The generation poem
Given names in Korean are almost always two syllables, with the first syllable usually being shared with your siblings and cousins (all the children of the same generation of a family, basically). I just grew up with this and didn’t think it was weird until I had cause to explain it to someone yesterday, at which point I stopped and wondered if I was making all of this up, it seemed so weird, how the heck do they coordinate that? Do the parents of the first kid of the new generation decide, or something? That doesn’t sound right. I looked it up, and it turns out that family lines keep a constant character array in a poem:
The sequence of generation is typically prescribed and kept in record by a generation poem (bāncì lián 班次聯 or pàizì gē 派字歌 in Chinese) specific to each lineage. While it may have a mnemonic function, these poems can vary in length from around a dozen characters to hundreds of characters. Each successive character becomes the generation name for successive generations. After the last character of the poem is reached, the poem is usually recycled though occasionally it may be extended.
Generation poems were usually composed by a committee of family elders whenever a new lineage was established through geographical emigration or social elevation. Thus families sharing a common generation poem are considered to also share a common ancestor and have originated from a common geographical location.
A note: I vaguely remember learning as a child that genealogy books (in which these poems are presumably written) were often bought from financially struggling noble families by nouveau riche merchant families in times of class churn, but I can’t find an online source on this. My dad claims that we descend from a famous 11th century Korean general, and I remember suspecting this wasn’t true, he just had a successful non-noble recent ancestor.
Backfilling syllables
The mapping from Chinese character to Korean syllable is many-to-one, so that given a name(-sound), there are multiple potential meanings per syllable.
This might be best understood starting from the Chinese case: a Chinese child’s name is written with character(s) with fixed meanings, and the sounds might collide with other characters (although tones disambiguate some, I imagine). You might have two kids in the same school whose names sound similar/the same, but one of them writes it Quellable Circumference and the other one writes it Treasure Bead1.
All Korean does is add a parallel phonetic writing system and remove tones. The two kids have the exact same name as far as most people know – they are written the same way in Korean writing, and pronounced the same way (since no tones), but the underlying Chinese characters are in their government documentation somewhere, their parents know which Chinese characters they chose, and the kid knows their name-meaning as well.
Something I can get away with, as an American is picking Ji- as the common syllable but picking different Ji characters to match the second syllable’s meaning. So I could have three kids who are named Jia, Jiseong, and Jiye, whose names mean intellect-elegance, comprehend-star, and ambition-craft. This breaks rules, but there’s no Chinese language documentation for them for anyone to notice
Footnotes
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A user submitted name in behindthename.com’s Korean section claims that Jinju – a common name meaning ‘pearl’ – can also be written as 鎭 quellable 周 circumference, which I like to think is the product of a hard labor. ↩