> 14,872 Chinese characters.
aren't those words from an English point of view?
What can we tell from the evolution of Han Chinese names?
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Re: What can we tell from the evolution of Han Chinese names?
#22> 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 standar…
I feel like the lines I quoted goes against the lines you quoted.
Maybe I am misreading the authors intent.
Re: What can we tell from the evolution of Han Chinese names?
#23My 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 meaningfu…
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?
Re: What can we tell from the evolution of Han Chinese names?
#24> 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.
Re: What can we tell from the evolution of Han Chinese names?
#25> 14,872 Chinese characters. aren't those words from an English point of view?
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.
Re: What can we tell from the evolution of Han Chinese names?
#26My 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 meaningfu…
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
Re: What can we tell from the evolution of Han Chinese names?
#27> 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
Re: What can we tell from the evolution of Han Chinese names?
#28> 14,872 Chinese characters. aren't those words from an English point of view?
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.
Re: What can we tell from the evolution of Han Chinese names?
#29Wow, 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.
Re: What can we tell from the evolution of Han Chinese names?
#30My 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 meaningfu…
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.