't even that academic or difficult. That person could read or type that word right away I bet. But to write it, they will have to think. Is it this way or that way?

But in English it is fun to just put random letters together. "What does p-o-n mean?" Well nothing in English as far as I know, but it's still a word.

Can you do this in Chinese? I guess you can. It would be like doodling. In fact you can make up your own words I guess. But culturally this is looked down on. For instance, you ever hear that myth that Cantonese and Mandarin writing are the same written language? This idea is hammered into everyone so hard that people are probably laughing at my ignorance. Well then one day this guy wrote the word "tai" to see for me, instead of "hon" or "Kan" to see. It is an eye (mu) next to a little brother (dai) And even an illiterate like me can see that the sound dai and the meaning eye means to see and sounds like dai so it must mean tai. The guy was educated and was commenting on how my copy of the Three Kingdoms with English on one side and Chinese on the other was in "real" Chinese instead of a book written in "Cantonese" which is no good and isn't worth learning because it is only a dialect or a slang language.

But this was the first time I had ever heard that an entire book could be written in a "Slang" language. What Americans would call vernacular.  Anyway, Jonah can't come close to writing his name in Chinese but he wrote the Chinese Language first but in English, even though he knows the whole alphabet, it is his name that seems to be his gateway to the language in written form.