Tip: Although the meaning of the word has changed, the practice of calling fathers "da" or "big" has been retained – later, perhaps it was difficult for people to distinguish which father had more than three children, which should be called dad, so it was all called "big", "big" and "father" became one meaning - even today, people can still hear people refer to fathers as "big". This is very interesting, so that people can look back at the history is very far, but also can have a difference in identity, that is, the father is still called up, must be from the northern ethnic minorities, they can be ronghu, Xiongnu, Xianbei (Ruoran), Turkic, Uighur, Khitan, Jurchen, Mongolian and other ethnic groups, and standing at the source of these ethnic groups, only Ronghu and Xiongnu.
Let's start with one word – Uncle.
Today, we say that "uncle" refers to the father's brother, the eldest is the uncle, and the rest add numbers in turn in front of it, such as the second uncle, the third uncle, and the fourth uncle. This name is very popular in Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei Province, and some parts of Henan are also popular. Shandong people are also called this, but also used to refer to the father-in-law, as long as the husband and wife formally worship the heavens and the earth after the son-in-law must change the mouth to call the father-in-law "uncle". However, in ancient times, uncle was not such a concept, and we separated this title from Yamato--first.
There is such a passage in the "Mulan Poem" that we are all familiar with: Last night I saw the military post, and the Khan ordered the soldiers. There are twelve volumes of the Military Book, and the scrolls have the name of the grandfather. Grandpa has no eldest son, and Mulan has no eldest brother. Willing to be the city of Kurama, henceforth for the grandfather.
Who is this "grandpa"? The answer is father. The Mulan Poems, a folk song of the Northern Dynasty, which included the Northern Wei, Eastern Wei, Western Wei, Northern Qi, and Northern Friday Dynasties, ended China's nearly one hundred and fifty years of chaos in the Central Plains from the Rebellion of the Eight Kings of the Western Jin Dynasty. Later generations of Sui and Tang dynasties inherited the Northern Dynasty, and their founding emperors were all famous and noble of the Northern Dynasty, and they followed the Northern Dynasty from various fields such as military and political systems and better developed and innovated, laying the foundation for the prosperity of the Sui and Tang Dynasties and the great integration of the nation. Through the "Mulan Poem", it can be seen that the Chinese at that time was called Father Grandpa.
Of course, the person who called my father did not specifically refer to the Han people mentioned today, there are still a few sentences in the "Mulan Poem" - last night I saw the military post, and the Khan ordered the soldiers... Return to see the Son of Heaven, and the Son of Heaven sits in the Hall of Fame. When Mulan was a soldier, he called the ruler at that time Khan, but when he returned, the Khan became the Son of Heaven. The Tianzi in the interior, they call themselves emperors, it is impossible to call themselves khans, but khans can be called tianzi, that is, the leaders of ethnic minorities became the emperors of the Central Plains. According to this, some people say that Mulan is a minority, and even clearly positioned the Xianbei ethnic group, which we do not oppose, the situation at that time may be like this.
That is to say, the Xianbei people are also called fathers and grandfathers, but calling them fathers is definitely not the invention of the Xianbei people. The Guangyun records: "Father, the Qiang people call the father also." "The Qiang people originate from the ancient Qiang, an ancient ethnic group in western China, the ancient Qiang have a wide and far-reaching influence on the historical development of China and the formation of the Chinese nation, the national language is Qiang, which belongs to the Qiang branch of the Tibetan-Burman language family of the Sino-Tibetan language family, which is divided into northern and southern dialects. During the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, the Qiang people in the northwest were forced to carry out large-scale and long-distance migrations under the pressure of the Qin state. They first lived in the upper reaches of the Yellow River, Huangshui, Taohe, Datong, and the Minjiang River in present-day Gansu and Qinghai. In the Eastern Han Dynasty, it migrated out of the Eastern Qiang and reached the Hetao region, that is, Ningxia, Inner Mongolia, Shanxi and Shaanxi. The title of father and grandfather may also have been spread at this time.
Here, we have made the "grandpa" thing clear, and then say "big". "Big" is very common in northern China, and the meaning is understood by everyone. Unlike Shaanxi, Gansu, Shanxi and other places, in some ethnic minorities in Qinghai and southwest China, they call "Big" "Ada", which is also the meaning of their father. But how did the father become big? That is the main point we are going to make today.
From the perspective of northern dialects, most dialects today call father "father" and "big", which is not a Chinese title. "Father" means "father" and "many", not "father", "father" refers to father, "many" means "multiple children". "Father" and "many" combine to mean "father with more than three children". The ancients took "three" as "many". Therefore, the person who is called "father" must be the father who has more than three children. But some fathers have only one or a pair of children in their lifetime, so they can't be called "daddies". So, what do you call them? The answer is "big", having one child or two children with a father.
