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Chinese honorifics (Chinese: 敬語; pinyin: Jìngyǔ) and honorific language are words, word constructs, and expressions in the Chinese language that convey self-deprecation, social respect, politeness, or deference. [1] Once ubiquitously employed in ancient China, a large percent has fallen out of use in the contemporary Chinese lexicon.
Generally speaking, courtesy names before the Qin dynasty were one syllable, and from the Qin to the 20th century they were mostly disyllabic, consisting of two Chinese characters. [1] Courtesy names were often relative to the meaning of the person's given name, the relationship could be synonyms, relative affairs, or rarely but sometimes antonym.
A painting of a gentry scholar with two courtesans, by Tang Yin, c. 1500. The four occupations (simplified Chinese: 士农工商; traditional Chinese: 士農工商; pinyin: Shì nóng gōng shāng), or "four categories of the people" (Chinese: 四民; pinyin: sì mín), [1] [2] was an occupation classification used in ancient China by either Confucian or Legalist scholars as far back as the ...
In modern Chinese, filial piety is rendered with the words xiào shùn , meaning "respect and obedience". [49] While China has always had a diversity of religious beliefs, filial piety has been common to almost all of them; historian Hugh D.R. Baker calls respect for the family the one element common to almost all Chinese people. [50]
In Confucianism, the ideal personality is the 聖 shèng, translated as saint or sage.However, as sagehood is impractical for most people, Confucius defined an archetype for a less demanding but still cultured and moral way of life and used the term junzi, originally used to refer to members of the nobility, to refer to anyone upholding that way of life, regardless of social status.
This category is for articles on words and phrases of Chinese origin. For articles on words and phrases related to a specific area of China, or to a specific spoken variant , please refer to one of the subcategories.
At that time, people believed that bending the sacrifices such as cattle and sheep into a bow shape on the altar was the only way to express respect and piety to the heaven. Later generations interpreted it as a daily etiquette, bending over, lowering the head, avoiding the other person's sight, to show obedience and lack of hostility.
In a speech in 1934, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek invoked the importance of the four principles as a guide for the New Life Movement. [ 5 ] The movement was an attempt to reintroduce Confucian principles into everyday life in China as a means to create national unity and act as a bulwark against communism.