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Quick answers
What is a generation name?
In many Chinese lineages a poem or list assigns one character of the given name by generation, so cousins share a written coordinate.
What is 돌림자?
A Korean practice of sharing a hanja/syllable across siblings or a generation. It marks a set. It does not forecast fortunes in this atlas.
Why does Japan have a kanji list for names?
The koseki (family register) and ministry lists (jōyō and jinmeiyō) limit which characters can be filed for a given name.
Do Statistics Korea tables use hanja?
KOSTAT publishes given-name frequencies; families may still think in hanja even when the file is hangul. Read releases as counts, not as luck.
Is a “good” character one with lucky strokes?
Not here. A good character is one the family intends, the registrar accepts, and the bearer can live with — no stroke-count science.
Can I mix a Chinese generation character with an English name?
People do, as stacked identities. Keep the kin logic and the English fashion logic in separate columns.
Scholarship covers morphology, register law and demography (KOSTAT, household surveys). That is enough science.
Stroke-count fortune and five-element name scoring are folk systems. They may be described as culture; they are not endorsed as mechanisms here.
Findings
- Chinese historians — Generation names as kin coordinates
A shared character locates a person in a descent cohort — genealogy, not fate.
- Korean researchers — 돌림자 as set-marking
Sibling-set syllables are a design pattern; KOSTAT still shows fashion moving around them.
- Ministry / scholars — Jinmeiyō as a closed inventory
What can be filed is an empirical legal fact.
- Statistics Korea — Frequency without fortune
Annual given-name counts are the honest popularity layer.
- Lieberson (contrast) — Fashion still exists under characters
Phonetic and stylistic waves happen in hangul/pinyin too; characters do not freeze taste.
- Migration scholars — Romanisation as a second name
The Latin form becomes the everyday name in English rooms — stacked identity.
Mechanisms
- Composition — Two characters (or a character plus a generation slot) combine senses and sounds.
- Reading vs writing — Japanese names especially: the kanji and the reading can surprise outsiders.
- List constraint — If it is not jinmeiyō/jōyō, the koseki clerk can refuse it.
- Cohort marking — 돌림자 and generation poems make cousins readable as a set.
Debates
- Should luck calculations be taught as culture or refused as science? — This atlas: describe if you must, never prescribe.
- Hangul-only vs hanja given names — A Korean values and class conversation — not a quality score.
- Who owns the generation poem in a diaspora family? — Elders, parents, or nobody — a live kin-politics question.
Cultural depth is the point. Destiny physics is the thing we are not doing.