Talk:East Asian age reckoning

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[edit] Same system in traditional Chinese age reckoning

A lot of the information on this page also applies to the traditional way of reckoning age in the Chinese community. I wonder if there is some way of either making a separate page for that without duplicating information, or merging the two usefully? (For that matter, I wonder if it also applies to other nearby cultures?) --ian 18:00, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

i'm surprised to hear that. do you mean the ordinal calendar years? i wonder what parts of china, cuz at least some chinese i know were puzzled by korean age counting, & did not celebrate the 100th day. i wouldn't be surprised at all if other cultures did this, but it's hard to google for, & sal & dol are native korean words afaik. is there already an article on chinese age reckoning? Appleby 19:59, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

I couldn't find an article on Chinese age reckoning, but I lived in Taiwan when I was little, and I learned the traditional way of counting age: you started at one year old when you were born (the reasoning being the same, that you spent a year in the womb), and gained a year each time the lunar new year rolled around. But IIRC, people called this "xu1 sui4 (虛歲)", and referred to the age reckoned by the Western method "shi2 sui4 (實歲)", which implies more legitmacy for the newer, Western method of age-reckoning.

I'm unfamiliar with celebrating the 100th day, and obviously the words used to refer to different ages differ between languages, so I think the commonality is mainly in the concept of age-reckoning. Also, I don't know if this practice is still used in mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc. --ian 21:02, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

In Japan, kazoe doshi (数え年 lit reckoned year or age), the traditional system of age reckoning, works in the same way. The Japanese article on kazoe doshi states it is common among East Asian countries.... And in Japan, the age reckoned by the standard (Western) system is called man nenrei (満年齢, lit. full age), similar to Korean. --Kusunose 17:08, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

then maybe the article needs to be renamed & extensively rewritten. in my limited personal experience, a couple of chinese and japanese people thought the sal system was confusing, & i had a hard time trying to google for this topic. maybe the only difference is the extent of modern usage? of course, feel free to correct the article. Appleby 05:51, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

I started some of the reorganization (I noticed Appleby also made some changes); feel free to correct my changes, fill in the missing information, etc. --ian 19:49, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

i'm very curious how widely the traditional system is used in japan/china/taiwan. it is pretty much the default conversational usage in korea, unless otherwise specified, as when filling out certain forms or for some legal definition purposes. Appleby 17:07, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

As far as I remember, the modern system is the one mostly used in Taiwan (especially in legal documents and with younger folks), but for religious rites (probably not Christian though?), fortune-telling, marriageability, etc., people do still use the traditional system. --ian 17:47, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

I do not know whether it is related or not, but in Persian the word for year is 'sál'; thus, for example, "do-sále" means "two years old". -Persiciser, 21 September 2006, 03:00 (UTC)