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June 12, 2007
Chinese surnames
In January, I posted about the limited range of surnames in my home community in Scotland - and the problems that can cause for data quality. If it's a problem on a Hebridean island, think of how difficult it must be in China, where there is also a limited range of surnames. 85 percent of Chinese population share 100 surnames!
The Chinese authorities are now waking up to this problem and have introduced a new protocol whereby people can register a composite surname comprising both the father's and mother's name. The hope is that this would create up to 1.3 million new surnames - although the real number is more likely to be much lower: around 10,000. Still an improvement.
I guess these would rather like the double-barreled names so enjoyed by the British aristocracy. These were used when property or titles were inherited through the female line: the double name signified the new male line and the endowed female line. Think of the first Britihs prime minister: Campbell-Bannerman, where the dominant Campbell family carried the weight of history, wealth and titles in his lineage.
Or perhaps these new composite Chinese names would be more akin to the composite names used by ladies in the US - Hilary Rodham Clinton being an obvious current example. Either way, it's an interesting solution to an increasingly difficult problem.
In Thailand they tackled the Chinese name problem quite differently. They just insisted that Chinese immigrants registered themselves with unique surnames. In order to ensure uniqueness, more and more suffixes and prefixes had to be added to existing names. The result was extremely long names, which apparently Chinese quite enjoyed because they echoed the extremely long names of the Thai nobility. The idea of requiring your name to be a unique identifier appeals to my datahead, if not to my sense of individuality.
Enjoy the links.
Posted by Donald Farmer at June 12, 2007 4:45 PM
