ZHONG SHUHE (钟叔河) has a short column every Friday in the book review section of The Beijing News in which he runs modern translations and explanations of interesting excerpts from old books. Recently the excerpts have been from 《康居笔记》 (Kang Residence Notebook), a book written in the Republican period by 徐珂 (Xu Ke). This Friday's was on men with women's names:
There are men's names which at first glance look like women's names. Shi Mangu (石曼姑) in the Zuo Zhuan, Feng Fu (冯妇) in Mencius, Yu Nu ([女禹]女) in Zhuangzi, Xu Furen (徐夫人) in the Biography of Jing Ke, Ding Furen (丁夫人) in History of the Former Han, and Ji Yan (暨艳) in the Records of the Three Kingdoms.
The radical in both 姑 (gū) and 妇 (fù) is woman (女), and in normal usage refer to women: 姑娘 is "girl" and 媳妇 is "wife", for example. As a full character, 女 also appears in the name Yu Nu (which I had always seen given as 女偊 (Nǚ Yǔ), an older man whose youthful appearance comes from his interaction with the Dao. The character 艳 (yàn) means brightly colored and is popular in women's names.
The compound 夫人 (fūren) means "wife", so instead of names those two examples could be read as "Mrs Xu" and "Mrs Ding". The character 夫 by itself, however, means "man" and typically is used in the sense of "husband". The compound 夫妇 (fūfù) means "husband and wife". Zhong Shuhe notes that in a television production of the story of Jing Ke's assassination attempt on the King of Qin, the producers brought in an old lady to play the role of Xu Furen. It was not until after they had finished filming that they became aware of the error, and rather than reshoot, they chose to depart from the historical record and change the lady's surname.
As a more recent example, Zhong mentions that when the author Zhou Zuoren (周作人, brother to Lu Xun) first started writing, he used the pseudonyms 萍云女士 "Ms. Pingyun" and 碧罗女士 "Ms. Biluo".
你可以使用这个链接引用该篇文章 http://publishblog.blogchina.com/blog/tb.b?diaryID=514771