Thi

The name Thi comes to Poland from Vietnamese, and its short meaning is poetry, a poem, a line of verse. That meaning is not decorative. In Vietnamese, thi traces to the Sino-Vietnamese word written 詩, the same character that names classical poetry across East Asia, from the ancient Chinese anthology called the Shijing to the verse composed at royal examinations.

There is a second thi in Vietnamese, a homophone meaning an examination, and the two once met in real life. Scholars sat exams that required them to write poems. So a single sound held both the test and the art it tested.

In Poland, Thi belongs mostly to families with Vietnamese roots, one of the country's larger immigrant communities. A teacher reading a class register in Warsaw may find it among the surnames she knows and the ones she is still learning. The name has no Polish name-day, no diminutive worn smooth by generations here. It arrives whole. What a child named Thi carries is a plain word for verse, kept in a second alphabet and spelled with four Latin letters on a Polish form.