beautiful jade

My friend, Leo, helped us (via e-mail) with some translation in a few of our documents.

Meaning of her Chinese Name

“Chen Jin Lin”

Family name: 'Chen' is the abbreviation

of the city name where she was born 'Chenzhou' 

Given name: 'Jin' means 'brocade' as a noun, and 'beautiful' as a adjective. 'Lin' is a kind of jade. We have different words to describe different jade. So to answer your question regarding the spelling of her Chinese name, both 'Jinlin' and 'Jin Lin' are OK, for Chinese we can tell immediately it is a spelling from Chinese. 

* In English, the word "jade" does not really carry any significant meaning. But when one looks at the meaning of the word in Chinese, then it is here that we can see the beginnings of just how important jade is to the Chinese culture. The word for jade in the Mandarin Chinese language is yu. "The character for jade resembles a capital I with a line across the middle: the top represents the heavens, the bottom the earth, and the center section, mankind" (Jade p.1). In Chinese, the word yu is used to call something precious, just as in English one may use gold or silver.

* The Chinese used and still use many jade-related names for their children, such as Yü (jade) or Bao-Yü (precious jade), Lin (beautiful jade), Lin-Yao (beautiful jade treasure), Ling (tinkling of pieces of jade)... The upper part of this symbol (character) means the sky, its lower part the earth, its central part man in-between the two.