English should adopt the French convention of capitalizing the family (last) name. For example, this would make it ABE Shinzo, which would remove ambiguity. When encountering East (thanks for the reminder) Asian (or Hungarian, for that matter) names in emails for example, I'm usually worried about if their "last" name in the directory is their given name and what they should be addressed by or their actual last name.
Agree. This is, actually, a regular (if not standard) practice in many domains of academic bibliography for Chinese authors (which is useful, as some individuals with Chinese personal and family names working in Anglophone contexts do follow the English convention of putting personal names first -- meaning that you often can't tell which is the personal and which is the family name in pinyin, e.g. "Li Jia")
Fun fact: Han Chinese surnames are almost always one character, but there are a very few that are two characters[1] -- usually, they're very old, very aristocratic names. E.g. "Sima 司馬", "Ouyang 歐陽", and "Zhuge 諸葛".
I have seen emails from Japanese colleagues where the last name is capitalized for clarity.
Capitalization is particularly useful for Chinese names where names are not written in Chinese symbols (hanzi/漢字) because the romanized names could be ambiguous as to what is the first name; for example: 江劉鋒 JIANG Liufeng (where both Jiang and Liu could be potential Chinese surnames)
> the romanized names could be ambiguous as to what is the first name; for example: 江劉鋒 JIANG Liufeng (where both Jiang and Liu could be potential Chinese surnames)
On the other hand, it'd be pretty hard for the surname to occur in the middle of the name, where you have the 刘.
On the Uber app, they only provide the given name and not the full surname. I mistakenly thought my driver was surnamed LIU, when his actual surname is JIANG. Just pointing an anecdote when I was in Taiwan
If you only hear it spoken, or you don't understand the naming convention and start making guesses about what you think is going on. People in countries where middle names are normal also tend to make the assume that one of the syllables is a middle name.
It's not for Malaysian born Chinese. We usually have three names. For example, mine is SOH Kam Yung:
SOH - family name
Kam - 'generational' name (same as for my brothers)
Yung - my given name
For simplicity, I usually add a hyphen (Kam-Yung) in my name to make it easier for people to refer to me in non-formal settings, i.e. I should be called "Kam Yung" or "Mr. Soh".
Calling me "Kam" (it has happened) is nonsensical from my point of view.
Same for Koreans. Capitalizing the first character of the 'generational' name and lowercase for given name could work.
But I think emphasizing the given name offers better UX so given name should be all caps and family name should be all lowercase like this: YUNG Kam soh or soh Kam YUNG.
> But I think emphasizing the given name offers better UX […]
How? You are introducing a custom capitalization convention nobody uses. People expect the UPPERCASED name, if present, to be the surname (or whatever you can sensible put after Mr/Ms). Going against strong conventions is not a good user experience.
As others have alluded to--here's an explanation for _a good portion_ of the people who have two character given names. The first character of the given name is defined by ancestors, generations ago in a poem. Each subsequent generation uses the next character of that poem.
"I thought the given name in Chinese was almost always two characters. Is this not the case?"
Not at all. Nowadays there are hundreds of millions of people in Mainland China with a single-character given name. Case in point: former tennis player Li Na, former basketball player Yao Ming.
I say "Mainland China" because I notice people from Hongkong and Taiwan have mostly two-character given names.
> That's interesting, I thought the given name in Chinese was almost always two characters. Is this not the case?
It depends, I think. I don't know about all of China, but in some places they alternate the length of the given name by generation (e.g. if you have a two-character given name, you give your children a one-character name, and vice versa).
Fun fact: some German names (e.g. Strauß) change spelling when capitalized. The letter "ß" is a ligature that only exists as a lower case letter and has to be written as "SS" when capitalized.
Names are fun. I recently had dealings with a company that assumed in its employee roster that the last word entered in the name field was your last name (i.e. anything beyond the last space). One of my coworkers was from Spain and had a last name consisting of two words separated by a space. She was the very definition of a failure case for that system.
It was terrible because you could get all 3 choices in a lowercase usage (s, ss, ß) and then lose that distinction when capitalizing. You couldn't reliably uncapitalize such words unless somebody disobeyed the rules by leaving the ß unmolested.
Lingering affects will be with us for ages, for example in the rules that computers use to do sorting and searching. The default capitalization rules for Unicode can't really change because that would break somebody's database or filesystem.
Note that there is now an official capital "ß", after being adopted as official in 2017. It has been in Unicode for longer. The situation is fairly complicated.
