Ji (surname)

Ji is the pinyin romanization of a number of distinct Chinese surnames that are written with different characters in Chinese. Depending on the character, it may be spelled Jī, Jí, Jǐ, or Jì when tone diacritics are used. In Wade–Giles they are romanized as Chi. Languages using the Latin alphabet do not distinguish among the different Chinese surnames, rendering them all as Ji or Chi.

Surnames romanized as Ji

Ancient ancestral names

Other surnames

Jī

Jī (姬) was the ancestral name of the Zhou dynasty which ruled China between the 11th and 3rd centuries BC. Thirty-nine members of the family ruled China during this period while many others ruled as local lords, lords who eventually gained great autonomy during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods. Ji is a relatively uncommon surname in modern China, largely because its bearers often adopted the names of their states as new surnames.

The character is composed of the radicals 女 (Old Chinese: nra, "woman") and 𦣞 (OC: ɢ(r)ə, "chin"). It is most likely a phono-semantic compound, with nra common in the earliest Zhou-era family names and ɢ(r)ə marking a rhyme of 姬 (OC: K(r)ə).

The legendary and historical record shows the Zhou Ji clan closely entwined with the Jiang (姜), who seem to have provided many of the Ji lords' high-ranking spouses. A popular theory in recent Chinese scholarship has suggested that they represented two important clans – the Ji originally centered on the Fen River in Shanxi and the Jiang around the Wen River in Shaanxi – whose union produced the Zhou state ruled by Old Duke Danfu, although the theory remains problematic.

Chang (surname)

Chang (/tʃɑːŋ/) is the pinyin romanization of the Chinese surname 常 (Cháng). It was listed 80th among the Song-era Hundred Family Surnames.

"Chang" is also the Wade-Giles romanization of two Chinese surnames written Zhang in pinyin: one extremely common and written 張 in traditional characters and 张 in simplified characters, and another quite rare and written as 章 in both systems. There is also a rare case of 鄭 in Hong Kong written as Chang as well. For full details on them, see the "Zhang" 章 and "Zheng" 鄭 article. In Macao, this is the spelling of the surname "Zeng" 曾.

Romanization

常 is romanized as Ch'ang in Wade-Giles, although the apostrophe is often omitted in practice. It is romanized as Soeng and Sheung in Cantonese; Seong and Siông in Minnan languages; and Sioh in Teochew. It is occasionally romanized Sōng and Thōng as well.

It is the source of the Vietnamese surname Thường. The Korean surname romanized as Sang (상). In Japanese, it is romanized as Jō.

Distribution

常 was unlisted among the most recent rankings of the 100 most common Chinese surnames in mainland China and on Taiwan based on household registrations in 2007, although the Ministry of Public Security in 2008 listed is as the 87th most common surname in China based on its database of National Identity Cards, shared by at least 2.4 million Chinese citizens. It was the 94th-most-common surname during the 1982 Chinese census.