W3bbo said:This is nothing new; you know "Windows Vista" means "Chicken" in Latvian?
Granted, they could have done more research, but name like "Bing" or "Kumo" are just contrived. They have well-recognised brands like MSN and Windows Live, they should deliver a quality product that does its job as advertised, a rose by any other name...
I'm quoting anonimously from an internal email:
"For a single-syllable word, you pretty much are guaranteed that *some* reading in Chinese will be a word with a negative connotation. Not only does Chinese employ tones (giving you 4 to 8 [depending on the dialect] possible pronunciations for what in English all map to the same spelling), the language is also rich in homophones. For example, "bing" spoken with a low tone can mean "third place", "to reject", "brilliant", or "luminous"; spoken in a falling tone, it can mean "happy", "nightmare", or "illness". Speakers of the language rely heavily on context to disambiguate the multiple meanings.
Even if you pick a "how could anybody possibly object to this?" word like "hao" (good), by mixing up the tone, and exploiting homophones, you have alternate readings which mean "to pull weeds", "to bawl", "air-raid shelter", "heroic", "to waste money" or "bright".
So a negative connotation for one reading of a single-syllable word in Chinese really doesn't mean much, IMO. You can do that with pretty much any single-syllable Chinese word."