In Spain there are two last names, not a last name "with a space" between words. Traditionally paternal first, maternal second, although the law has changed to be able to use any order. Both must be present in legal documents or ID card, passport, etc.
It is a real pain for Spaniards living abroad. It is not a middle name, a two worded last name, or anything of that sort. Full legal name = First name + Parent A's 1st last name + Parent B's 1st last name.
Edit : As pointed out in another comment, a Spanish last name can be a two worded one, and a first name can be as well, and often is. So you could end up with for instance, a 5-word nightmarish José Carlos ( 1st name ) García ( 1st last name ) De Maestre ( 2nd last name ).
> One of my coworkers was from Spain and had a last name consisting of two words separated by a space.
It's two last names, father and mother first last names. I guess the same definition works, but it's worth noting that any last name might contain a space.
Some Japanese people do this already when writing their names in English, and Wikipedia's article "Japanese name" claims that it's recommended by the Ministry of Education. I'm usually against non-standard capitalization, but because it reduces the potential for confusion I support it here.
I've never seen it used in mainstream news or literature, only in software and scientific papers, and not always then. I just searched for '.jp' in the Linux kernel changelog and none of the Japanese contributors I found wrote their names like that.
I see names like Macdonald and MacDonald, where one family prefers the mid-capitalisation to another or family names like De Havilland. But it seems like a reasonable disambiguation to capitalise a family name.
Could you be more specific about what makes it "wrong".
FWIW my family name is commonly misspelt, life is too short to get too hung up about it. In my case it's just a name that existed prior to English standardisation.
In genealogical research it's typical to not only standardize capitalization of family names (typically to ALL CAPS) but to also standardize spelling to the most common or first used spelling. Otherwise searching becomes a very frustrating venture, and these things change surprisingly quickly through generations.
A long time back soundex [1] was used for matching things like names. I imagine there might be yet better algorithms these days but that one probably still solves this problem relatively well.
Would this not render fairly unambiguously to MAGUIDHIR (?spelling, corrected in an edit as I got it wildly wrong)? It only seems confusing if you're not Irish, and I'm already completely at sea with names that aren't Western European so this seems like a fine tradeoff to make.
But you're going to dreadfully confuse people looking for Mark McGwire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_McGwire), for example. (And possibly "MacGuiver". I'm kind of unconvinced that it's related.)
wrong could be contrary to your preferred style. that's just how it goes. just because you don't care if others misspell you name doesn't mean that applies to all others.
I care, it's just it's an emotional response and over time I've realised that there's no real logical reason to correct it in most every situation. Of course people are not logical, and I don't expect others to share my values -- in part that's the point of asking question to get another perspective that I can use to alter my own.
I don't know about jlv2, but the Dutch frequently have a tussenvoegsel[1], an insertion between their names which is properly lowercased but is a part of the family name.
So the physicist who researched molecular stickiness is named Johannes Diderik van der Waals. His surname is "van der Waals" and a scientific reference should be cited as "van der Waals, JD", sorted alongside other surnames starting with W (either sorted at WAALS∅∅JD where ∅ is a symbol that evaluates less than any letter, or occasionally you will see them sorted at W∞VAN∅DER∅WAALS∅∅JD so that all of the tussenvoegsels end up at the end of their section, where ∞ is a symbol that evaluates greater than any letter).
It is considered formally incorrect to capitalize tussenvoegsels, except when they begin a sentence or when you precede them with an article like Mr. or Dr. You would probably want to write his name in this last-name-capitalized-first-no-commas convention as “van der KAMP Johannes Diderik;” writing ”VAN DER KAMP” looks wrong to me—but I am not sure what the French do.
Is there a Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Surnames yet? There’s famously one for names in general.
Your post made me want to check the rules of the "particule" in French [1], with regard to French names, as in: Charles de Gaulle, Jean de La Fontaine or Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu.
Turns out, capitalization depends on the grammatical construct. It's always capitalized at the beginning of a sentence, or to avoid ambiguity as in "Les mémoires de De Sèze". It's never capitalized when writing the full name (Jean de La Fontaine). In other constructs, it's complicated, and quite subjective...
Foreign names with particules follow the rules of the country of origin.
As a french, it seems perfectly normal to see Charles DE GAULLE.
This convention comes from the bureaucracy in France, they usually write your family name in capital letter. By the way my company does the same, all our names are in capital letter in Exchange
This doesn't work in media that doesn't distinguish letters by case. That's still fairly common for things like forms and other official records that only use capital letters.
