What can we tell from the evolution of Han Chinese names? | Hacker News Reader

What can we tell from the evolution of Han Chinese names?

kontinentalist.com

125 pointscossatot46 comments

My great...great great grandparents decided that the second character in the names of all sons and daughters follow a chinese poem so that when the extended family meets, just by our names alone, we would know which generation we were from. I only found out recenty. It’s now around the 18 character of the poem. My parents skipped a character in the poem for me because it was too difficult for them to find a meaningful name with the character. My name means to stay humble forever

You mean they decided that 18-ish generations ago? And how long is the poem?

Edit: changed 28 to 18 because of the typo explained below.

Yes, my great great great grandfather was the one who traced most of our extended family members, but i think it is very much incomplete today. The poem has 40 characters in total and females may have some exceptions as well, like they can get their second character from a different set of characters other than the poem.

Impressive.

sorry i had a typo it is 18 character only, not 28

I don't know if it's a poem but my ancestors from Hainan island passed down this list of words to use for each generation. So all the men in m family have names following this order.

FamilyName WordFromList RealName

and people address us as WordFromListRealName.

Apparently, this list is also shared with other Hainanese descendants that share the Heng family name (maybe we have a shared lineage?) because my relatives have a habit of looking in the obituaries for fellow dead Hengs and to see how far along the list they've come.

I don't intend to follow this tradition.

Yes that is the format. Sometimes, there can be two character names. I only know that my grandparents are from shanghai, but I cannot speak shanghainese. I am learning from my dad and aunts because the intonation is more difficult for me as compared to speaking chinese or cantonese.

You might be interested in Tatoeba's collection of Shanghainese audio recordings: https://tatoeba.org/eng/audio/index/wuu

That common character is called a generation name, as it is shared among the same generation in a family. This practice is seen much less commonly in recent times. For example, none of my friends bear a name in this format.

However, sometimes while siblings share a common character in their name, it may not a generation name. Some parents like to name their children this way, though in such case, the common character may appears in any position of the given name. So it's kinda hard to tell whether it's a generation name thing just by the name, without consulting the name bearer themselves or their parents.

Interesting enough, my family uses the (less common) format of <FamilyName><RealName><WordFromList>.

My mom's family follows this convention.

"we would know which generation we were from." - did you find it useful for that? Or is it just a uniting narrative

I belong to Shi Lang’s clan and, traditionally, my clan has the second character following a poem bestowed by Emperor Kangxi for the recovery of Taiwan. It’s really cool when I bump into random Shi people, even some from Malaysia, and we can tell who is senior (generation-wise), by comparing our second character. :P

Also, in case anybody is curious, this system is called 昭穆.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_name

Wow. That's beautiful. Have you found that your extended family generally follows the rule, or do some folks break it based on whether they immigrate to, say, western countries?

thank u, it is interesting to me. My cousins born in 1990-2000 still follow the convention, but i am not sure about their kids. Most of them speak english so i am sure they use their english names more often

In China, usually you could tell a person’s age by reading the names. However, the exception would be if the family’s ancestors were literate thus made a genealogy book, where the book will tell you which character could be used for the first character of a given name for the next few hundred years of the descendants; plus the descendants was able to protect a from the political movements in 1960s. My family’s genealogical book was mandated to be destroyed in the 1960s, hence I won’t able to tell my grandchildren which character was selected for his kids as my grandparents wasn’t able to recall the remaining.

The article could be way more interesting if it cross referenced names of Taiwan vs Mainland China. Names of newborns in China after 2000s are heavily influenced by TV shows, novels by Chiung Yao etc. (from Taiwan), due to parents love watching those TV shows, and a lot of them cannot remember the remaining of the genealogy book. Names heavily used by people born in Taiwan in 1980s, gains popularity in 2000s - 2010s in Mainland China.

Had no idea they tried getting rid of it in the 60s, but that I guess explains why I was told it was hidden when I asked to see it.

In my family I think the second character is a generational name, from a poem or something selected way long ago and the third character is chosen by the recorder from a pool recycled for evey generation.

