Calla in Chinese: 卡拉

Calla is written 卡拉 in Mandarin (kǎ lā) — one character for the surname 卡 and one for the given name. The characters are chosen to carry the sound and the sense of Calla 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.

卡拉 breaks down as 卡 (kǎ) — A checkpoint, a wedge; the one place where everything must stop and show itself; 拉 (lā) — To draw, to pull toward — the hand's word. The seal note we would put under it: Two-character seal: the narrow gate — the trumpet lily that stops the eye.

Pinyin: kǎ lā — 卡 is tone 3 (a dip down and back up); 拉 is tone 1 (a flat, level pitch held high). 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. 拉 (lā) reads to draw, to pull toward — the hand's word — and its own history runs: Not an old word at all, and the site’s only one of its kind: it was coined in the 1950s from 立 (to stand) and 扌 (the hand) for the physical act of tugging. Which makes it an unusually honest character — it means exactly what a hand does to a rope, and it borrowed the standing radical to do it.

22 other names on this site carry at least one of the same characters — 艾拉 for Ella, 芙拉 for Fara, 卡特 for Carter, 卡西 for Casey, 拉维 for Ravi, 莉拉 for Lira, 洛拉 for Lola, 玛拉 for Mara, and more. 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.

Calla carries the sense Beautiful (Greek kallos); the lily. The Chinese name 卡拉 answers it with 卡 (A checkpoint, a wedge; the one place where everything must stop and show itself) and 拉 (To draw, to pull toward) — chosen for sound and sense together, the way a Chinese parent chooses a name rather than the way a wire service transliterates one. The full account — the etymology, the bearers, and why this site renders it as 卡拉 — is in the section above.