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Structurally, Vietnamese names come in a reverse order compared to Western names.
In general, most of Vietnamese names have three parts:
> The family name (equivalent to surname) comes first.
> The middle name (optional, but common) comes second.
> The given name (equivalent to first name) comes last.
This reflects an important difference in terms of philosophy between the West and the East: Individuality is considered as the core of Western society, while in the East, the community, particularly the family, takes the central position.
Like anywhere else, under the influence of patriarchy, Vietnamese children bear their fathers? surnames. However, sometimes people combine both the father and mother's names, thus the children have a double family name.
Vietnamese surnames are limited to just a few hundred, which means that millions of Vietnamese may have a same surname such as Nguyen or Tran?
The meanings of Vietnamese given names is a mystical forest for language explorers, since they are no longer characters to identify somebody, but they also carry honorable meanings, as well as the hopes and expectations of the parents.
Most Vietnamese names have Chinese origin, as well as Chinese meanings. However, sometimes parents don't include such meanings in their children's names intentionally, they simply choose those names because they sounds beautiful.
On the contrary, some names are chosen because of their ugliness. This mostly occurs in the countryside, where parents fear that children with beautiful name will not grow up healthily, or might be taken away by devils.
In naming, the thinking of the West and the East meet in such a nice way. Flowers and precious stones, for example are favored by both as beautiful names. While the West has Rose or Rosa, Vietnam has Hong, while mirrors appear as Daisy and Cuc, Esmeralda or Jemma and Ngoc.
Influenced by a nature-oriented philosophy, naming children after Mother Nature is a choice of many Vietnamese parents. Everywhere and every time you can meet people who are named Fragrance, Flower, Mountain, Cloud, and many more like that.
There used to be a time when most Vietnamese people bore the middle name Thi for women and Van for men. In recent years, this practice has fallen from favor, since it is thought that these two names are now characterless or even rustic?
Another interesting thing is that most Vietnamese names are less commonly gender specific. The majority of western names have gender qualities, but this rule doesn't exist in Vietnam: Ha (River) or Hai (Ocean) can be named for both boys and girls. Of course, there are certain names, which are mainly used for boys like Hung (Hero) or Tuan (Handsome).
Some nice naming rules of the past are no longer adhered to in Vietnam, continued only by a handful of families.
For example, middle names are sometimes is used to identify the rank of one person in a large family, which means that people of the same generation have the same middle name? In many cases, the names of brothers and sisters are in some way tied to each other, or to their parent's names. A father whose name is Dragon might call his son or daughter Phoenix, since these form a pair of legendary animals in Vietnamese culture. Likewise, two sisters might be named Golden Branch and Jade Leaf.
In a style contrary to Western practice, Vietnamese avoid naming their children after their friends or relatives, since such an action is considered as lacking respect ?
In short, there are many things you can tell, or even discover about a Vietnamese if you know his or her name?
Vietnamese names are the crystallization of humanity, philosophy, and parental love, the characteristics of the society that created them. |
