More on low class names

 

The point to be made is that there are no low class names.

Last time I wrote about the supposed “seven low class names” and I tried to denounce the concept. In Korea these days, the idea is dying out — the older people still hold on to the idea whereas younger people, in many cases, have not heard the old aphorism. Nonetheless, the discussion on my YouTube broadcast about the seven names was illuminating.

The first issue is the basic interpretation of the saying. The saying is: cheon, bang, ji, chuk, ma, gol, pi. A translation of the terms are: heaven, direction, earth, cow, horse, bone, hide. Somehow, and I think quite inappropriately, this saying, which I think is originally an obscure passage from a poem or essay, has been interpreted to be a reference to certain surnames in Korea. The surnames are not common ones, like our old friends Kim-Yi-Bak, but are smaller population groups, some of which have 100,000 members. Not really small. All of these surnames seem to have originated in China, but then again, these are not the only ones; quite a few others have as well.

Fitting the saying into the surnames requires more than a shoehorn. The first character means heaven (天), but the surname is a homophone meaning “thousand” (千). Those who like to quote this saying just glide over that difference.

The second character, bang, (方) means direction. There is another bang character that is also fairly common meaning “room” (房). The first one has 95,000 members in Korea; the second has 33,000. It turns out there are two other bang characters, 龐, with 900 members, and 邦 with less than 300 living in Korea. These last two descend from historic figures who immigrated from China. Several people commented that Yi Sun-sin’s wife was named Bang, a motif featured in the most recent movie about him.

The third character needs adjusting like the first. The saying has “ji” meaning earth (地), and that makes a nice parallel with the first character, heaven. It seems to be saying something about heaven and earth. But the problem is, the Korean surname means “lotus pond” (池). Same pronunciation, but different meaning. This surname is not obscure by any measure. There are over 150,000 members, making it the 49th largest surname group in Korea. In addition, to display their “yangban” status, they have had 10 men pass the high civil service exam, 36 pass the secondary civil service exam, and 86 pass the military exam. One of my comments on the YouTube channel reported that one-fourth of all military exam passers had the name Ji. It’s not true. It’s more like one-third or one percent, but still, the fact that someone can report such a thing means there is high regard in some quarters for the Ji as military officers.

The fourth character is really problematic. It is given as “chuk,” meaning cow (丑), not a terrestrial cow, but the cow in the zodiac. But it alternatively is given as the character for axis (軸). Neither of those characters are found in surnames, so those who want this to be about surnames suppose the character should be “chu” (秋), meaning autumn.

The fifth character is horse, and indeed one can surmise that such a name might not be complimentary, but there are nearly 40,000 people with that surname in Korea, and historically they have had success in the examination system.

The sixth character is really intriguing. If you look for someone named Gol (骨) today, you won’t find one, but there were a few in the historical record. One passed the jinsa exam in 1568, but indeed, the name has disappeared from Korea.

Finally, the seventh character, Pi (皮), “hide,” always evokes the name of a famous poet and professor at Seoul National University, Pi Cheon-deuk. Like the other questionable names on this list, this family saw success in the exams — but not the civil exams, rather the military and the technical exams. To have success in the technical exams ("japkwa") one had to belong to an exclusive hereditary, endogamic class called the “jungin” — literally “middle people." Mistakenly people often translate that as “middle class” — nothing could be more misleading. The term middle comes from where they lived in Seoul, and they were part of, although the lower edge of, the upper class, not in any sense the middle class as in modern society.

In sum, the phrase that many Koreans know that supposedly describes the lower class names of Korea is completely, totally and absolutely false. Some of the comments I’ve received included statements that the person writing bears one of these names, and they have been bullied and teased about it for years. One commenter said his teacher in school made fun of him and his name.

Fortunately, the practice is on the wane these days. I’ve tried to do my part to put a nail in its coffin.

Mark Peterson (markpeterson@byu.edu) is a professor emeritus of Korean, Asian and Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University in Utah.