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I have a Chinese friend called Zhihao who lives in London with his wife Hua. We first met Hua on the return flight of our trip to China and, since they came to Britain, Zhihao and Hua have been very good friends whom we see regularly. Each time we meet, we find ourselves comparing and contrasting British and Chinese cultures.
Zhihao has become particularly fascinated by the use of personal names in our two societies. He has noticed there are huge differences in how people use names in the two cultures. He points out:
“In western countries, if we say Tony or George, people will never know whom I am talking about. But, if I say Blair or Bush, they all know I am talking about the top leaders of two developed countries. But in China, if you say Li, Wang, Zhang, Zhao, Sun (very popular surnames with millions of the population sharing each one), people get lost about who you are referring to.
Similarly, in a smaller context, like in a small work unit, we use surnames a lot, but English people by contrast use first names instead. So, we may notice in England that every shop, every company has a Sarah, Jenny, Tom, Elizabeth, or even maybe two.
Usually, for the hundreds of millions of Chinese people, we say there are one hundred common surnames for them to share. So, I believe, in the wider context, they distinguish each other by first names and then English is vice versa.
In the last two years, I have been collecting interesting British surnames to prove that westerners have millions of surnames and plenty of them are quite humorous. In alphabetic order, I have: Armstrong, Barber, Baker, Bell, Bird, Bishop, Burns, Close, Coleman, Coxford, Day, Dearlove, Eagle, Edinburgh, Fox, Fry, Goodman, Goodgame, Grand, Grant, Green, Guest, Hall, Heady, King, Lane, Large, Lean, Littlewood, Longstaff, Lawhead, Lawson, Maiden, Miller, Newman, Newson, North, Paris, Pearson, Pick, Potter, Pound, Price, Prior, Rose, Skipper, Starkey, Stay, Tennant, Trickleman, Underhill, Walker, Wall, Weeks, White, Wilder, Winter, Wolf, Young.
If you carefully read each of these surnames, they mean something to us foreigners. But, certainly, they mean nothing to these people who own them as a surname, nothing much but a surname.”
Zhihao is absolutely right. The naming of people is a fascinating subject that varies so much around the world and tells us so much about a country or society. Everywhere names mean something, but often the meaning has been lost or obscured by time. The study of personal names is known as onomastics. Behind this forbidding word lies an utterly absorbing subject that tells us so much about history, geography, tradition and culture.