Nova as a Chinese name seal: 星雅

Nova is written 星雅 in Mandarin (xīng yǎ) — one character for the surname 星 and one for the given name. The characters are chosen to carry the sound and the sense of Nova 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.

星雅 breaks down as 星 (xīng) — Stars. The pictograph is three 日 around one 生 — a life born of the light. The astronomer’s word, and the poet’s; 雅 (yǎ) — Refined, elegant; also correct, as in 雅正. The mark of a thing made well and left plain. The seal note we would put under it: A star newly lit: the classical two-character seal for something brand-new.

Pinyin: xīng yǎ — 星 is tone 1 (a flat, level pitch held high); 雅 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. 雅 (yǎ) reads refined, elegant; also correct, as in 雅正. the mark of a thing made well and left plain — and its own history runs: First a crow — the 乌 of the left half is the black bird. How a crow became the word for refined is one of the oldest arguments in Chinese letters; the elegant answer reads it as the elegant black, the crow the court poets kept. 雅 is also the high register itself — the refined — one of the six sections of the Book of Songs.

7 other names on this site carry at least one of the same characters — 米雅 for Mia, 苏雅 for Sofia, 雅柏 for Jacob, 阿丽雅 for Aria, 莱雅 for Layla, 皮雅 for Pippa, 雅薇 for Avery. 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.

Latin nova, ‘new’, the feminine of novus — the adjective that opens so many scientific names. The Chinese answer keeps the astronomy rather than the grammar: 星 (a star) and 雅 (refined, from the same root as 雅 in elegant). The full account — the etymology, the bearers, and why this site renders it as 星雅 — is in the section above.