The Sword and Laser discussion

I was doing some digging for another thread and came across an interesting tid-bit: Li means "rites" or "rules of conduct" and Kao means "high" or "tall", so Master Li's name could be taken to mean "high rules of conduct", which is both an antithesis to his origins and actions and fitting for his moral motivations and conclusions.

Lu Yu the Classics of Tea author lived 100 years after the story setting, but it does clarify what accents were used on the name. Lu was a provience/state under the Song Dynasty and can be taken to mean "provincial" and Yu the Great was the founder of the Xia Dynasty known for his upright moral character. If this is the combination for Number Ten Ox, then it's less ironic, but we see how quickly he falls down that slippery slope all in the effort of a good cause.

Does anyone else have a different take on these names or some of the other Chinese names in the book?

Unless I missed something (or my edition is), we don't know which ideograms are used to write the names, so dozens and dozens of homonyms are possible.

Using this online transliteration/translation tool, for example, there are a few dozen different ideograms for "li" and about a dozen for "kao" (and it only does Pinyin romanizations--how many more would we get from Wade-Giles). My favourite combination for "li" and "kao" is "tortured logic".

There are only two surnames that use the sound Li (disregarding tone). A very common one (think of Smith but more common) meaning pear (which also happened to be the Imperial surname for the dynasty the book is set in), and a fairly rare one meaning dark or twilight. Both of these have different tones.

The most common given name for kao (gao in pinyin romanization) is tall. Which is most ironic since he is not tall at all. It could also mean cake, accuse or any number of things, but these are not the types of names a scholarly family would give an young man (given names for men were given at the capping ceremony, a kind of coming of age ceremony, during this time, which was held at about 12 if I remember correctly).