Also fun, as a 1.5g banana without too many connections back home, my parents also worry a bit about how I'll get my kids entered should that ever come to pass after they are gone.

I would suggest getting in touch with a local chapter of your clan association (宗親會).

To those who are not Chinese: yes, “clan association” is a thing among the Chinese, especially among clans who are likely to have expats - e.g. clans from coastal provinces like Shanghai, Guangdong, Fujian. My Shi clan has chapters in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Philippines, and probably at least a few major cities on the West Coast of the US.

I'm a Deng, and don't think we have that though it's been suggested that I have the dubious honor of having been inscribed in the same book as mr Xiaoping.

Whether that's actually true or not IDK but there's also the double irony of my parents almost having been killed in 89 but for a last minute decision to stay with the local movement. For a triple dose, one of them is a Trump/Bannon/Guo paleocon now, the other a mildy liberal pro XJP nationalist - and then there's me, the Hayeck/Nozick/Cato reading classical Liberal. Real fun.

Rejoice there is better now ! I was educated as an atheist democrat liberal in the French Republic and decided to migrate to China and make children there !

It goes both ways, there's bound to be an increased inbound migration to China from other philosophies and it's not obvious we won't end up contaminating them a bit too !

Deng is a pretty big family name with many clans. Does your father or grand father still know the name of their Hall (堂號)?

Alternatively, if you know a fragment of the poem, you can DuckDuckGo it and see.

With some luck, people have been posting books that they find online in a rather scattershot manner on forums and blogs, usually surname and location. What is digitized may not represent the majority, but I was able to find a match on my grandmother's family poem by searching for her character, her father's, and her grandfather's.

> My family’s genealogical book was mandated to be destroyed in the 1960s, hence I won’t able to tell my grandchildren which character was selected for his kids as my grandparents wasn’t able to recall the remaining.

That sucks to hear. Don’t lose hope though. Does your family still remember which exact clan you belong to? There might have been expat members or ones who fled to Taiwan/HK/Macau and have a copy of the book.

Wow, makes my family's naming convention of "rulers and biblical figures admired by the Ulster Scots and/or Presbyterian Church" seem rather dull. Far too many Roberts, Williams and Davids in the family tree, gets confusing when you're trying to figure out which Robert it was who drowned rowing a load of bricks across the lough.

A few more "Forthright dragon"s would really have livened it up.

At least you still have that good Ulster Scots sense for banter.

I come from France where we have the tradition to use saints' names (mine is a very classical example) and I moved to China and got a daughter there with my local wife.

I ended up breaking all possible traditions from all families involved, by putting no Christian names but pre-christian greeks keywords for her first 2 european-sounding names, using a scientific reference for her 2-character Chinese name, and for the family name character, use my own french last name's second syllable transliterated.

I got scolded from every possible elder in all languages but I never felt so revolutionary :D (and all her names are 'normal', just 0 reference to any tradition - I didn't name her aquarium or anything :D). And at least she will have names everyone can pronounce, unlike me who still can't be named correctly by most asian language speakers grrr

> For example, the Chinese equivalent of “John Smith”—a common English name in the United States—would be 王俊杰 (wang2 jun4 jie2).

Not sure about whether or not it's really that common, but given the fact "王俊杰" means King, Handsome and Prominent individually, I'd say that name is pretty close to the up limit of what you can get from a 3-characters name.

狂帅酷炫叼霸天

> Daughters too are expected to be “excellent” (佳, jia1—with the “man” radical)

It was my understanding that 人 was “man” as in “person” (gender neutral) and not “man” as in male.

Is the author wrong or have I been applying modern PC standards to my language study?

The article explains it perfectly: Understandably, male names still do not spot the “woman” radical (女, nü). 女 explicitly refers to women, whereas the “man” radical (亻, ren2) is more flexible, as it refers to humans.

This is also consistent with my understanding. On a cultural note, many ppl call Westerners with PC leanings “白左” and view the PC movement as a bit ridiculous. So definitely don’t apply modern PC standards to China.

