If you grew up speaking English, when you look at Guge, you probably think it rhymes with huge, making it sound like googe. For a Chinese speaker, "Guge" sounds approximately like goo-geh. Try saying Google without the 'L' sound, and that's kinda what it sounds like. It's not that the Chinese don't have the 'L' sound, but while 'goo-geh-le' is definitely possible, it changes Google, a 2 syllable name into a 3 syllable one in Mandarin Chinese. I'm curious to see what the Chinese characters for 'guge' are. 'gege' is 'big brother' in Chinese, so I'm sure there will be a couple of puns generated from the guge/gege similarity.
BEIJING (AFX) - Google said it has adopted the Chinese-language brand name 'GUGE' for its Chinese operations.
At a conference in Beijing, company chief executive Eric Schmidt said the new name demonstrated Google's commitment to China.
In China, there's a movement against foreign words coming into the language. The word 'e-mail' is one of the worst offenders: properly, it should be: dyan yi feng syin, a 4 character word which is just too long, so everyone just uses the english word "e-mail".
"guge" with different tones can also mean "skeleton".
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