Wouldn’t they be even more useful there considering the lack of unique syllables and huge populations giving more opportunities for misidentification?
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it's useless and most of the time aesthetically unpleasing
They used to have two character names. Li Bai, Lu Bu, Liu Bei,...
As the population exploded, they went with three character names.
In case a surname got too popular, a subclan added 4th syllable.
So you have old Sun Wu (Sun Tzu).
Then you get middle Zhu Yuanzhang (founder of Ming).
And when things heat up, even Nguyễn Phúc Hồng Cai (Nguyen being extremely prevalent in Vietnam, the royal clan was Nguyen Phuc's; Koreans did the same with Ree/Lee/Li/... and Kim family names).
Do Korea’s Li/Lee has any connection to the Tang? I doubt many of them actually fled there after the Tang collapse
Is that map the distribution of Lees in China?
interesting
Even Japan has Li's (Fujihara, I think?).
And the pedigrees of names are largely bullshit because they weren't tracked before Song. And even then and afterwards, people could and did change names for various reasons, fake their family records.
>In Chinese the character 日 is pronounced ri 4 times. In Japanese it's pronounced 4 different ways, shita, nichi, bi, jitsu.
Japanese has native (hi), EMC (nichi), LMC (jitsu) pronunciations of characters.
Most Chinese languages have native (zeq) and literary (nyiq) readings for each, using Shanghainese as my example here.
Ashita is not a reading of any character. 明日 is "tomorrow" in Classical Chinese and when I read that as "tomorrow", I'm doing the same thing as Japanese who read it as "ashita". Zero connection to character readings, just like 今日 and the like.
They can actually read the characters, but that's how you get konnichi (wa).
Are middle names even a thing outside of Germanic languages? I know Spanish and Italian don't use them.
>Spanish and Italian don't use them
Juan José Alberto de las Mercedes y San Jerónimo Martín de Jesús
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso
but Spanish and Italian do use them...
all of the Romance language do, it's just that they also use compound surnames which makes distinguishing them apart from middle names confusing.
I thought things like
were essentially lists of maiden names (mother's last name, father's mother's last name, etc.) because of Spanish/Italians inherit their names. I didn't know they had middle names in their too.
Italians usually have a middle name and only the father's surname
It depends on the country, in Latin America there is a first name(de pila), middle name, fathers surname(apellido) and mothers surname. In some countries it is legally enforced to always have these 4, no more and no less.
All European languages do because all of Europe was Catholic vel Orthodox at some point, and having a name means that patron saint of said name is your patron and more patrons is obviously good.
>Fernando Francisco de Paula Domingo Vincente Ferrer Antonio José Joaquín Pascual Diego Juan Nepomuceno Januario Francisco Javier Rafael Miguel Gabriel Calisto Cayetano Fausto Luis Raimundo Gregorio Lorenzo Jerónimo de Borbón y Borbón-Parma
I live in a Spanish-speaking country and don't know a single person without a middle name
moron
In Slavic naming conventions your middle name is inherited from your father. Putin's dad's name was also Vladimir hence he is Vladimir Vladimirivich Putin, much like old Germanic naming conventions
The Spanish often have ridiculously long names
I have a middle name on my documents but I don't use it.
t. Italian
I write my middle name sometimes because I'm ethnic and it's an English name (live in Central Europe)
So people would think my parents come from America instead of some Asian shithole
wait, you don't even have a chang name?
I'm not a chang, I don't think I ever implied
>So people would think my parents come from America instead of some Asian shithole
When you say Asian people think of the ching chong asians, not the Indians.
I'm half-middle eastern and my dad's not from anglo countries but he spent most of his life abroad
Half middle eastern half white? So your dad was a refugee who fricked a Euro woman?
Higher status than "refugee" but that's about right
Do you still practice your dad's religion/culture or are you fully westernized? Did your mom assimilate to this religion/culture or is she still Eastern Euro?
My dad's only nominally muslim pretty much so there's no religious issue
But culture, yeah.
>Eastern Euro
Lol that's what people assume when you say Central Europe and mean Germany/Austria. She didn't need to assimilate. They spoke English (fluently) to each other.
When people say central Europe I solely think Czech republic. Germany/Austria is Western Europe, Poland/Slovakia is Eastern Europe, only Czechia is central, in my mind anyway.
So do you look Iranian, white, or tanned? Which languages do you speak?
I look almost white passing but not quite, you see it in my nose and skin a bit.
I speak english german arabic (poorly) french and a very little bit of cantonese from living in Macau as a kid for some time.
