[Corpora-List] Chinese name frequencies

[James L. Fidelholtz]

Hi, Jerry,

Well, I can't. But I do have a (possibly) useful suggestion. I gather that
you can read Chinese. So get yourself a copy (electronic, if possible) of
telephone directories from as many Chinese cities as you can (you may or may
not want to include Taiwan and directories for the 'Chinatown' in various
cities with large Chinese-origin populations (eg, San Francisco, New York,
etc.), or tag the results by city, etc.). I believe Chinese uses the surname
to sort such lists, and presumably has some way of distinguishing what is a
surname and what is a given name (eg, apart from the order, hyphens between
multiple given names, or writing them together in a romanization). If the
list(s) is(are) electronic, simply sort on each field and count. If you are
doing a manual search, at least the surnames can be compared as to frequency
by counting the number of pages (or columns) which have that name
alphabetized. If I am right about the ordering of names, the given names
will be a bit more tricky, done manually, obviously. (If I am wrong, then
everything is viceversa.)

If you are not in China, you might try the closest Chinese embassy to you.
They might also have some leads for Chinese scholars who might be studying
similar areas.

I have done a little work in Mexico on some aspects of Spanish surnames, and
found a similar tactic very useful for a small study I did on surnames'
orthography.

Jim


On 3/20/09, j_kurjian at hotmail.com <j_kurjian at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Can anyone point me to a frequency list of Chinese given and/or family
> names, either in characters or transliterated?
>
> Thanks,
> Jerry Kurjian
>
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-- 
James L. Fidelholtz
Posgrado en Ciencias del Lenguaje
Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades
Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, MÉXICO
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