Yes, this works well in writing and it is common practice in Eastern Asia. However, how about oral conversation?
Sometimes, I am not sure what is the proper way to introduce my Chinese name in English conversations? If I put family name at first, it would confuse English speakers. If I put given name first, the sound of my name feels so weird to me as that is not what I heard outside English environments.
Well, it doesn't solve the problem of communicating whether you are using the family name or given name, which is an important piece of information to know since it indicates the level of familiarity / intimacy / distance. This distinction is a bit less common for personal conversations in English-speaking countries but important in many parts of the world.
Perhaps I would be talking to "Cheng", but later I would be talking about "Professor Cheng".
In my experience, while it is common for a Chinese personal name to be one syllable, it's not at all common for a person to be addressed by that one-syllable name. There are several strategies:
1. A person with a one-syllable name might be addressed by their whole name. For example, a 孙艺 might be called 孙艺 in speech, even though 孙 is the family name.
2. The person might have a nickname. For example, I know someone who goes by his nickname 哈哈; I've never heard his actual name.
3. The one-syllable name might be reduplicated; 袁璐 might be addressed as 璐璐.
4. The one-syllable name might be prefixed with 小; 李宁 might be addressed as 小宁.
Options 3 and 4 are diminutive constructions and may be too intimate for a strange man (or even a familiar man) to use to a woman.
I was thinking of the context where you are talking to someone in English, but they have a Chinese name. In Chinese I assume it would be much less ambiguous how to address someone with a Chinese name.
- Everyone has exactly one well-defined "family name". (In Latin America people have more than one, and some cultrues may go by a single name that isn't a family indicator.)
- In every formal context, the "family name" is how you should address someone. (You do not address the queen of England as "Mrs. Windsor", and Saddam Hussein preferred to be known as "Saddam", which is not a family name.)
(With that said, if it's understood that those assumptions hold, this is a great convention and I endorse it ... at least for the first mention in an article.)
> In every formal context, the "family name" is how you should address someone. (You do not address the queen of England as "Mrs. Windsor", and Saddam Hussein preferred to be known as "Saddam", which is not a family name.)
Don't these "falsehoods" just become ridiculous at some point? Like, am I really supposed to carve out special cases in my shitty app's business logic for the Queen and Saddam Hussein?
A better counterexample here would be Russian conventions of address. I'm not sure why the grandparent comment used such rare, basically-ignorable cases instead.
As someone whose (bog-standard American-style) last name is also a common first name, this convention would save me a lot of trouble as well. It’s a consistent source of confusion for secretaries, receptionists, and so on.
When Japanese people write out their names in English, they often use this convention anyway (esp. in papers and the like), since it may not be clear which name order the writer has chosen to use.
It probably doesn't matter too much, but this is a lossy conversion. For example "Fred McIntosh" -> "MCINTOSH Fred". So the capitalization of the "I" is lost.
> English should adopt the French convention of capitalizing the family (last) name.
I've seen that convention used in English-language sources more often than in French-language sources, which seem to usually use the pattern (also dominant in English) of initial caps for names with none of the name elements in all caps. Is that really a “French convention”?
The "Last, First" convention exists in English as well. To me it reads as something you'd see in the index of a book, since indices are usually ordered by last name but they'll want to show the first names as well.
It could be per-language, i.e. use family-given when speaking Japanese or given-family when speaking English. That's more what I'm getting at.
This would also (I'd propose) hold true for non-Japanese names; if family-given is conventional when speaking Japanese, and my English name is John Johnson, it'd only be fair for my Japanese name to be ordered as Johnson John.
Would it be though? If all caps becomes standard, and the given name isn't in caps, it would mean the single letter family name is the single letter one.
My wife is a Mongolian Chinese from Xinjiang, and she doesn't have a last name like other Mongolians follow single name convention. That brings lots of mess to our life in Japan.
Firstly I should note that her Chinese passport records her first name as the last name, which I think is a widely adopted way; however, whenever I purchase a boarding pass for her, I need to inquire the company how to fill a required first name field in the form. Most commonly, they let me use a placeholder "MS" in the first name field. Still, even following their instructions, we face minor trouble at ticket counter sometimes. That is fine because the airline offers us compensation such as free first-class seat conversion. So boarding pass is a frequency-wise problem for us.
