![]() ![]() ( How Koreans Talk: A Collection of Expressions by Sang-Hun Choe and Christopher Torcha, claims that this too was simple pragmatism, as people were waiting to see whether kids would survive early childhood diseases before bothering with a birth documentation.) Then they would be given their “real” names and entered onto the register. So, as more than one old guy has told me, unsavoury names were given to children, and their names were not written on Family Registers for the first few years, until it was agreed that the “danger” had passed. kill) any child with a nicer name meaning something like “beauty” or “truth” or “great joy”. People had a superstitous fear that the (supernatural) Powers-That-Be were greedy SOBs, and would immediately “take away” (ie. Whereas, just across the “East Sea” (Sea of Japan), here in Korea, where we have so very few surnames, the practice of naming children “Shit” or “Toilet” or other nasty things was practiced, I’m told, not out of a superstition about bathrooms, but out of a semi-pragmatic response to infant mortality rates. has surnames from just about every ethnic/linguistic group in the world, but butterflyblue’s statement is clearly incorrect as it stands. Of course, in a sense it’s an unfair comparison, because the U.S. Mark Liberman points out in the comments, and in more detail in this Language Log post, that the U.S. This seems very out of place in the Japan of today, but it persists in a small way in the superstition that a pregnant woman should keep her bathroom clean if she wants to have a beautiful baby.Īddendum. Since the toilet god keeps you healthy, it stands to reason he would be helpful in rearing a healthy child. The book explains that this has to do with the belief in the god of the toilet. Names like “Kusoko” and “Oguso” were in vogue among the nobility. His birth name was “Ako Kuso,” which means “my child…shit.” Amazing that a man with this kind of name grew up to be successful in life. The famous poet “Kinotsurayuki,” who wrote the Tosa Diaries, is a notable example. Yes, in the Heian period and after, it was common to use “Kuso” in names, which means just what you think it means. Did you know (to take one startling fact) that Japan has more such a large number of different surnames than any other country in the world (about 120,000)? I’ll let you discover various piquant examples in situ, but I can’t resist quoting the final paragraph: Butterflyblue has a great post on Japanese family names.
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