HOW to address a person with their correct and proper title may be one of the most complicated aspects of Chinese culture.

　　It is not the same as in English where the courtesy titles are simply displayed as father, mother, grandpa, grandma, Mr, Ms, or Mrs.

　　The Chinese have many ways to describe a person depending on his or her kinship and social connections and they vary depending on whether the titles are being spoken or given in writing.

　　Relatives on the father's and mother's sides also have different titles.

　　"Family connections are very important to Chinese and they are also very complicated," said Wanyan Shaoyuan, editor of the Shanghai Bookstore Publishing House.

　　The father's father is called yeye or zufu, while the mother's father is waigong or waizufu. Wai means offshoot or collateral. Chinese think that relatives on the father's side are closer to them so they are given different titles to distinguish them.

　　Father's elder brother is bofu and younger brother is shufu, while mother's brothers are called jiufu.

　　Almost every family member has a different title, which can confuse not only foreigners but also younger Chinese who grew up in much smaller families where they were the only child at home.

　　Creative addresses

　　For one person, there may be several titles expressing the same meaning.

　　Father-in-law is called taishan(Mount Tai in East China's Shandong Province.)

　　The title originated in the Tang Dynasty (618-907) when the emperor, after ascending the throne, would go to the top of Mount Tai to offer a sacrifice to God.

　　Zhang Shui, the prime minister of Tang Ming Huang - a famous emperor for his romance with one concubine - was responsible for the ceremony and his son-in-law was also promoted because of this.

　　Other officials satirized them, saying that his promotion was because of Mount Tai. Since then, father-in-laws received the name taishan.

　　Since Mount Tai was also called dongyue (dong means east and yue means high mountains) and a peak on the mountain was called zhangrenfeng, father-in-laws thus received another two names - yuefu and zhangren.

　　Taishan, yuefu and zhangren are more often used in written form or when a man talks about his father-in-law in front of others. When face-to-face, he would just call him, baba (father).

　　The ancient Chinese paid much attention toshavingsgood manners, thus lots of courtesy titles were created. Most of them are not used now except in some literary works.

　　In China, younger people must never call their elders by their names as is sometimes done in Western cultures.

　　In ancient times, women had a lower status in Chinese society. When a man talked about his wife, he used jiannei or neiren(jian means humble, nei means the person staying inside one's house - that is, wives, who didn't go out in those days).

　　Wife and husband are only a pair of legal titles. In Chinese families, the most popular title for wife is laopo and laogong for husband.

　　Lao means old, while po and gong stands for elderly lady and gentleman. These originally polite titles are now used as intimate forms of address between a couple.

　　Modern appellations

　　After 1949 when the People's Republic of China was set up, airen (my lover, my sweetheart) began to be used insgroupsto show the equal status of man and woman in monogamous marriage.

　　The new form of address was said to have come from the Russians, who were very close to the Chinese in the revolutionary years.

　　So was the widespread use of tongzhi (comrade).

　　However, this title is no longer in common use because it now has the connotation of someone being gay. Its new meaning originated in Hong Kong.

　　The same situation occurs with xiaojie (Ms, madam) which is a form of address for escort girls and prostitutes.

　　Since different parts of the country vary in ways of calling a person. xiaojie is taboo in North China but it can be used in southern parts, such as Shanghai.

　　Some titles were derived from English words.The most popular one namowen, which has a similar pronunciation to "No. 1."

　　This title in Chinese refers to tough and mean overseers or the foremen in a factory.

　　In hierarchical feudalistic societies, people were addressed strictly according to their social ranking. Nucai (your humble slave or servant) in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) is one example of this.

　　Currently, Chinese are used to calling a person by his or her surname followed by their position title.

　　If close enough, people add lao (old) or xiao (young) in front of a person's surname.

　　The person addressed may not be really old or young and it's just a way to show friendliness.

　　But Chinese never use just the surname to address a person as foreigners often do and they seldom call others by their given name if the name is only a single word.