In class, the teacher called the roll: "Liu Zihan got up and answered the question."

Monitor: "Teacher, is your name Liu Zihan, Liu Zhihan or Liu Zihan?"

I can't help but let netizens call it the generation after 00.

statistics

And some parents influenced by the culture of Hong Kong and Taiwan directly gave their children such names: Duanmu Queen, epic Wang Jue and meatballs. What a nice suit.

After reading the routines of modern people taking names, let's take a look at the routines of ancient people taking names.

As we all know, the first name of China people is "surname+first name", so where does the surname come from? There is a saying that ancient surnames originated from the totem of ancestors. In the tribal times, each tribe has its own totem of worship and belief, such as bears, snakes, leaves and so on. Different totems formed symbols of different tribes, and later became codes of various tribes, namely "surnames".

What do you mean when you say your last name? As mentioned in Shuo Wen Jie Zi, the name "Ming" means that it is convenient for everyone to identify who it is after dark. For example, the name of the bear tribe is Xiong Da, Xiong Er.

Totem surname

In Shang Dynasty, it was said that there were ten suns in the sky, which were called A, B, C, D, E, Ji, G, Xin, Ren and Gui. A sun rises every day, and these ten days are called ten days. These ten suns are called heavenly stems, which was named by the royal family of Shang Dynasty. For example, Shang Tang's son was born on the third day, which is the so-called foreign third day.

Heavenly stems and earthly branches's naming method had existed in the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, and people began to set themselves free by naming. For example, Hou Ji, the ancestor of Zhou, was originally named Ji, but his name was later abandoned. Why is it called "abandonment"? Legend has it that Hou Ji's mother, Jiang Yuan, once stepped on the giant's footsteps in the wild and came back pregnant. She soon gave birth to a son. She felt unlucky, so she left the child in a narrow lane. As a result, she found that all the cattle and horses in the past avoided stepping on him, so Jiang Yuan wanted to put the child in a sparsely populated mountain forest. It turns out that there are many people in the mountains. In desperation, Jiang Yuan had to leave the child in the cold ditch, but not yet. A big bird flew over to protect the child with its wings. Jiang Yuan thought the child was amazing and amazing, so she took him back and raised him. Because I wanted to dislike him, I named him "Dislike".

Portrait of Hou Ji

Next, a general from the Northern and Southern Dynasties. His name is Lu Shuang, but his word is "girl". Think of the two armies at war and the enemy calling for battle. "The girl opposite dares to fight." Then a big man came out, very visual. "If you have family, you can kowtow at night."

There is a popular saying that "a cheap name is good for feeding", so that many names such as "Liu" and "Wang Dog Egg" have appeared. But then there was an emperor's base name, and he was the great emperor of Ming Taizu-Zhu Yuanzhang.

Zhu Yuanzhang, a peasant, was originally named "Zhu Chongba", because he ranked eighth in the family, and later became "Zhu Yuanzhang" after the uprising. Zhu Yuanzhang, who became emperor, set a high standard in order to give future generations a better name.

Zhu Yuanzhang has 26 sons, and each son has a wooden character next to his name. He gave each son a 20-word generational table. Starting from his grandchildren, the first word of each generation is the Chinese character, and the second word must have five elements. It means primary gold, gold raw water, aquatic wood, and wood fire. The principle of fire producing soil.

However, Zhu Yuanzhang underestimated the fertility of the family, from five people in the early years of Hongwu to 127 people in Yongle, 196 1 1 in the thirty-second year of Jiajing, and then surged to more than 80,000 people in the thirty-second year of Wanli. Feel this powerful fertility. At this time, the problem came. When naming their descendants, the grandchildren also need to follow Zhu Yuanzhang's naming standard, so the Zhu family began to look for rare words with gold, wood, water, fire, earth and radicals in the vast number of Chinese characters, resulting in a large number of wonderful names.

Taking stock of so many ancient ways of naming, it seems that not only our generation, but also the ancients named themselves not bad.