The Existence Of Chinese Sound Symbolism Of Nasal Finals In Real Estate Brand Names And Its Correlation With Product Attributes

The growing number of new real estate brands being introduced to the marketplace suggests a heightened need for marketers as well as linguists to understand how to create effective new brand names. Limited domestic academic research, however, has been conducted in this area.The author has categorized real estate products into three groups according to the attribute qualities they conveyed: the good residential environment type, the modern type and the high position identification type. And then, by using a series of questionnaires, this paper attempts to aid the Chinese real estate brand naming process and brand names' translation by demonstrating the link between brand nasal finals and product attributes.According to the results of a pretest, three hypotheses have been proposed. And then, the hypotheses were tested by a following series of questionnaires. The result of the test shows that in brand naming, the subjects' nasal finals preference varies depending on the attributes of the real estate products as follows: "in" is most favored for the good residential environment and modern type; "uan "is fairly favored for the good residential environment type; "iang" is fairly suggestive in conveying the attribute quality of modern for real estate products; "eng" and"un" are proved to be most suggestive in transferring the meanings of status, honor and worship in real estate brand names.However, the hypotheses got only partial or mixed support. And one possible explanation is due to the fact that as belonging to pictographic writing system and sound writing system respectively, Chinese and English differ a lot in brand naming: the words with phonemes conveying the desirable product-related information are favored for English brand names; while Chinese brand names favor the Chinese characters which can transfer the desirable attribute qualities from semantic aspect.Although with limitations in practice, the results of this paper do contributes. That is to say, when the semantic meanings of potential Chinese characters are similar, certain nasal finals which are proved to be significantly preferred in corresponding attributes in this paper could be used as an effective supplementary strategy in Chinese real estate brand naming or brand names' translation process.