A Comparative Study on the Origin of Surnames between Chinese and English Culture
中英姓氏起源的文化比较
Abstract: Culture is the sum of the material wealth and spiritual wealth in the development of human and every nation has its own unique culture. Surnames, created by people’s cultural creation, which are also a special part of culture, have rich cultural connotat ion and can reflect a nation’s cultural characteristic in history, language, philosophy, ethics, morality, religions, customs, social customs, psychology and value system. A surname is a family name and many dictionaries define "surname" as a synonym of "family name". In the UK and the US, it is commonly synonymous with "last name", since it is usually placed at the end of a person's given name. But in Chinese culture, the surname is a very important part in one’s life, as saying “A man never changes his na me wherever he goes, nor his surname whenever he sits”. In both Chinese and English, there are a great number of diverse and interesting surnames. The article mainly expounds the origin of surnames, comparison of vocabulary of the two kinds of surnames, their similarities and differences between Chinese and English culture and their relationship with given name. Here I need to make the definition of the title. In this article, the “Chinese” means the Han nationality which uses Chinese as their mother tongue in the mainland, other minorities excluded. The “English” means the nations like the UK and the USA where English is used as a mother tongue, the other countries like Australia, New Zealand excluded. This article mainly uses comparative method to distinguish the two kinds of surnames. On the basis of this comparative study, we can reveal the internal cultural characteristics of Chinese and English deeply and thoroughly which is helpful for improving the understanding of and intensify the respect for other cultures. And it also promotes cross-cultural communication and deeply research into language rules.
Key words: surname; culture; similarities and differences; cross-cultural communication
I. Introduction
Surname is not only a kind of symbols to distinguish one from another or one family from another, but also it is a high-density information symbol indicating the messages of a nation’s language, history, geography, religion and social
development. The communicators between different cultural backgrounds
contacted each other initially by the change of surnames. The famous cross-
cultural communication experts, Scollon and Scollon said that the surname is the beginning of the cross-cultural communication which is also the window of
understanding social culture and evaluation. (cited in Gao and Ren 2003)
In Wangjun’s research (2004:44), she gave an example of the importance of
surnames. One American businessman, writer and social observer called Robert.
L. Shook(1977) conducted an experiment in which he asked 20 male friends
whether they wanted to date with a secretary called Harriett Finkelstein. 18
friends out of 20 said that they did not have time. After one month, he asked
