In the early years of Chinese immigration, immigrants created "surname societies" as mutual aid organizations, with the explicit knowledge that any blood relationship was almost certainly fictive but a fictive family association is better than nothinghttps://twitter.com/XiranJayZhao/status/1332102230502096896 …
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So like imagine being stuck in a foreign country and being so lonely and poor you put up an ad like "Are there any other Greens in the city that want to do Thanksgiving together? We can start a new Green family tradition"
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Imagine being the one unlucky person in the city named McGillicuddy or whatever (Chinese surnames are much more "lopsided" than surnames in America, the common ones are very common and the rare ones are extremely rare)
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That's a thing in Chinese too, there's an old idiom "lao bai xing" meaning "the Old Hundred Surnames", to describe a reaction from "the general public" or "typical bystanders" (Like saying "Tom, Dick and Harry" in English I guess)
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The lao bai xing make up 85% of all Chinese surnames (out of 12,000 possible recorded surnames in history), which is a hugely concentrated distribution By contrast the top 100 surnames in the United States make up 17% of the population
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I guess I should point out that, mathematically, the way surnames typically work (by patrilineal inheritance) is that they "winnow down" over time as people marry each other, so unless you allow people to create new surnames, eventually you'd just have one
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Replying to @arthur_affect
I wonder if any decent fantasy worldbuilders have developed remedies to that in the cultures they design I've thought a lot about spousal name merging ("Smith-Johnson") and how it seems unsustainable... but on the other hand, racehorses seem to have a variant of that
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Even if you have a matrilineal and patrilineal surname, as long as you have only two and not an infinitely expanding list, you'll eventually just have one of each That's literally what Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosomal Adam are
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Replying to @arthur_affect
Ah, good point! I was implicitly assuming the infinite expansion ("Mom is a Smith-Johnson and Dad a Madison-Jones so I'm a Smith-Johnson-Ma..") but keeping just one per gender will work that way instead. I'm sure an especially equitable solution exists (but I'm not sure what)
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