Scholarship covers morphology, register law and demography (KOSTAT, household surveys). That is enough science.
Stroke-count fortune and five-element name scoring are folk systems. They may be described as culture; they are not endorsed as mechanisms here.
Findings
- Chinese historians — Generation names as kin coordinates
A shared character locates a person in a descent cohort — genealogy, not fate.
- Korean researchers — 돌림자 as set-marking
Sibling-set syllables are a design pattern; KOSTAT still shows fashion moving around them.
- Ministry / scholars — Jinmeiyō as a closed inventory
What can be filed is an empirical legal fact.
- Statistics Korea — Frequency without fortune
Annual given-name counts are the honest popularity layer.
- Lieberson (contrast) — Fashion still exists under characters
Phonetic and stylistic waves happen in hangul/pinyin too; characters do not freeze taste.
- Migration scholars — Romanisation as a second name
The Latin form becomes the everyday name in English rooms — stacked identity.
Mechanisms
- Composition — Two characters (or a character plus a generation slot) combine senses and sounds.
- Reading vs writing — Japanese names especially: the kanji and the reading can surprise outsiders.
- List constraint — If it is not jinmeiyō/jōyō, the koseki clerk can refuse it.
- Cohort marking — 돌림자 and generation poems make cousins readable as a set.
Debates
- Should luck calculations be taught as culture or refused as science? — This atlas: describe if you must, never prescribe.
- Hangul-only vs hanja given names — A Korean values and class conversation — not a quality score.
- Who owns the generation poem in a diaspora family? — Elders, parents, or nobody — a live kin-politics question.
Cultural depth is the point. Destiny physics is the thing we are not doing.