This is the point of origin of calling the father "big", and the second point is a little deeper and still needs to be studied. We analyze that "big" may come from "da", and the two words that arrived at it were common in ancient times, and "big" is "da". Who is "Da"? It was first written like this, 羍, a sheep under the big letters. The sheep was born with the name 羍, which means lamb.
The information we can see today is that the earliest from the "Book of Poetry and People's Livelihood": Birth Mi Yue, Mr. Ruda. Birthday, pinyin: dàn mí, means full term pregnancy. Que yue, pronounced quē yuè, means a moon that is not round, and here also refers to the time and process of pregnancy. The husband is the first time to give birth to a child, and Da is a lamb. It means that it is not easy for women to give birth every time, but when Jiang Yan gives birth to her first child (Hou Ji, the ancestor of the Zhou clan), it is very easy, just like the big sheep giving birth to the small lamb (羍). It is also said that "the first born people, Shi Wei Jiang Yan", which means that the people who were born in the first place were because Jiang Yan was able to give birth. Later, when people understood and translated, they regarded the 羍 as smooth and smooth, and it had the meaning we say now, but at first it must have been a lamb, and the mistake of translation gave the 羍 another meaning, and it has been retained.
The "羍" in the poem shows that the Zhou people came from qiang, a people who worship sheep and use sheep as a totem, and also let northerners call their father "big" with historical provenance. "Big" has become a sign of the inheritance of blood and ancestors here, and in the past, people in the Central Plains called the northern ethnic minorities "Dazi", and this "zi" is not the colloquial language we have in modern Chinese today, like chopsticks, quilts, stools or something, but the son of "Da" and the descendant of "Da". However, unfortunately, the word was later discriminated against and changed, and in the old days, the Han people called the Northern Peoples of Jinyuan, and also called the Mongols, so that it was later regarded as a curse word.
During the Ming Dynasty, the Mongols, driven by the Ming army to the northern steppes and deserts, split into Tatars and Wallachians (i.e., Weyrat Mongols, today's Kalmyk Mongols), and at the beginning of the division, the Tatars had the upper hand in the internal struggles of the Mongols, and they were relatively strong. The Ming army often had wars with it, and the battlefield was mainly in Inner Mongolia and northern Beijing, northern Shanxi and other regions; if the Ming army occupied the strategic initiative, the battlefield would sometimes develop to the Outer Mongolia region and Russia. In the course of the war, the names of the Ming soldiers and civilians for their opponents soon developed with the situation, from Mongols to Tatars, and out of factors such as historical and practical hatred between ethnic groups, economic superiority, cultural and psychological superiority, and the need for propaganda in political-military confrontations and struggles, the Tatars were deliberately called "Tartars" with strong derogatory connotations.
Over time, the word Tarzi became synonymous with the Mongols in the Ming Dynasty, and even if the strength and status of the Inner Mongolian Wa Thorn later surpassed that of the Tatars, the opponents of the Ming Dynasty were mainly replaced by the Wa Thorn people, and this title did not change again. Later, the power of the Mongol tribes declined, and the Jurchens in the northeast region arose, and the title of Tartar was extended to the Jurchens. Of course, when the Jurchens were called Jurchens in Tatars, in order to distinguish them from the Mongols, the Han Chinese at that time often called the Jurchens Liaodong Tatars, and later changed the name of the Jurchens to Manchus, and this contemptuous title was also changed to Manchu Tartars.
Although the meaning of the word has changed, the practice of calling the father "da" or "big" has been retained - later, perhaps it is difficult to distinguish which father has more than three children, which should be called "big", "big" and "father" have become one meaning - even today, people can still hear people refer to father as "big". This is very interesting, so that people can look back at the history is very far, but also can have a difference in identity, that is, the father is still called up, must be from the northern ethnic minorities, they can be ronghu, Xiongnu, Xianbei (Ruoran), Turkic, Uighur, Khitan, Jurchen, Mongolian and other ethnic descendants, these ethnic groups are in the same lineage, and standing at the source of these ethnic groups, only Ronghu and Xiongnu.
What is even more interesting is that in the title of "big", there are also big, two, three big... There seems to be an ancient custom of the northern minorities to adopt marriages. Therefore, "big" actually reflects the process of integration and development of our nation, and is evoked in one voice, and in the long river of history, people feel that they are deeply connected by blood. Finally, by the way, there are still some places in Shanxi that call the mother "sister", which is also very interesting, and also comes from ethnic minorities, "female" and "and", "and" is actually the worship of male reproduction. In addition, in order to reflect the equality of men and women, some places also call the aunt "Da", call the "aunt" "Dada", and call the aunt "Dada".
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