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Comment by happy_pancake | Hacker News Reader

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

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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

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

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

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

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