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oh, warcraft xD
They actually confused liondogs and the qilin (probably on purpose, because they like to be "unique". Like when they named the Manticore mount "wyvern".)
The genuine quilin is a horned aquatic creature covered in fishscales. It's also featured in WoW, but they named it the Windsteed! lol.
anyways!
I researched the heck out of the "Jiao people", and it wasn't made easier by the fact that old Chinese words are often confused because they're all pronounced the same way and just written with different radicals.
(and in olden times, most of the populace could not read or write, even upping the confusion.)
I'm 99% sure the correct term is "鲛人" (meaning fish or shark people), and not "蛟人" (coming from the term 蛟, which is a certain kind of water/flood dragon. Note also that the wikipedia article exists only in English, not in the chinese version, which explains what a 蛟 is, but does not even mention the existence of 蛟人.
The word itself is pronounced the same.)
Trying to find more about them apart from the few sentences of the ancient sources (none of which, sadly, feature a depiction- everything I came across was fan-made of recent), one finds mostly modern interpretations influenced by western stories, and (chinese) question-answer boards, which give the impression the story, while very old, is not widely known (which wouldn't be surprising if the described sea-people were divers, as those would only ever be seen near the sea.)
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Or you could look it up in a Chinese dictionary. Curiosity is getting the better of me, I asked my friend in Singapore over fb. She's a true Chinese girl like with beliefs and can speak all of the Chinese dialects there, unlike me who grew up in Australia! I'll post her answer when I receive it.
I was thinking of using my Chinese name as my mermaid name. It means Beautiful Cloud in English. My Grandpa named me so don't ask me why I have that name!
But I found most Westerners can't say it properly and pronounce it as, Lie Yin or Lying, when its phonetic Lee Yin and spelt as Li Yin.
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that's a beautiful name!
I totally would have taken my chinese name as a performer name if it weren't for the pronunciation issues.
Every dialect has its own pronunciation, so not even your name would be the same (and it's worse when, for example, Cantonese "translate" a western name into their dialect, and then you read it out in mandarin and go "what's that supposed to mean?!!" until you realize you have to pronounce it in Cantonese :p ).
I have several big older chinese dictionaries, none of which have any jiao people.
They have 蛟 dragon and 鲛 shark. That's it.
Maybe an even bigger dictionary yields more results (there are also tons of dictionaries online, but one can't know with them how traditional they are.)
My best bet would be something from a really old, big book.
The newer sources will all have stuff in them that's become a thing only recently.