Anyway, my middle name has always been handy to make me seem more "international" (at least not directly from MENA) because it's a really anglo name. It's simply interesting and gets people asking when they see it. Even my name is a generic European name just written anglo in a way that's imperceptible. So middle names kinda have their uses.
Do you read Chinese? I've always wondered if written vernacular mandarin can be completely understood by Cantonese speakers, due to the Cantonese using different words for a lot of stuff (唔 instead of 不 for example)
Sadly no, I forgot all characters except the very basic ones. I also left pretty early so I can really only speak bits and pieces.
I assume you were with your father in Macau on business, do you miss it? What is there even to do in Macau business wise? As far as I understood it it was just a really shit version of Hong Kong that solely made its money through being a sort of Las Vegas of the Orient.
Managing hotels and casinos there pretty much
Inshallah.
But what's a rich son of a business magnate doing shitposting on IQfy? Shouldn't you have your own harem by now?
He didn't like own them, we're upper middle class at best and I'm kinda autistic so there you go
I'm imagining you as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7tEAHcLHDg ngl
Look up generation names.
>Generation name (variously zibei or banci in Chinese; tự bối, ban thứ or tên thế hệ in Vietnamese; hangnyeolja in Korea) is one of the characters in a traditional Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean given name, and is so called because each member of a generation (i.e. siblings and paternal cousins of the same generation) share that character.
I'm a chink and my brothers share a common character in our Chinese names.
is there a reason for why japanese names and surnames have more syllables than chinese/korean ones?
That isn't a hard and fast rule.
Their native words just have more syllables and not all names are read with the Chinese reading. Their names can have up to three kanji (I've seen some with four), so a person's full name can have six characters in total, while Sino-Korean names have three. Compare different readings for the same names 中村三星 and 東窪光
>On'yomi (Chinese reading)
Chuuson Sansei; Toua Kou
>Kun'yomi (Japanese reading)
Nakamura Mitsuboshi; Higashikubo Hikari
Notice how they sound more Sino-Korean in on'yomi? Names often mix on'yomi and kun'yomi, but they end up with more syllables anyway
I still don't know how the frick nanori work. There are Kun readings, from Japanese, On readings, from Chinese, but then there are also completely random readings.
Take Shinzo Abe's "Abe", from the characters "安倍", "安" is "An", "倍" is "bai", so by all rights it should be Anbai Shinzo, why can you just make the characters sound like whatever you want them to for names? This isn't a case of Westerners translating it wrong, the Jap wikipedia has him as "あべ しんぞう" in furigana.
>why can you just make the characters sound like whatever you want them to for names?
There are standard readings, but the spoken Japanese language predates the usage of Chinese characters, so the precedent for just assigning stuff ad hoc was/is there, and is integral to how the language works.
>the Jap wikipedia
does that for basically every word; it has little to do with how unusual a given reading is.
>the spoken Japanese language predates the usage of Chinese characters, so the precedent for just assigning stuff ad hoc was/is there, and is integral to how the language works.
The whole point of ateji is it's for phonetically identical sounds. It's needlessly confusing to use names in a way that doesn't match any usual readings.
That was just me using an example people knew. Almost every Japanese name is unguessable due to this shit. The guy who succeeded Abe is Yoshihide Suga, and his characters are:
菅 Suge, this is close enough, but if we were nitpicking still unguessable.
義 Always read as Gi, from the Chinese Yì.
偉 Either Erai or i.
So from this you'd assume he'd be Gii Suge. Now imagine this moronicness for literally every name.
>Sounds change over time
The Chinese have it right, they pronounce everything by the way it's pronounced now. They even read the classics from 2000 years ago in modern Mandarin pronunciation.
>They even read the classics from 2000 years ago in modern Mandarin pronunciation
Nah, not quite. I mean, the characters convey the same meaning regardless of pronunciation, so a Cantonese speaker, a Min speaker, and a Mandarin speaker can understand the same written text but will read it out loud differently
Off the top of my head I remember 國, which was pronounced something like kwok in Middle Chinese and is nowadays guó
No language is exempt from change. Chinese writing preserved old features, yet the spoken language is definitely not the same
I'm not saying the different regions read them in standard Mandarin, I'm saying in all the Mandarin speaking regions they use the modern pronunciation rather than trying to emulate classical ways of reading, so we would sort of have to read Shakespeare in ye olde way thuf, but they pronounce everything how it's pronounced now. So while Japanese place names can vary depending on the reading as of the time the name was coined the same isn't true in Chinese
Another example is the breakdown of different onyomi, you have go-on, kan-on, and to-on, where in Chinese you solely have modern pronunciation.
