Talk:Leong

Etymology of Tagalog Leong

@Justinrleung, For this one, I found some facebook profiles of people through what facebook knows of my network of fil-chi fb friends(which usually gives me a lot of results of teen university students or recent graduates from here in the top universities of metro manila). Those specifically from the Philippines that have set an optional chinese name, I found these two profiles with 龙 and 梁 listed as their chinese name: Christian Adam Leong Espiritu (龙爱德) and Kyle Liong (梁愷). They seem to be young fil-chi university students or recent graduates from UP and ADMU. Most fil-chi profile results usually render their romanized family name as "Leong", with the one or two people spelling it as "Liong" or "Leung". In my university at ADMU, we have a building we call "Leong hall" (Ricardo & Dr Rosita Leong Hall) where some faculty offices are located, like the chinese dept, korean dept, and japanese dept, etc. The chinese department in ADMU is called the "Ricardo Leong Center for Chinese Studies". For some reason, my college english teacher a fews years ago even mistook my family name as Leong, since my second name and middle initial was "Leon G." lol hahaha, but in general, Leong isn't that frequent of a fil-chi family name to hear, I'd say it's probably just a mid frequent kind of surname. Cantonese family names, like Leung or Chan, these days in the Philippines are usually from fil-chi families that emigrated to the Philippines from Hong Kong during 50s-80s, despite being originally from Fujian before that (since they were economic migrants jumping from fujian to hk to ph where they might've had some family connections), because their government records in hk that passed their names to the philippines transcribed it in how they heard it pronounced in Cantonese. I think around 90s to modern times, recent fil-chi immigrants (basically mainlanders and their 1st/2nd gen children recently raised as gen Z), now recorded their names in the romanization of the character in Mandarin. This past weekend since it's nearing All-Saint's Day/ Halloween, I recently got to visit the Manila Chinese cemetery and decided to take a load of pictures of grave tablets since many of them had both their latin and chinese names written, along with the original city and village their family was from within either Quanzhou, Xiamen, or Zhangzhou. The trouble with some of them. Those who immigrated in during American colonial times around 1900s-1940s (especially those escaping ww2) during when the Chinese Exclusion Act was in effect in the US and also in effect in the Philippines under the US, many mostly took the family names of older late 1800s fil-chi families they had connections or relatives with or paid off government officials to sell them generic hispanic filipino surnames, so many families (usually the elder generations these days) have non-matching romanized chinese surnames with the original chinese characters in their chinese family names, because many of them were simply "adopted" into another chinese-filipino family or bought a hispanic/filipino name. This is my source of some of the other recent edits I've been doing these couple of days, from pictures of gravestones I took. I must say though lol, there were so many people there with the same old common family names or latin surnames that didnt match their chinese surname, or only one name either a young to middle-aged person with just a latin name, or an elderly person with an entirely chinese gravestone with all the traditional stuff written. There were also some people with unique rare family names (like Juo? Luo? from other provinces like Shanghai, probably? but the chinese character sounded more like To'?), or names I couldn't read the script, so I didn't add them here anymore since they didn't seem common enough that I've heard of from any past filchi schoolmates or others I've met. Otherwise, facebook's recent trend with some young filchi teens displaying their chinese name too seems to do well with source. Also, there seems to also be a few rare handful teochew or hakka family names somewhere, but I haven't specifically pinpointed them yet.--Mlgc1998 (talk) 00:52, 29 October 2019 (UTC)

@Mlgc1998: (The discussion should probably be at WT:ES#Leong instead of here.) My issue with the etymology isn't if it's from 梁. I'm questioning whether it's from Hokkien. Being a Fil-Chi last name doesn't necessarily let us know whether it's from Hokkien. Also, the Facebook profile you pointed me to spells it as Liong, which is not proof for Leong = 梁. Leong or Liong are usually Cantonese/Hakka in origin if they're from 梁. — justin(r)leung _{{ (t...) | c=› }} 02:07, 29 October 2019 (UTC)

@Justinrleung: Does 梁 never use the literary hokkien liông/liâng as a family name? There's this guy, who uses Niu (梁): Justin Mitchel Niu 梁宏伟, but Niu doesn't sound very common around here, besides this guy. Could be either of them three, Cantonese, Hakka, or Hokkien, especially if their family were also from the batch that came in through hk with british overseas passports like my dad.--Mlgc1998 (talk) 02:27, 29 October 2019 (UTC)

@Mlgc1998: In other Hokkien regions, it's always Niû or Niô͘ and never read as the literary Liông or Liâng, like Singaporean actor/director Jack Neo. Leong is most likely Cantonese (maybe Hakka but not sure). — justin(r)leung _{{ (t...) | c=› }} 02:33, 29 October 2019 (UTC)