Amaya as a Chinese name seal: 亚玛

Amaya is written 亚玛 in Mandarin (yà mǎ) — one character for the surname 亚 and one for the given name. The characters are chosen to carry the sound and the sense of Amaya rather than to transliterate it letter by letter, which is how Chinese names are actually made. On this page the seal is carved in the Zhongshan King (中山王) bronze-inscription seal script, with the Academia Sinica Chongxi Small Seal (崇羲篆體) filling any character the main font lacks.

亚玛 breaks down as 亚 (yà) — Second, next after — and in old texts, a land beyond the reach, Asia itself taking the word; 玛 (mǎ) — Agate, a fine stone — beauty and durability, with light caught inside it and never let go. The seal note we would put under it: Two-character seal: the second of the line, and a stone you can carry.

Pinyin: yà mǎ — 亚 is tone 4 (a sharp fall, like a full stop); 玛 is tone 3 (a dip down and back up). Mandarin has four tones plus a neutral tone, and getting them wrong is the most common mistake Western speakers make with Chinese names — the seal itself is unaffected, since the carving is of the written form.

Because names in Chinese are chosen, not inherited by sound. 玛 (mǎ) reads agate, a fine stone — beauty and durability, with light caught inside it and never let go — and its own history runs: 马 the horse supplies the sound — and the method: jade-like stone, and this stone’s road rode in from the western regions on horseback. 玛 is the agate that came by camel, wearing the 玉 radical like a passport.

3 other names on this site carry at least one of the same characters — 艾玛 for Emma, 诺亚 for Noah, 玛迪 for Mateo. Chinese names combine a family name with one or two given-name characters, so a single character can carry a hundred different people; the character page above lists every name that uses it.

Amaya is one of those modern names with no settled ancestry: it is used in Spain and the Basque country, it is also a toponym, and etymologists disagree about whether the root is Basque or a medieval variant of an ‘I am.’ What is clear is what it does to a name — short, open, two bright syllables that work in almost any language. The Chinese pair leans on the reading of it as ‘beloved’: 亚, the second and the other — the next and no less — and 玛, agate, a stone with light caught inside it. The full account — the etymology, the bearers, and why this site renders it as 亚玛 — is in the section above.