Proposal
Title:
Proposal
Description:
The names of Literati in premodern China: a comparative study between Song, Ming and Qing China
Names, as people’s primary terms to identify themselves, always find their origin in the contemporary culture and ideas. As surname are mostly passed on by generation, forename represents the expectation and wish to one by one’s parents or oneself. In the western world, the frequency of name using differs dramatically as time changes, yet there are usually a group of words used specifically as name (although many of them start as regular words). New names join the group often as a result of cultural interaction. In either way the basic meaning of a name is relatively fixed. The particular situation of premodern China is that despite some extreme cases which people (usually from royal families) create new characters for name, almost every character can be used in a name. Generally speaking, Chinese enjoys much more “liberty” in naming.
Such circumstances put the study of the culture implications of Chinese name in a subtle situation, on one hand, numerous cases suggest various connection between names and other cultural elements, on the other hand, the enormous case number make it hard to reach to a conclusion of what the specific content of such connection is, and moreover, how such connection changes over time. Historical database and digital technology have made such research possible.
This research intend to study the preference of naming of literati in premodern China. As scholars often regard the elite culture of Song, Ming and Qing period as different stages within the system of neoconfusianism, the preference showed in the naming of literati shall first verify or challenge this general idea and then reveal if there had been any cultural shifting during this long historical period, or even between different regions.
To conduct the research properly, it is necessary to have a clear sense of the group of people involved, the source, the procedure as well as the problem might come up with in the research.
Depending on following reasons, this research plans to focus on men who hold Jinshi degree. Based on the tradition that regard the names of women at all age as extremely private, there aren’t many women’s name recorded until the late Ming period, which make a comparable study of women’s name impossible. Restricting the subject to Jinshi degree holders who beyond all doubt represents the literati class and kept the most complete records, makes the research easier to operate.
Traditionally, the source of Jinshi various as the time differs. Thanks for the works of previous scholars, reference books have enable us to get to the sources and biographies of those individuals much easier. Historical database like CBDB has adopted data from such reference books including name, time, geographical information and relatives. The data of Qing is almost complete, that of Song and Ming is not complete but still in great amount.
The basic procedure of this research:
First, find all the Jinshi degree holders in the CBDB, conduct a count on all the names appeared, find the frequency of each character, and the frequency for combination in the case of double-character name.
Second, try two approaches with the counting result. One is to categorize the characters in names by their function or meaning, the other is to find the origins of each high frequency names, either in classic text or in given cultural tradition.
Finally, adding time spatial dimension into the analysis. Combined with the earlier two steps, we will be able to present changes of values or cultural through time, cultural differences between different regions or the changes within certain region.
There are also Problems might come up with during the research:
First, there are names without cultural implications. Most commonly under such circumstances, the forename are related to the surname, either part of, a split of or a synonym of the surname. Although it sounds challenging, it still seldom contract the basic idea, since the characters used are still hardly contain negative meaning, while statistically hardly noticeable.
Second, there is always the separation of single and double character, the current solution is that double-character names need to count twice, once as a whole and then separately. In some cases, male members of the same generation of the same clan share one character in their names, which still won’t jeopardize the result, as the shared character itself is also the result of prevailing culture.
Besides, it is still not clear how to trace certain single or double character name back to certain text effectively. Worst case scenario, it will involve tons of philological work.
The most uncertain part is the presentation, which will largely depend on how the results come out.
Creator:
Hang YIN