I feel like the lines I quoted goes against the lines you quoted.

Maybe I am misreading the authors intent.

人 refers to man only in the sense of mankind. It is usually translated as person, like 中國人 (Chinese person). The character for specifically male people is 男 as in 男人 (guy).

> On a cultural note, many ppl call Westerners with PC leanings “白左” and view the PC movement as a bit ridiculous.

Putting aside whether "westerners with PC leanings" are "ridiculous" or not, it's hardly surprising that a country ruled by the CCP would have isolationist tendencies against international leftist movements that do not align with their own national interests. This power grab over language and definition is pretty evident in any "socialist" one party state that has existed.

“Westerners with PC leanings” are considered ridiculous by most every culture in the world. If there is any ideology that has a “power grab over language and definition” it is the modern, Western left.

I was very consciously not trying to have this discussion based on how I phrased my comment, so could you please raise the bar a little?

You are right, 人 (or radical 亻) is a gender neutral term means "Person/People". You can add gender ahead of it to be more specific, for example, Man means 男人 (Male Person), and Woman means 女人 (Female Person). As far as I can tell, there is no default gender for 人.

Learn more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_9

I don't know if the combination (亻+圭) makes it gender specific, but as far as I know, many males also has 佳 in their names. I'd say the character is neutral, as long as the name is not 佳佳 which sounded too cute to be a male.

On the other hand, 蕊 is not gender neutral, because you don't call a man Flower and it's a different "Rui" from the one in my name.

> 14,872 Chinese characters.

aren't those words from an English point of view?

Not necessarily! One Chinese character = one English syllable, but just like in English, many (most?) Chinese¹ words have more than one syllable. The article itself mentions that most names are two syllables, for instance. Or here’s another example with six characters/syllables but four words:

    你 叫   什么   名字？
    Nǐ jiào shénme míngzi?

_____________

¹ I really shouldn’t be talking about ‘Chinese’ like this in a unified way, as the differences between Chinese languages are comparable to those between, say, English and German; however in this particular case, it’s fine to do so, since my specific comments here are applicable to all Chinese languages I’m aware of.

Sort of. A lot of Chinese words involve multiple Chinese characters (2 or 3 is common), and they aren’t completely semantic in their use.

Technically each character is a morpheme, not just a syllable—-a syllable is a unit of sound but a morpheme carries some meaning along with the sound. And in Mandarin, many words consist of two or more morphemes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morpheme

Syllables and morphemes are not the same! In Chinese languages, all (or nearly all) morphemes are syllables, but not all syllables are morphemes. From Li and Thompson’s Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar:

> The relatedness between the meaning of a compound [i.e. bisyllabic word] and those of its components can vary from close to nonexistent … For example, qūzú ‘to chase’ is composed of two morphemes from Classical Chinese … neither of which exists any longer as a morpheme in modern Mandarin.

That is, in many cases, the syllables of disyllabic Mandarin words are no longer synchronically analysable as morphemes, though at one point in the past it was possible to analyse them in this way. In this particular case, neither the character for qū nor the character for zú represents a morpheme, at least when used in this context.

That's right, more properly stated, each character represents a morpheme in Classical Chinese, with a few exceptions for bimorphemic words like 蝴蝶 which are probably of foreign origin.

There are also a few modern characters in informal use which indicate multiple syllables/morphemes like 圕 for "túshūguǎn".

> aren't those words from an English point of view?

No, many words are multiple characters. I think this is a pretty good explanation of the structure for English speakers: https://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm

The closest thing they'd be in English would be a Latin root. Some Chinese words are a single character, but most are multi-character, and like Latin roots, characters have a "meaning" associated with the set of words in which they appear. For example, the character anciently used for lightning now appears in many words associated with electricity, such as phones, TVs, electric subway trains, computers, and so on, as well as seemingly unrelated words (like "movie") which actually have a historical etymological relationship to electricity (the projectors).

I love watching wuxia films and the many ways they name the characters. Wonderful.

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