Ask me questions.

[snoopy369]

What is this, Ondera asks questions??

[Alinestra Covelia]

Haha, thanks! Family names are very interesting - I did some study about Icelandic and Norwegian names.

In China, most people have three syllables. A - B - C. Say a girl is named 林顺珍 Lin2 Shun4 Zhen1 (Lin = forest, Shun = swift or straight (as in a road), Zhen = pearl). Here the family name will be Lin. Her generation name will be Shun. And her personal name will be Zhen. Often her family and friends will call her ZhenZhen or A-Zhen as an affectionate nickname.

Surname: Lin never changes. It's the family name, and a woman does not lose it even if she marries. She'll go to the grave with the same name that her father gave her, not her husband's. If she marries a man named 刘 Liu, people may call her "Mrs. Liu" 刘太太 Liu TaiTai (where Tai Tai means "wife to" ... literally it means "Too much too much" ) but her legal name continues to be Lin and she will equally likely be called "Ms. Lin" 林女士 Lin NüShi when entering into conversations etc. on her own behalf.

(This was something that was uncommon during the last emperor's time but began to liberalize in the Republican era. The Communists accelerated this process considerably.)

Generation name: the second syllable is usually chosen according to a poem - but this is really only the case for boys. Some of these family poems are centuries, if not millennia, old. My dad's family has a poem that's 54 characters long and he's number 35, and the poem was written in or around the 1200s. It's already very small by most family's poems, many of which can be in the 70s or 80s characters, and many of which have already hit the last character and "repeated" from the first. All the people in a generation usually share one character, though the family may use a different one for girls than for boys. The character for girls is usually just invented on the spot for the firstborn female. The boys are the ones to follow the poem. My brother has a different middle character to mine.

Given name: Could be anything. Usually focuses on nature or literary inspirations. My brother's name is Shan4 善 which means "compassionate". My own name is Zhen1 真 which means "truth". These can also have a "horizontal" poetry pattern. One of my cousins is Mei3 美 which means "beauty" (or possibly "American"?) and "Truth Compassion Beauty" are another literary trio of personal virtues.

Children all generally take their father's name, but on occasion if a family only has female children, they can come to an agreement with the husband to allow the children to take their mother's name. My father gave me his name as a middle name and I took my mother's (English) surname because it gave American and British passport officials less of a headache to pronounce than my dad's name.

Also during the upheaval of the 1900s, a lot of family poems were destroyed and many Chinese now only have two syllables in their names.

Very rarely you can find people with two-syllable family names (the historical military strategist Zhuge Liang 诸葛亮 is an example of this - Zhuge is his family name and he has only one given name Liang). This can lead to people with four-syllable names.

[Nikolai]

Icelandic and Norwegian surnames haven't had anything similar for a few centuries now.

Icelandic surnames goes like this: Father is named X. Son then is named First name Xson. Daughter is named First name Xdottir.

Norwegian surnames is fixed. If your father (or mother, depending on what name the parents decide to use) is named Johansen, then the children is named Johansen too.

[onodera]

So did your government disclose any wack stuff about UFO's that our government wouldn't?

No, I guess.

[Saras]

Would you believe me I said that I think the Russian navy rocks?

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601095&sid=aUbthr1wp94c&refer=east_europe

[onodera]

Would you believe me I said that I think the Russian navy rocks?

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...er=east_europe

Heh, I'd rather they spent some of the rockets to destroy the villages the pirates who had captured 'Faina' are from.

[Nikolai]

onodera, you still haven't answered my question.

[onodera]

As we all know, 42 is the answer. But what is the question?

What do you get if you multiply six by nine?

[Elok]

SIXTY-NINE, duudes!

No, wait, that's not right...

[Alinestra Covelia]

What do you get if you multiply six by nine?

That has always bothered me, because...

Well, you should be able to see why.

[Q Classic]

-Are Russians, such as yourself, congenitally bad at math?
-Isn't it obvious that multiplying six by nine leads to fifty-four?
-Do Russians, as a whole, like Douglas Adams?
-Do Russians, as a whole, like Stanislaw Lem?

[Felch]

Heh, I'd rather they spent some of the rockets to destroy the villages the pirates who had captured 'Faina' are from.

I thought Peter the Great was in the Atlantic. Wasn't it the lead ship in the flotilla headed for Venezuela?

Amen on punishing those pirates. So long as they have sanctuary, capturing boats isn't going to end the mess.

[onodera]

-Are Russians, such as yourself, congenitally bad at math?
-Isn't it obvious that multiplying six by nine leads to fifty-four?
-Do Russians, as a whole, like Douglas Adams?
-Do Russians, as a whole, like Stanislaw Lem?

No, Yes, No, No
Russians as a whole are just as horrible as Americans as a whole.

[Alinestra Covelia]

Do you want kids?

How long?

What's a good way to keep women off you?

Should the US Government subsidize homeownership even more?

[onodera]

Do you want kids?

How long?

What's a good way to keep women off you?

Should the US Government subsidize homeownership even more?

facepalm.jpg