“The Irrelevant Yuan” was an op-ed at the Wall Street Journal yesterday. If you must say I (Jer-Yuan Tsai, 蔡哲元) am irrelevant, then how can you say Yuan Tseh Lee (李遠哲) is irrelevant; we both have a “Yuan” in our name. His “Yuan” is 遠, and mine 元. We actually have the same 哲 in our name, although his is spelled as Tseh, and mine Jer.
I trust you know Yuan Tseh Lee (李遠哲) shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Dudley Herschback in 1986. The take home message is that one cannot guess the correct Chinese characters by reading the English names, not even an educated guess.
Yuan (元) is the unit of dollar; I have one dollar (我有一元). As the unit of money, Yuan (元) may not be glamorous, but it also means ‘primary’ or ‘first’, such as 元首 (head of state). Yuan Dynasty (元朝) is the Empire of Great Khan—Kublai Khan and Genghis Khan.
In the States ‘Dollar’ (美元) is used to mean “US dollar” and Yuan (元) Chinese dollar, thus “The Irrelevant Yuan (元)”.
Jer or Tseh (哲) means ‘sage’ ‘wise guy’ rightly so :- ), 哲學 means philosophy.
Janice’s Chinese name is 嘉珍; she recently was surprised to learn that 嘉 means ‘commend, praise, compliment, fine, beautiful, etc’, all the good things for she was always led to believe that she was named after 嘉義, the place Katy and I used to live. 珍 means pearl or treasure. (my hand written note shows the original 珍 and 元 thousand years ago).
Jo is 嘉玲, and Joy 嘉倫.
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