Something Serious

I never read about this anywhere, but sort of made it up as I started teaching Chinese.  It is probably something studied by East Asian Studies PhD candidates time and time over.  Why is it that we reverse the order of things when we give dates in Chinese?  when we give addresses?  When we give first and last names?

As a teen coming to the U.S. whenever I had to give my address in English, I saw the number '1645' on my mailbox, the tree-lined Bedford Road, the town of San Marino, greater L.A., Cali, and then the United States of America.  It's like going on GoogleEarth and -- zoom out.  Voila!  I wasn't sure if American people have such vivid visual image when they are giving their addresses.  

After several times of teaching how Chinese people give their family names first then given names last, I was really wondering if it's true that Chinese people value their families so much that in order to honor them, we put family names before given names.  I heard it somewhere.  But of course growing up with it I never gave it a second thought.  I started thinking though -- could it be something more significant than honoring one's family?  We begin giving someone's name by identifying the clan, then sometimes generation, and finally individual members.  With household addresses, we begin by giving the country, province, county, city, district, neighborhood, street, and finally, house number.  It's GoogleEarth, but zooming in.  Giving dates too,  we start with the year, and refine it by giving the month, the date and then the day of the week (the opposite of the European or American format).  

Could it be that, traditionally, the Chinese considers the society before they do the individuals?  Family always comes before individual?  Considering the Euro-centric tradition of the western culture, does it contribute to the fact that the individual comes before the society?  It's culture that fuses itself with language.  Maybe I am reading too much into it.  I tried to not let my excitement overtake me.  When I had to teach the date, the address, and name formats this year, I shared my visual of zooming in and out, and my hypothesis on the differences between the cultures.  I think it went right over the heads of some students, but a few of them did enjoy thinking about language through a 'possible' cultural lens.  I had to come clean with my students that I did not know of any research that endorses the connection between language and philosophy in this particular case.  But they can now remember it in a way that may be culturally meaningful.