1. A South African friend of mine has leased out his house for a year to tenants who only speak and read Afrikaans. I'm hoping they might forward a letter to him for me. How would I write "Please forward this letter to Mr X" in Afrikaans?
2a. My fiancé has suggested we give any daughter we might have 'Beryl' as a middle name, because it's the name of both my paternal grandmother and his maternal grandmother. I'm not keen on this, partly because I can't shake the old lady associations of Beryl, and partly because my mother's Chinese, and I'd like to give any daughters of mine a Chinese middle name. I'm musing that a good compromise could be to translate 'beryl' (or emerald or suchlike) into Chinese.
My dictionary gives me the literal translation "green precious stone" (绿宝石), which is presumably inappropriate (though would cutting it down to 绿石 be viable?), and poking about in online dictionaries has yielded 翡翠 , which appears to refer to jade rather than beryl and for which the hanyu pinyin is "fěicuì" (actually pronounced something like "fay tsway", but likely to curse any hypothetical daughter living in an English-speaking country with a lifetime of mispronunciation and spelling things out).
Does anyone know of any other words in Chinese which definitely refer to beryl/emeralds as opposed to jade which would be appropriate for use in a girl's name? Could I perhaps combine 翡 with something else?
2b. My mother's family aren't Mandarin speakers, they speak Hokkien, known in China as 闽南话 . This being the case, I could use a romanised Hokkien reading of the characters for my hypothetical daughter's middle name instead of using hanyu pinyin. Does anyone know how 绿石, 翡翠 and any other characters which mean beryl or emerald would sound in Hokkien?
