Names
The name "Yangtze", which is also spelled "Yangtse" or "Yangzi", is derived from the local name for a stretch of the lower Yangtze near Yangzhou.
"Yangzi" (Chinese: 扬子; pinyin: Yángzǐ) was the name of a village and site of an ancient ferry crossing, and "Jiang" (Chinese: 江; pinyin: Jiāng) is one of the Chinese words for river. In the 13th century, the famous Song Dynasty official, Wen Tianxiang penned a poem entitled Yangzi Jiang. Later, Western missionaries heard the name and applied it to the entire river.
Read more about this topic: Yangtze River
Famous quotes containing the word names:
“If goodness were only a theory, it were a pity it should be lost to the world. There are a number of things, the idea of which is a clear gain to the mind. Let people, for instance, rail at friendship, genius, freedom, as long as they willthe very names of these despised qualities are better than anything else that could be substituted for them, and embalm even the most envenomed satire against them.”
—William Hazlitt (17781830)
“The instincts of merry England lingered on here with exceptional vitality, and the symbolic customs which tradition has attached to each season of the year were yet a reality on Egdon. Indeed, the impulses of all such outlandish hamlets are pagan still: in these spots homage to nature, self-adoration, frantic gaieties, fragments of Teutonic rites to divinities whose names are forgotten, seem in some way or other to have survived mediaeval doctrine.”
—Thomas Hardy (18401928)
“Our foreparents were mostly brought from West Africa.... We were brought to America and our foreparents were sold; white people bought them; white people changed their names ... my maiden name is supposed to be Townsend, but really, what is my maiden name? What is my name?”
—Fannie Lou Hamer (19171977)