When I read on Chinese, Korean and Japanese history pre-European contact, I find people styled with European titles like Duke, Count, Marquis, etc. What are the native words for this titles and to what extent can they be compared with their European counterparts?

by masiakasaurus

*these

diseased_oranguntan

The European terminology for aristocrats was mostly derived from Roman military ranks, as the Empire devolved into basically warlords who still claimed Roman titles for the prestige. Likewise Chinese/Japanese/Korean noble ranks were created by the respective imperial systems and in a certain sense aren't really equivalent. China and Korea maintained more or less unbroken imperial systems from the classical era/early hundreds AD to the modern day, while Japan's system collapsed around 1000 AD and was replaced by warlords for the remaining time

wumao

I'm not sure why you say pre European contact because the titles basically continued to be used all the way until the end of Imperial China. It's a battle between literal translation versus phonetic translation. It becomes rather pedantic when you keep referring to Chinese emperors as huangdis since obviously emperor is a Roman term, but the differences are minute, and for the layman rather inconsequential. A huangdi ocupies the same role as an emperor in western minds. I would answer your question directly and give you a list of all those titles in their respective languages, but honestly it's as easy as typing them into google search.