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Concept
Traditional Chinese marriage
Summary
Traditional Chinese marriage () is a ceremonial ritual within Chinese societies that involves not only a union between spouses but also a union between the two families of a man and a woman, sometimes established by pre-arrangement between families. Marriage and family are inextricably linked, which involves the interests of both families. Within Chinese culture, romantic love and monogamy were the norm for most citizens. Around the end of primitive society, traditional Chinese marriage rituals were formed, with deer skin betrothal in the Fuxi era, the appearance of the "meeting hall" during the Xia and Shang dynasties, and then in the Zhou dynasty, a complete set of marriage etiquette ("six rituals") gradually formed. The richness of this series of rituals proves the importance the ancients attached to marriage. In addition to the unique nature of the "three letters and six rituals", monogamy, remarriage and divorce in traditional Chinese marriage culture are also distinctive.
The two-Chinese character word (pinyin: hūnyīn, literally "marriage") can be analyzed as follows:
(hūn) was defined as the father of a man's wife (e.g. a man's father-in-law) in Erya, the earliest known Chinese dictionary; but now it generally means "marriage" in Modern Standard Chinese. The character has the phonetic component 昏 (hūn, "dusk, nightfall, twilight, dark") beside the radical as well as the semantic component 女 (nǚ, "female"). The phonetic component 昏 itself was used as the ancient (original) form of 婚 in Old Chinese. This implies that wedding ceremonies were typically performed in the evenings when yang (representing days/male) and yin (representing nights/female) cross over.
(yīn) was defined as the father of a daughter's husband in Erya, but now generally means "marriage" or "relation by marriage" in Modern Chinese. The character has the same pronunciation as its phonetic component (yīn). According to Shuowen Jiezi, a dictionary of ancient Chinese characters, 因 in this character is not only a phonetic component but also means to "go to" or to "follow" one's husband.
Official source
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