说国学——中国名字的由来

说国学主题——中国人的取名之道

1.Is there any Chinese names that you like? Or any of you has a Chinese name? How you choose Chinese names?

There are a lot of things influence Chinese people choose their names, even choose the country’s name or the dynasty name or the street name. We care about surname and also we care about the family name.

Let us first talk about how our family name come from. China is the only country which inherit a relatively complete family name, we have a long history, you know, like over 5000 years. And many family names were inherited despite the war and the revolution. You know, In Japan, they use Japan Chronology, which means one “tenno, mikado” the empire of Japan, will represent one year, in the Meiji year, “ Meiji year is come from China’s change of the world, which means the empire face to the south and manager the country with bright.” in meiji year, that the mikado said we need to have more family names, at that time Japan only have given names, so a lot of Japan people choose the location of they live as their family name , like”Murakami Haruki”

Chinese people in the ancient times first choose family names with “women”as a part of their family name, because at that time we are a matriarchy society, you can see that Chinese language is hieroglyph language, which means the words are just like the represent stuff, like my family name “姜’or the zhou dynasty “姬”，like the first empire in Qing Dynasty “嬴”you can also see our family name word”姓“，which means “gir”。

And we are not only have family names, we also have “style name”, we believe call a person’s name is in polite so we prefer to call peoples’ style name, Korea and Janpan had learned the similar things from us, they call differently when they met friends or elder people, a style name is what our family give us to want us live like that. Like “Yue fei”style name is “pengju” which means spread wings and fly away”. Confucius’s father’s family name is not “ kong”, his father’s style name is “孔文“，so Kong zi inherited the style name as the family name. However style name were disappear I think in the republic of China.

Also family names comes from the ancient times officers title, like “上官，司空，司马，司徒”and so on

There once was a couplet which is really interesting”水部失火，金司空大兴土木”，;南人北相，中书君什么东西“which I can not translate, you have to feel. Sorry.

And we just talked about some family names, but normally we do not choose our family name, they are almost be given by the parents, sometime the writer choose the writing names, like “老舍”or like “金庸”now let’s talk about the given names we are choosing.

Normally we will have two ,three or four words names, according to the law, we can not use the word we created, except 武曌and we can not have more than 5 words name. So normally we have two or three words in our names. How people choose words in their names? First consideration in the ancient times is “ranks in the family.” you can see from Japan, you ranks first called”Yamado tora” which means the first born in Yamado family. You can also see Confucius whose style name is “仲尼”，which means also the second in the family. At first” we use “伯仲叔季”to rank the first four kids, their name should have the below letters to show their ranking. But when the kids getting more, and the kids become parents too, they have to avoid use those letters, because they are the same