conanima:

etirabys:

Given names in Korean are almost always two syllables, with the first syllable usually being shared with your siblings and cousins (all the children of the same generation of a family, basically). I just grew up with this and didn’t think it was weird until I had cause to explain it to someone yesterday, at which point I stopped and wondered if I was making all of this up, it seemed so weird, how the heck do they coordinate that? Do the parents of the first kid of the new generation decide, or something? That doesn’t sound right. I looked it up, and it turns out that family lines keep a constant character array in a poem:

The sequence of generation is typically prescribed and kept in record by a generation poem (bāncì lián 班次聯 or pàizì gē 派字歌 in Chinese) specific to each lineage. While it may have a mnemonic function, these poems can vary in length from around a dozen characters to hundreds of characters. Each successive character becomes the generation name for successive generations.^[1] After the last character of the poem is reached, the poem is usually recycled though occasionally it may be extended.

Generation poems were usually composed by a committee of family elders whenever a new lineage was established through geographical emigration or social elevation. Thus families sharing a common generation poem are considered to also share a common ancestor and have originated from a common geographical location.

Which is mindblowingly cool, I think.

     Interesting! I just noticed this name trend in my own family a few months back, and asked my parents about it. I don’t know much on this topic or whether this is the same thing you’re talking about it, actually, but assuming it is, I think it’s referred to as dolimja (돌림자 or 항렬자) in Korea, with a whole complicated system that I still have a hard time understanding. 

According to my parents: 
     The syllable in question is decided on a wheel-like pattern based on the five elements: water, (which grows…) wood/trees, (burned by…) fire, (which produces ash, or…) earth, (which melts to form) gold/metal, (which— my dad laughed as he said this— can be squeezed to form) water again, and so on. It alternates every generation, and so the syllable is a variant of/related to the said element next in that pattern for that generation. 
     I pointed out that for our family (both sides), it’s the second and not first syllable of the given name which is shared. Apparently, that also alternates on some sort of pattern. 
     My father says the shared-syllable-across-a-generation trend is for male family members only (I observed this in my own generation— my brother and two male cousins have a shared syllable; my female cousin and I do not). However, my mother disagreed and said that while it was mainly male family members, her family had it going for female members too, at one point. Up to family, I guess, though I’m sure it’s a patriarchal thing.

According to my meager research:
     Determining the syllable(s) can be done in multiple ways! Something about brushstrokes… it’s complicated and I don’t understand most of it myself, haha. And though most families continue to have naming rules like this, a few new generations nowadays don’t always hold to them and name kids however they please.