Today I learned from one of our PhD students from Myanmar that they don’t have a surname. In her culture people all have individual names, typically beginning with a name chosen by their parents that starts with the same first letter as the day of the week they were born, to correspond to their horoscope.
She therefore knew exactly what day she was born, while the two New Zealanders in the room had to look that up on our calendars.
The link below has some more about it. Also notable are that “Burmese women generally do not change their name at marriage” and “Burmese people may also change their name at any point in their life.”
https://culturalatlas.sbs.com.au/myanmar-burmese-culture/burmese-myanmar-culture-naming
@joncounts neat. It looks like Burma escaped colonizer influence, unlike other parts of South-East Asia where surnames took hold centuries ago.
@joncounts oh yeah, I was surprised when I noticed that, in India, people never had surnames pre-colonization.
@tetrislife @joncounts Wait, most of Southeast Asia doesn't use surnames. Most of Archipelago SEA uses patronymic names, not surnames.
@ubi
I went with surnames following "patronymic surnames" earlier in thread. I did mean patronymic in India since the colonizer.
There are some regions in India which use their village name as a surname, which is an adaption from "person P from village X" references, and others use their community name. The patronym started getting tacked on on top of that due to outside influence.
@joncounts
@tetrislife Interesting. I hadn’t thought of it like that.