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I don't know anything about Chinese surnames, but their paucity cannot be due to a limited set of possible sounds. First, I would interpret "sounds" as phoneme

I don't know anything about Chinese surnames, but their paucity cannot be due to a limited set of possible sounds. First, I would interpret "sounds" as phonemes (including tones), and there are far fewer of those than 400. More likely what you mean is the number of combinations of phonemes into valid Chinese Mandarin monosyllables, of which I cannot imagine there being only 400. In any case, there are (from what little I've heard) lots of bisyllabic Chinese words. Can't they be represented by single (or double) characters? There are thousands of commonly used Chinese characters, and tens of thousands more uncommonly used characters.

thaumasiotes 5y ago
> More likely what you mean is the number of combinations of phonemes into valid Chinese Mandarin monosyllables, of which I cannot imagine there being only 400. That's your problem, not ilamont's. The limited syllable inventory of Mandarin Chinese is very well known. No need to stretch your imagination over it. That said, surnames are not limited by the number of syllables for the obvious reason that the spelling is part of the surname.
- mcswell 5y ago
  No, the "only 400 syllables" refers to the syllables without taking into account tones. But tones are as much a part of Mandarin syllables as coda consonants; taking the tones into account, there are over 1200 distinct syllables.
kccqzy 5y ago
You are getting something here by mentioning characters. Indeed there are a lot of distinct Chinese surnames written in the Chinese script that become identical after romanization, especially the romanization in the West where different tones are also ignored. Wikipedia has a nice list of common Chinese surnames at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_Chinese_surnames https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_Chinese_surname... and one can easily find examples: like 许 and 徐 both become Xu after romanization.
- samus 5y ago
  This effect is reduced by the fact that there are multiple romanization systems in use. Even taking that into account, the diversity is quite low. There are a lot of Chinese characters, but very few of them are actually used as surnames. Less than ~500 names are shared by more than 95% of the population, and most current surveys arrive at way less than 10000 in active use. There are two- and three-character names, but because of their low occurrence they are even more vulnerable to various processes that reduce the diversity of family names. Chinese family names carry great significance. They were often assigned as rewards, and people adopted different ones for various reasons. This makes their distribution and future development subject to more than random chance.

thaumasiotes 5y ago

> More likely what you mean is the number of combinations of phonemes into valid Chinese Mandarin monosyllables, of which I cannot imagine there being only 400. That's your problem, not ilamont's. The limited syllable inventory of Mandarin Chinese is very well known. No need to stretch your imagination over it. That said, surnames are not limited by the number of syllables for the obvious reason that the spelling is part of the surname.

mcswell 5y ago
No, the "only 400 syllables" refers to the syllables without taking into account tones. But tones are as much a part of Mandarin syllables as coda consonants; taking the tones into account, there are over 1200 distinct syllables.

kccqzy 5y ago

You are getting something here by mentioning characters. Indeed there are a lot of distinct Chinese surnames written in the Chinese script that become identical after romanization, especially the romanization in the West where different tones are also ignored. Wikipedia has a nice list of common Chinese surnames at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_Chinese_surnames https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_Chinese_surname... and one can easily find examples: like 许 and 徐 both become Xu after romanization.

samus 5y ago
This effect is reduced by the fact that there are multiple romanization systems in use. Even taking that into account, the diversity is quite low. There are a lot of Chinese characters, but very few of them are actually used as surnames. Less than ~500 names are shared by more than 95% of the population, and most current surveys arrive at way less than 10000 in active use. There are two- and three-character names, but because of their low occurrence they are even more vulnerable to various processes that reduce the diversity of family names. Chinese family names carry great significance. They were often assigned as rewards, and people adopted different ones for various reasons. This makes their distribution and future development subject to more than random chance.