Talk:Courtesy name

Translations
Can we have some translations to show meaning of given names and the reference to them in the zi?


 * I've given an example in the article. To see more literal meaning of the characters, you can enter the character in a Chinese-English dictionary. Choose "Head Char." option on top of that page to see a character's full defintion. But you should be warned that not all Chinese characters have a literal meaning. Some are just proper nouns. Moreover, often there are several meanings to a character, it can therefore be unclear sometimes, even to native Chinese speaker that, which definition the namer meant. --Menchi 07:20 Feb 19, 2003 (UTC)

External Link I think the external link "Introduction to Chinese Names" should be deleted - it looks pretty commercial, and gives no more information than the "See Also" wikipedia link. Haven't done it myself since it's been there for so long - maybe there is a reason? 80.141.230.100 01:13, 30 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Agreed the link should be removed. There's so much more to a Chinese given name than a simple phonetic transliteration, which is what the site has done. Athanor (talk) 20:24, 28 December 2009 (UTC)

Join Characters in Zi

Should we join the characters of a multi-character zi, as per Library of Congress guideline? See also Talk:Transcription of Chinese. --Menchi 09:29 Feb 19, 2003 (UTC)


 * go for it --User:kt2

Style vs. Style Name
Can the person who recently moved it from [Courtesy name] to [Style name] justify the move? I have never heard of "style name", just simply "style". I realize that the original intro that I myself wrote was ambiguous in saying: "...sometimes as style or courtesy name". But believe me, I did not mean it as "...sometimes as "style name" and sometimes as "courtesy name". --Menchi 01:55, 14 May 2005 (UTC)

Martial Name
Many pre-mao Chinese martial artists went by several names, which i've heard referred to as martial names, which where given to them by their sifu, are these the same as zi?

How much are they used?

 * The tradition of using style names has been fading away since the May Fourth Movement.

Would be useful to have some sense of how much it has faded. Do 1% of people get one these days? 10%? Are there particular regions of China where it remains popular? Tempshill 17:10, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

In fact,the style names are not used by 99.9% of modern Chinese people. There are no particular regions of China where it remains popular. --61.190.88.142 (talk) 13:59, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

Today, Chinese scholars may have 子 or 号.KJ (talk) 18:28, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

To be honest, the article should stress that the taking of a courtesy name in China has become so obsolete that it is almost acceptable to call it a lost tradition. Also, most scholars and writers don't follow the old traditions. They take all sorts of different pen names. The Average Wikipedian (talk) 14:50, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

QASIM BUTT
QASIM &NISHA —Preceding unsigned comment added by 116.71.175.26 (talk) 04:48, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

"Famous"
What criteria should be used to determine if someone is "famous" enough to have their style name included among the examples? I see that an earlier version of this article stopped the list at Yue Fei. I respect the inclusion of everyone up to this point, as these are major historical figures that have been immortalized in literary, historical, or political texts. But are the 20th-century figures listed below Yue Fei recognizable enough to an English reader for inclusion in this article? I would guess that most Anglophone readers of this article would surely recognize the given names of most--if not all--of the figures listed from Laozi to Yue Fei; the others, however, would likely be much more obscure, with readers recognizing neither their given nor style names. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.119.5.232 (talk) 11:19, 15 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Agreed. I went ahead and removed the less famous names. --Zanhe (talk) 01:39, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

Family school
In the lede are cited "family schools teachers" but I couldn't find any information on them. Does anyone know what are/were them in China? Thanks. --Dia^ (talk) 09:08, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Requested move 21 August 2013

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the proposal was moved. --BDD (talk) 17:45, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

Chinese style name → Courtesy name – Per WP:COMMONNAME. According to Google ngram, the term "Chinese style name" is never used in any source. And it disregards the fact that these names were widely used in several Asian countries besides China. A less common translation is "style name", but Google results for that term are mostly unrelated to the topic. Encyclopedia Britannica uses "courtesy name" exclusively and does not use "Chinese style name" or "style name" at all. As early as 2005, the creator of this article objected to the undiscussed move to the current title (see thread above), but for some reason nothing was done to revert it. Zanhe (talk) 21:34, 21 August 2013 (UTC)

Survey

 * Feel free to state your position on the renaming proposal by beginning a new line in this section with  or  , then sign your comment with  . Since polling is not a substitute for discussion, please explain your reasons, taking into account Wikipedia's policy on article titles.


 * Support per both nom's main reasons. In ictu oculi (talk) 03:09, 22 August 2013 (UTC)
 * [Mild] Support. Thanks for the searches. I know I've used our house term on plenty of pages but, if it's not being used in current English scholarship, sure we should fix our mistake. Better late than never. — Llywelyn II   09:15, 22 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Having looked through your work, you were cherry picking your terms quite a bit. If this page were covering only Chinese courtesy names, there's nothing wrong using the disambiguating adjective even if it might be obscure in texts which take their national focus for granted. And if we're cherry picking terms... The real data doesn't support the move 4k-odd (but really 3k + lots of extras) to 12k-odd (but really 300 all on point) and 880 (solid) to 806 (solid). Still, it's close enough to fudge and I like "courtesy name" more in the absence of a Sinologist coming by to explain why the term has fallen out of favor. —  Llywelyn II   09:43, 22 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Please do a bit more research before accusing me of cherry picking the terms. As I mentioned in the nom, Google results for "style name" are overwhelmingly false hits, which is why I didn't use that term in ngram. A simple google books search reveals that the vast majority of "style name" matches are about HTML and XML style names, which explains why there has been a huge spike of its use in Google ngram since the late 80s and early 90s, when people began to use the web. Before the results became skewed by the emergence of HTML and XML, "courtesy name" was far more common than "style name". -Zanhe (talk) 16:43, 22 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Support per nom. I would have moved it a while ago if it wasn't for technical reasons. --Cold Season (talk) 15:25, 22 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Oppose. This article is a simple stub, without any references. It is not legitimate to decide such a change here, since this would imply changes in a HUGE number of articles related to China/Japan/Korea/Vietnam etc. Anyway, if you want to provide a redirect as 'Korean style name' and all the others than can look as politically correct ... why not. Pldx1 (talk) 16:13, 22 August 2013 (UTC)
 * No change is required for any other article if this one is renamed, as the current title will become a redirect. Already a large number of articles link to courtesy name despite that being currently a redirect. Also, the move proposal is mainly about WP:COMMONNAME, not political correctness. -Zanhe (talk) 17:03, 22 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Support per nom. In addition, the current title artificially limits the topic to China and could be ambiguous (vis-à-vis "Chinese-style name, i.e. Chinese name).  —  AjaxSmack   05:53, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

Discussion

 * Any additional comments:


 * Anybody want to tackle art name?
 * That seems to be the correct term - . What would you change it to? Johnbod (talk) 20:37, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Relationship between zì and míng
Could someone with knowledge of Chinese please take a look at the sentence 'The relation which often exists between a person's zì and míng may be seen in the case of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), whose ming was Zhōngzhèng (中正，Romanized as Chung-cheng) and zi was Jieshi（介石，Romanized as Kai-shek）.'?

I appreciate that it may not be straightforward to explain the relationship in English but I think it would be useful if some attempt was made. -- Boreas74  You'll catch more flies with honey 13:15, 12 May 2016 (UTC)