Ethnography: Greetings & Introductions
I’d assumed that I would talk about business cards, because that was the topic that I knew the least about, and I still read a lot about that and bookmarked things, took screenshots of the useful phrases associated with it, but I did learn from the cultural atlas the terms in Japanese for family name and given name and I recognized them from the kanji practice I have been doing - for family name, you can use 上の名前 - ‘ue’ (上) means over or above, so I loved seeing it in this context and that the ‘above’ can be metaphorical/social/hierarchical too.
The given name takes the corresponding opposite direction, 下の名前 - ‘shita’ (下) means below or under, and this evidently extends to hierarchies and social position too. In fact, jisho.org (which I love and highly recommend to anyone who isn’t using that for their Japanese word look ups), listed both superior and elder in the additional meaning of 上, and vice versa for 下.
The reason that this is so interesting to me, other than the natural excitement and click of recognition as something you have learned in one piece of your learning finds a home in another aspect and builds a larger whole*, is because of an analogy that I used to use when I taught high school biology.
When I taught about how all living organisms can be organized and classified and sorted, some students would have problems grasping that something could be more than one thing, that a wasp could be an insect with special features and characteristics that made them an insect, but could also be an arthropod as well, and I used to use the example of families and family names there as well - that they themself is both a ‘Lisa’ with things that immediately identify them to everyone as Lisa, but they are also a 'Smith', they’re in that family or group and that families generally have shared characteristics too, that people that know their parents might look at them and say they have their mother’s eyes, or their father’s jaw. It helped, but in English, when we classify organisms, there is also a technical term and meaning for family, and it could be slightly confusing because of that.
An up name & a down name would have made that clearer, I think, for that analogy, so long as that isn’t also reused in the levels of classification in Japanese like family is in English. I also suspect that by the time that Japanese school children are learning classification in Biology, they are already used to thinking about things hierarchically, because of terms like this and the culture. It would make it easier to learn that topic.
Many people say that you cannot even think something if a word for it doesn’t exist, and certainly, there can be a click, or a feeling of rightness when you learn a term for something and know that it exists, and that other people have that experience too, but that isn’t entirely right - someone had to think something first and create the first word for it. New words are being created all the time, to support new thoughts and ways of being, and as culture shifts, old words get forgotten. But knowing words and the ethos behind them, the culture you bathe in when you learn them as your first and only language, really does shape the way that you tend to think about things.
It makes it much easier to think about things a specific way - like I said earlier about the joy you can get in learning when things click together, or how learning other languages gives you a base or a foundation to build Japanese on because of knowing some skills or some patterns in the other language that might be similar even if you do not have them in your own language. It is easier to learn things and to think in ways that correspond with the culture you grow up in. Pushing back can be hard. Language does shape and frame the way that you think, but we also shape and frame language. It is just a slower process because you are pushing uphill (上) against the weight of society and history, but sometimes it needs to happen.
One thing that has happened and shifted in language and society is that when I was small****, everyone used to refer to your given name as your christian name and your family name as your surname. Now, it is rare to hear anyone call it a christian name, and surname is fairly uncommon too.
I think that part of the reason that surname has become unusual is that people assume that it comes from "sir" + "name", and indicates patronymics and since not everyone's name comes from their father, either individually, nor in many cultures, there has been a tendency to drop it in favour of "last name". But it actually comes from Latin, via French (as many English words did, due to the Norman Invasion), and that brings us back full circle, because the Latin that it comes from is "supernomen" or "super" + "name". Super means "over, above, beyond" and takes us right back to 上 and Japanese. *****
"Christian name" has also fallen out of favour, in recognition that not everyone is christian, and that it is rather discriminatory. Plus, people actually used to change their name on becoming christian and being baptised, whereas in modern times, in western culture, in most christian denominations, babies are christened soon after birth, and even in the denominations where people are baptised at an only age, they no not change their name. The only people that tend to change their names as a reflection of their religious status are nuns, and the pope. So the usage of that term was antiquated even without people realising that it was exclusionary.
Using "given name" or "first name" to replace it makes sense, and the pattern match of "first name" & "last name" for things like form filling, makes them very convenient. Even if surname were as common as it once was, I cannot see changing to call it "subname" to pattern match being acceptable in English culture, and still less in American culture, where the rights of the individual, even frequently at the expense of society, are very much treasured.
Use of the terms "first name" and "second name" could still be confusing though - if you are an immigrant or a visitor to America or Britain and come from a culture like Japan where family names are given first, you could be putting the exact reverse of what is intended in a form, and everyone thinking that they understand each other clearly and are doing what it proper for the situation.
* I also believe that it is this process that is responsible for plateaus in learning languages - you have to build a foundation and for things to hang together and stick together in your mind before you can add the next layer of information on to it, whether it is vocabulary, or grammar or a cultural rule that helps you know which of five versions of a word you should use at that time. There’s a saying that when it’s railroading time, you’ll railroad**, and very few people know that the Ancient Greeks had an equivalent of steam power - but it was used for toys. They had enough metallurgy to build a metal sphere with a vent pointing sideways, and that could be placed over a small fire and heated till the water boiled and the escaping steam made it spin round, like a very hot and scalding child’s top. It was a toy, a curiosity, someone had invented it, but there was nothing they could do with it.
They didn’t have enough technology to build things that it could power - and even if they did, they probably would not have done so, because of cultural factors, amongst others, having cheap labor from slavery. It took a much larger population, and then population losses from the Black Death, to break the institution of virtually everyone being a serf, and many other things, to drive a cultural shift, where equipment and automation are cheaper than people, and also having a higher base level of technology, both in the metals that could be made (steel) and in so many things around it like gears and cogs that let you transfer that power, before someone could make that same discovery about steam and use it to power things and mechanise them and then eventually to turn it into transport.
It’s the same with learning languages - all the base pieces have to be there before you can get to the next level. Your plateaus only seem to be plateaus, but all the other pieces are assembling themselves to form that platform so that it is railroading time and you can move forwards. It might be a faster process for someone that has already learned second and third and more languages, because their brain has already made adaptations and leaps like that before, and they have things that they can connect to in the other languages as well, it makes it easier to build a structure, but it is still happening even for first time learners.
** Despite growing up in England, where we talk about railways rather than railroads, I know that saying that way because I learnt it from a science fiction book in my teens by RA Heinlein, who was American. ***
*** Yes, even on a blog, I have footnotes and my footnotes have footnotes :D.
***** There was an old English word that was in use before the Normans invaded and language became politicised#, which was freonama, which meant "free name" and presumably, like the Romans, Norse and Anglo Saxon slaves only had one name, but free people had two.
# It was probably politicised before, but the Normans banned the use of English (or so I was taught in school. That could be an absolute fabrication) and it is one of the reasons for the shape of English swear words - the swear word meaning to fornicate was an English word and so was automatically rude and bad, because it was from a banned language.
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