I get it now. I think Buddhist mantras are read entirely in on'yomi and sound like complete gibberish compared to Japanese. I wonder if they think their language should be reformed or we as outsiders think it's difficult because we're not immersed in it
Informative
I don't think it needs reform, because Japan has full literacy, and language learners can get over it eventually, but Japanese names will always be dekinai.
For some shenanigans look at this sentence in both languages.
"Tomorrow, Sunday, is my birthday."
明日, 日曜日, 我の生日
"Ashita, nichiyoubi, ware no Seijitsu."
"Mingri, riyaori, wo de shengri"
In Chinese the character 日 is pronounced ri 4 times. In Japanese it's pronounced 4 different ways, shita, nichi, bi, jitsu.
>In Japanese it's pronounced 4 different ways, shita, nichi, bi, jitsu.
'hi' as well. And 'ka' like in mikka/三日
Japan mapped different words/word parts to the same character without merging those words into one pronunciation, and without as much pressure to make its words conform to characters.
And it makes sense that it did so, because the Japanese and Chinese languages are not related. Trying to squeeze Japanese entirely into Hanzi was/is awkward, which is why even in that example sentence there's の rather than 的 or even 之.
It's like writing English with Chinese characters. With that example sentence, 日 would variously be read as 'morrow', 'sun', and 'day', with reading often unpredictable unless you've experienced the word before. One ends up in a worse version of the Japanese situation.
> I wonder if they think their language should be reformed
Their solutions to the basic problem of adapting another language's script were acceptance, widespread education, and kana, though the specific rules for employing kana have changed with time. They also did several rounds of Kanji reform, like using 国 instead of 國. There were proposals to abandon Kanji entirely, but those lost all interest after Japan's economic success.
JAPAN proposed to abolish kanji!?
I know Mao did, and obviously Korea, but Japan?
People within Japan did, seemingly starting around the Meiji Era and ending during the occupation.
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%BC%A2%E5%AD%97%E5%BB%83%E6%AD%A2%E8%AB%96
The push for it effectively died after a representative survey showed that the Japanese population did in fact have a very high literacy rate.
The issue is, as I understand it, that there is just no useful writing system that could take its place, so a new one would have to be devised and taught, as the kana are effectively incomprehensible alone due to the missing tone. (which, contrary to the popular belief, seems to be even more crucial than in Chinese)
Pitch accent in Japanese isn't as important as tones in Chinese, in Japanese it's needed to sound native but in Chinese people will literally not understand you if you don't use the right sound.
So if you're discussing religious differences and you want to say "the western god" as
西洋の神様
Seiyou no kamisama
If you say kami with a high tone like kámī it will sound like the word for hair, instead of the word for God (kàmi) with a falling tone, but context will make it obvious what you mean. Unless for whatever reason they think you're being extremely respectful to a random hairdresser in the west for some reason.
In Chinese if you say
西洋的shēn
with a high tone instead of a rising tone you will sound like you're saying the depth of the west (深 shēn instead of 神 shén), because Chinese uses less compounds tones are much more important.
Of course, if you instead say Shangdi and frick up one of the tones people may still understand you, because there isn't really another word or combination of words that fits there in context.
It isn't that hard to find Japanese words that could cause confusion without tones such as sake, and native speakers themselves claim that Japanese written without Kanji is too ambiguous.
Read up on Mori Arinori and Shiga Naoya, who wanted to replace Japanese with "more efficient" languages (English and French, respectively)
The Genbun Icchi movement sought to abolish Chinese characters and the National Language Research Council studied the possibility of reducing the number of kanji or even outright removing them, but it would be extremely difficult
They're a big country.
4U
What anon meant is that a modern Chinese speaker wouldn't bother trying to recapture whatever the pronunciation was at the time an ancient document was written, and just uses the current pronunciation.
There is no "once the pronunciation was different and there were a trillion ways to write it, but the pronunciation changed faster than the spelling and so knight sounds like night and rhymes with bite." Hanzi do have a phonetic component, but that component isn't locked to specific sounds, allowing a standard pronunciation at any given point in time even without changing the character. But that didn't happen in Japanese and so older readings can stay in circulation.
>It's needlessly confusing to use names in a way that doesn't match any usual readings.
Most uses do match a usual set of readings. They're just tolerant of divergences/uniqueness, provided it's not something in a forbidden category of names (perhaps because the entire system is a retrofit on top of 'original' Japanese anyway?).
Then, they can just provide the name in kana or give a "山 as in mountain" explanation.
>The Chinese have it right
Divergence in the sounds of topolects seems to be vastly greater than in Japanese (Cantonese being the most famous example). Government/high cultural tolerance of that is far lower.
I don't speak Japanese, but "Anbai" and "Abe" sound kind of similar.
