CHINESE REDUPLICATED GIVEN NAMES

• Authors: Kaluzynska Irena
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The paper presents one of the classes of traditional and contemporary Chinese personal given names, i.e. reduplicated names. The authoress discusses history, semantic, structural, and phonetic features of this kind of names. Reduplicated names are considered by the Chinese as those evoking special tenderness, familiarity and intimacy, which, in the past, caused broader popularity of the names of this type as women's names rather than men's. Nevertheless, because of the very same semantic evocations, such names were considered as appropriate mostly for women fulfilling the functions of concubines, artists, actresses or prostitutes. Today, among contemporary Chinese, this traditional affiliation of such names has already disappeared. However, they are still evoking imaginary of sweetness, lovingness, tenderness, which makes them much more popular for the girls than for the boys. The authoress analyses the structure and semantics of such names comparing them to other reduplications within the Chinese language (i.e. adverbial, adjective). Also, basing on the collection of more than 100 reduplicated names (contemporary, but also historic ones), she examines hypothetical importance of symbolism traditionally attributed to names' starting sound or names' first syllable tone to the name giving processes.

Keywords

EN

CHINA - NAMING'S TRADITION; CHINESE GIVEN NAMES' SYMBOLISM; CHINESE PERSONAL GIVEN NAMES; REDUPLICATION IN CHINESE LANGUAGE

Discipline

• PHILOLOGY_&_LINGUISTICS: PHILOLOGY & LINGUISTICS

• Publisher: Polska Akademia Nauk. Instytut Kultur Śródziemnomorskich i Orientalnych PAN
• Journal: Acta Asiatica Varsoviensia
• Year: 2006
• Issue: 19
• Pages: 7-22
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Kaluzynska Irena

• Irena Kaluzynska, Uniwersytet Warszawski, Instytut Orientalistyczny, Zaklad Sinologii, ul. Krakowskie Przedmiescie 26/28, 00-927 Warszawa, Poland.

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

09PLAAAA05501