The Year of the Tiger is coming,
Ask everyone a cold knowledge,
When you know Tiger as a surname,
Read what?
The answer you must not think!
The tiger surname does not read "hǔ",
And read "māo".
According to media reports, in the mainland, the number of Tiger surnames is extremely rare, mainly distributed in Zhaotong, Yunnan and Chengdu, Sichuan, Xindu District, Pidu District, in addition to Gansu, Nanjing, Guizhou, there are also Hu surnames.
But why is the surname "tiger" (hǔ),
But should it be pronounced as "cat" (māo)?
According to a scholar surnamed Li who has studied the tiger surname in Chengdu, there are many Hui people in the tiger surname, and the people with the tiger surname are called "māo" between each other, or outsiders call the tiger surname, "the shouting method has been passed down from ancient times to the present, and it is not a name that only exists in the year of the tiger."
Why is it called "cat" instead of "tiger"? Mr. Li introduced that he has gone to the place where people with the surname of Hu live in the field, "because in everyone's impression, tigers are more fierce, cats are more docile, and tigers also belong to the feline family, so tigers are also called big cats." ”
Hu Yongfang, the chief of the Sichuan Chengdu Fangcao Volunteer Corps, is a Hui person known as "Tiger Mother". The 74-year-old told reporters that listening to the older generation, from the perspective of national customs, the surname tiger is not called "tiger", but "cat", but with the development of the times and the great integration of nationalities, now everyone calls her "tiger" surname, not "cat" surname, "there are also called cats, but they are very rare." And when others call her a "cat" surname, she also feels normal, "like a word has two tones." ”
Associate Professor Liu Dongxu of Minzu University of China
In an interview with the media, he said:
"More special surnames like 'Tiger' are related to historical development."
Historically, the origin of the tiger surname has probably two sources:
The first is from the descendants of Bo Hu, one of the "Eight Yuan" of the ancient Shunchen, with the tiger as the clan. According to ancient historical legends, Bo Hu was the minister of Emperor Zhao. The descendants of the Bohu clan then took the tiger as the surname and called the tiger clan, which became an important source of today's tiger family. According to the historical records "Customs and Traditions", "Zuo Zhuan" and other records, "Eight Yuan", that is, eight talented people in ancient legends, one of whom is Bohu, and his descendants take the ancestral name as a surname, called Hushi, pronounced hú.
The second is the tiger surname from the Hui people: the tiger surname in the Hui people, taken from the first sound of the ancestral name, pronounced māo. For example, in the Ming Dynasty, the Western Regions people of the Western Regions, Qiu Kebier, lived in Nanjing to serve as the deputy qianhu of Jinyi Wei, and his son Hu Bei'er, who took Hu Bei'er as his surname, included Sun Huxian and Huma Town.
The next time I meet someone with the surname Tiger,
I know how to read it
— Late Night Selection —
Source | Oriental Net, Red Star News, People's Daily Online, Youth Shanghai, Youth Beijing
Edit | Lu Chuyi