>I still don't know how the frick nanori work
Neither do I
>why can you just make the characters sound like whatever you want them to for names?
If nanori is confusing to you, have you heard of the kira kira names? Naming conventions can be quite confusing in Japan but most normal people follow traditional rules. Reading nanori "accurately" is just a matter of getting used to the language. Thank God there's furigana
Thinking about it, some of them may be due to pronunciation changing but writing remaining the same. Take the Kōbe city's name for example. 神 evolved from *kamuy to kami to kamu to kan and finally kō (in this case) while the character remained the same. An unaware foreigner would read it as "kamibe" or "shinbe". Seems strange that 神 is kō in Kōbe's case but is kami in Kaminabeyama's case. That's just how things are. Sounds change over time
They didn't adopt the Chinese naming conventions.
The closest the Chinese have are Generation names, which is a section in your personal name that denotes your belonging to a part of a particular generation of your family.
Take for example Mao Zedong: his dad, Mao Yichang, named his sons with a "Ze" generation name, so Mao's brothers are.
>Mao Zemin
>Mao Zetan
>Mao Zejian
When Mao Zedong had kids, he named his spawn with "An," so his kids were:
>Mao Anying
>Mao Anqing
>Mao Anlong
Generation names however tend to only be given to sons.
Lots of cultures don't have middle names. I dated an Armenian girl who didn't have one.
surnames were for important people. peasants didn't get surnames (and middle names) until the 20th century
>the lack of unique syllables
They have a tonal system of phonology, which allows more options for any given length of syllables.
That also applies for given names, especially when the given name is disyllabic.
Additionally, the number of possible characters is even larger, providing another way of uniquely identifying someone.
Additionally, within a family/clan, there were ways to avoid assigning the same sur/given name combination, and commoners' dealings were likely to be limited to that group.
Additionally, middle names aren't normally used for the purpose of differentiating identical sur/given name pairs; unless you're intimate with someone, or they're famous, you're unlikely to know their middle name.
They used courtesy names.
How can 1.4 billion people share the same 20 or so names and surnames? What's the Chinese phone book like?
China has had the same naming system for a very long time. There's a named process that explains how the pool of surnames will shrink overtime as certain surnames go extinct.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galton%E2%80%93Watson_process
>How can 1.4 billion people share the same 20 or so names and surnames?
You type Li Mao in the search bar and your app stop working.
Two characters still give you a million possible names, assuming 1000 possible unique sylables.
bug human
Phrasing questions as "why doesn't X do Y" as if Y were some natural default is weird.
Middle names are a recent thing designed to distinguish people from eachother.
I got my family tree from 1700s and almost every member of it was someone called Mary or Thomas.
I'm Vietnamese and we all have middle name for thousand of years.
Ly Cong Uan (李 太 祖) - founder of Ly Dynasty, his middle name is Cong (太)
they didn't need it
>Wouldn’t they be even more useful there considering the lack of unique syllables and huge populations giving more opportunities for misidentification?
Chink culture is truly bizzare with its naming conventions.
Consider this:
1) All chinks look the same (black chinkeyes, black hair)
2) In the west, all chinks literally have the same haircut. I call it "the Zhang"
3) They all sound the same too - you can tell that someone is a chink based on their chinky voice, even if they don't know a word in chinese, have perfect english and grew up in the west.
4) Finally, they all have the same surnames. I know like 20 Zhangs.
It's like the entire culture is built on suppressing individuality. The surnames is just a part of the whole package - you look like a chink, you sound like a chink, you must also be named like a chink species (Zhang).
I mean, imagine waking up in the morning, looking in the mirror, and you see a chink. How fricking depressing would that be? You're basically a clone
Its called "having an ethnostate" which you will never have.
> 56 ethnicities
Does the Chinese script have particular characters for names, or do they just use regular words as a name?
Both. You can usually pick out names because they're unusual characters, but they also use normal characters.
Xi Jinping for example is 习近平, all of which are extremely common characters used in words like 学习 (learn), 最近 (recently) 太平 (taiping, peace, like the taiping rebellion.
Equally though there are characters that are solely used for names, like 徐, which technically has its own meaning but it's like "smith", where if you heard it you would hear it as a name rather than a profession.
Surnames mostly are very particular. Especially old ones. If your surname shows up in the ancient Catalogues like
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Family_Surnames
Then yeap, its going to have its own character.
Given names not so much.
Courtesy names.
That's not the intention/social role of courtesy names. Especially as it would still be generally drawing from the same character pool/name-formation rules.
People with two first names are douchebags and cant be trusted.
one of useless subhumans make a thread for me titled the han dynasty was vietnamese