- 17 Jul 2002
- 5,907
- 385
BBC News : Shanghai muddle over popular name
It has always startled me how the most populous nation on earth could cope with some few surnames and given names. The major problem is that Chinese surnames are limited to a single hanzi and a thus single syllable. There are only 700 surnames for 1.3 billion people, which means almost 2 million people with the same surname in average. But the worst of all is that all these surnames have several homonyms, and only the written character can distinnguish them. Given names are hardly better, as they are limited to 2 monosyllabic characters.
As a result 4000 people with the exact same name (including characters) in Shanghai alone. As Shanghai's population is about 1% of the whole country, we could guess that the most common name combination in China would have 400,000 people bearing it. If only one hundred of them travelled the same day to the same country, imagine the confusion at the airline and customs !
Like the Japanese, Chinese people do not have multiple given names, unlike in Europe where 3 to 5 given names is common (and dozens possible), justly in order to avoid confusions. Yet there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of surnames in Europe. Tiny Belgium alone (130x less populous than China) had exactly 187.710 family names in 1987 for 10 million people (one for 53 people), so that when you meet two people with the same surname (except a few hundreds common ones), there is a good chance that they are related. France counts some 900.000 surnames for 60 million inhabitants (one for 66 peolpe), a proportion slightly lower than Belgium.
In comparison, the Hiragana Times claims that there are 240,000 different surnames in Japan (1 for 533 people), although this surprises me, given the very limited number of kanji that are allowed in family names (just a few hundreds).
While searching the web, I found an article in French (from a Chinese government website) mentioning that there once was 22,000 family names in China, and contrarily to what the BBC says, they claim that there are still 3500 Han Chinese surnames nowadays in China. This is still a ridiculously low number compared to much smaller European countries, or even Japan.
Maybe it is time (high time, indeed) for China to allow multiple character surnames (or at least combinations of both parents' surnames, as is common in Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries), and also for multiple given names, at least for administrative purposes (Europeans otherwise never use their 2nd, 3rd, 4th or other given names).
BBC said:
It has always startled me how the most populous nation on earth could cope with some few surnames and given names. The major problem is that Chinese surnames are limited to a single hanzi and a thus single syllable. There are only 700 surnames for 1.3 billion people, which means almost 2 million people with the same surname in average. But the worst of all is that all these surnames have several homonyms, and only the written character can distinnguish them. Given names are hardly better, as they are limited to 2 monosyllabic characters.
As a result 4000 people with the exact same name (including characters) in Shanghai alone. As Shanghai's population is about 1% of the whole country, we could guess that the most common name combination in China would have 400,000 people bearing it. If only one hundred of them travelled the same day to the same country, imagine the confusion at the airline and customs !
Like the Japanese, Chinese people do not have multiple given names, unlike in Europe where 3 to 5 given names is common (and dozens possible), justly in order to avoid confusions. Yet there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of surnames in Europe. Tiny Belgium alone (130x less populous than China) had exactly 187.710 family names in 1987 for 10 million people (one for 53 people), so that when you meet two people with the same surname (except a few hundreds common ones), there is a good chance that they are related. France counts some 900.000 surnames for 60 million inhabitants (one for 66 peolpe), a proportion slightly lower than Belgium.
In comparison, the Hiragana Times claims that there are 240,000 different surnames in Japan (1 for 533 people), although this surprises me, given the very limited number of kanji that are allowed in family names (just a few hundreds).
While searching the web, I found an article in French (from a Chinese government website) mentioning that there once was 22,000 family names in China, and contrarily to what the BBC says, they claim that there are still 3500 Han Chinese surnames nowadays in China. This is still a ridiculously low number compared to much smaller European countries, or even Japan.
Maybe it is time (high time, indeed) for China to allow multiple character surnames (or at least combinations of both parents' surnames, as is common in Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries), and also for multiple given names, at least for administrative purposes (Europeans otherwise never use their 2nd, 3rd, 4th or other given names).