Why is there the term "Zi generation"?

Category: Society/Culture >> Folk Tradition Problem Description: Chinese people are very particular about naming, and brothers will all have the same generation. For example: Wang Xiaolong, Wang Xiaofeng. Are the small characters in the middle all expressions of generation? Why?

What does this mean? When did it continue to this day? Analysis: The use of characters to indicate a person’s rank in the relationship between members of the same ethnic group should be regarded as the most nationally distinctive part of Chinese name culture, because it makes full use of

The method of constructing Chinese characters has been improved, so that it can be perfectly combined with the multiple meanings of the name from content to form.

However, as a genealogical symbol, the appearance of generation is much later than that of names.

As mentioned before, when the early people lived in a primitive society with very limited group members, they only needed to use "surname" to identify each person's maternal lineage.

Later, with the relative improvement of human reproduction conditions, the number of group members continued to increase, and the scope of activities expanded day by day. Only then did "shi" appear that could make the "classification of centuries" more detailed.

In other words, "Shi" not only indicates bloodline, but also has a certain role in identifying generation.

On the other hand, the human ethics concept that men and women of different generations with different surnames and blood relations cannot combine, which was gradually becoming popular at that time, was also a reason why people did not pay enough attention to generation symbols.

During the Qin and Han Dynasties, the process of surname confluence was basically completed. According to the development laws of name culture, the issue of generation symbols should have been put on the agenda accordingly.

However, in this process, continuous merger wars and social changes have led to the complete collapse of the clan organization since the Shang and Zhou dynasties, and have been replaced by the universalization of independent individual small families.

The composition of a small family is simple and the generations are clear, so people still rarely consider how to show the generational relationship between members of the same family through naming.

This situation did not change until the family system of aristocratic families was gradually established during the Han and Wei dynasties.

Throughout the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, frequent wars forced bankrupt small farmers to rely on the estates of large landowners of the same clan, either to live together in groups for self-protection, or to migrate as a group for refuge. It was this kind of social organization in which the same ethnic group lived together and lived together for generations.

Structure encourages the flower of writing to bloom.

Take the Huan Yi family of the Eastern Jin Dynasty as an example: their sons were named Yun, Huo, Mi, and Chong, and there was no unified identification symbol for each other. However, in the third generation, Huan Huo's six sons were named respectively.

Shi Qian, Shi Xiu, Shi Min, Shi Sheng, Shi Sui, Shi Kang.

The word "stone" is a clear mark that they are brothers of the same generation. Another example is the "Hong Family Genealogy" which records the lineage of Hong Xiuquan, the leader of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, saying that the first ancestor of the Hong family was Hong Pu, who served as a government official in the late Eastern Han Dynasty.

One character named Jian; Jian gave birth to two sons, named Qiao and Zhe; Zhe gave birth to three sons, named Wei, Zhong, and Shen. It is known that the third generation of Qingzhou Hong family was named after "Shi" and the fourth generation was named after "Ren".

. Judging from the time, it has been from the Han and Wei Dynasties to the founding of the Western Jin Dynasty. However, for a long time after its emergence, the character generation was not generally accepted by people, and there was no strict format to follow.

The latter is highlighted by the fact that there is no obvious difference or connection between the previous and later generations. Starting from about the middle and late Tang Dynasty, people began to try to express the lineage by naming. Initially, symbols were still used on radicals.

The concept of "Five Virtues Beginning in the End" is compared to the family's repeated development and cyclical development.

In fact, just when Zhu Yuanzhang set the rules for naming his family after the Five Elements characters, the development of character culture itself had entered a new stage.

Wu Hai, a scholar from Fujian who was a contemporary of Zhu Yuanzhang, clearly stipulated in the rules he wrote for the "Genealogy of the Wu Family": "The ranking of descendants is from water, wood, fire, earth, and metal. Their behavior lasts for a lifetime. The five elements are mutually reinforcing, and the cycle is endless... male, yang, and female.

Yin, the number of generations is easy to test. If you count each generation together, there will be no confusion. "Although the character generation he drew up is still "the five elements are mutually generated", which coincides with Zhu Yuanzhang, but we know from this: until the end of the year.

Since the late Yuan Dynasty, the new genealogy has not only pre-stipulated the way to name the branches of descendants, but also fully takes into account the role of "connecting the family with names". This is consistent with the four surnames of Confucius, Meng, Zeng, and Yan since Renzong of the Yuan Dynasty.

Later, the concept of time was consistent with the use of character generations. The effectiveness of the new character generation not only broke through the limitation of the old character generation being only used to identify people of the same generation, but also allowed it to fully play the role of the lineage chain of the same clan.

, and it also breaks through the limitation of the limited number of Chinese characters with the same radical, opening up a rich reservoir of word-formation resources for choosing characters and names, which is a practical contribution in terms of reducing the phenomenon of having the same name.