In severity-wise, the social security system in Japan frightened me. Oh dear. Very soon after I started my career, their representative called me that they would input whitespace (I guess it's in multibyte) as her last name, and told me that they could not guarantee it won't cause any trouble. Imagine you work for 30-40 years and the government's mother-AI sentences that you are not eligible for the national pension as your residential profile doesn't match with the whitespace! Not quite surreal to think about it if the AI learned the less diverse culture in Japan. But I digress. Currently, my wife and I consider registering the legal FBN to use my family name to prevent upcoming troubles.
Software developers, please have a moment to think of the NULL name when your product owner tries to set the first name as required.
There is an impressive amount of variation regarding personal name formats even within Asia.
In my culture (Thai), I put my given name first and then my family name (inherited from my father), like in most of the west, but actually my name of formal address is my first, given name, and my family name is hardly ever used except as a differentiator. [1]
In Vietnamese culture, I believe the given name is also the name of formal address, yet the family name comes first as in China and Japan. Hence Nguyen Anh would be called "Anh".
I have seen the following variations in Pakistan. Given name is what people prefer to be called informally. * marks if people strongly prefer to be referred to by this name in a formal setting. Prefixes are usually religious in nature (Muhammad/Syed) and then you are never supposed to use them except when reading out the full name.
FamilyName GivenName*
<optional prefix> GivenName FamilyName
GivenName* Father'sGivenName
GivenName Father'sGivenName FamilyName
Father'sGivenName GivenName FamilyName
Prefix GivenName*
My name is of the third type and as a scientist it annoys me immensely that my work is referred to by my Father'sGivenName in western culture when no one has ever called me that in real life in my culture.
I did not know that this was common in Pakistan. I am from south India and my name (and almost all names in this part of the country) are of the form.
<GivenName> <Father's Given Name>.
This gets less common as one moves towards the north of the country, where
<Given Name> <Family Name>
is more common. So I had assumed the Pakistan would be same given its proximity to and shared culture with North India.
(actually the name is <initial> <given nane> where the initial is the first letter of the father/mother's name. When expanded to satisfy the north - esp for passports or in a western system, it becomes <first>-<Father's first> or <fathers first> - <first>. the reason it is that way in the south was related to the self respect movement aimed at eliminating caste among others. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_name#Tamil_Nadu)
My family immigrated from North India (UP) at partition and we use the <GivenName> <Father's Given Name> convention. Most of these other mentioned conventions are from Pakistan's Punjab, but also from other areas.
Not OP. But similar situation. My name is of the form <given nane> <father's given name> (a bit more complicated than that, see my other comment). So if my father's given name is Jack, my name may be Michael Jack. In my native setting I am always referred to as Mr Michael. Very rarely Mr Michael Jack. Never Mr Jack, because that is how my father would be referred to as. So in a western setting I am almost always called Mr Jack and in my mind it is my dad, not me.
I think this is the start of the hockey stick graph in the unicode-ification of the world
We are becoming a closer more integrated world and we will find it waaaaay easier to have common shared conventions and regulations - but that does not mean we all choose an existing one, (ie cultural hegemony) we just migrate to a new one, more complex perhaps but one that fits (more or less) everybody.
It's fascinating (been fighting unicode legacy issues today so it's top of mind)
In this example the Japanese are actually asking foreign media outlets to switch to the naming conventions they already use for Korea and China, $LASTNAME $FIRSTNAME. (E.g. Tsai Ing-wen, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, Moon Jae-in, and now Abe Shinzo)
So Japan isn't converging with the rest of the dominant Western convention.
Factoid: reminds me of a strip in a recent superman comics, I quote a villain getting his message broadcasted on every devices of the planet: "You really should settle on a common language or you'll never achieve anything significant as a specie".
I think we're pretty close with English, or it's at least the best candidate. Most of the knowledge recently produced (since WWII) is in it, and the world's largest economy uses it. It's also taken a little something from every one.
With that said, I think national pride will prevent such a thing happening. As an American, I wouldn't want to learn someone else's language as a "common tongue", though have no objections to using it for communication. Same thing with units: I'll convert if needed, but won't use yours. I've also got a bit of an objection to "design by committee" (i.e. esperanto) because it is either influenced primarily by one language (which goes back to the "other guy's language" objection above) or has little influence from other languages (meaning massive barriers to adoption). Most Americans are also highly resistant to bureaucrats dispensing "what's best" from on high, be it with language, units, or most other things.
It's also a cultural thing: how much tradition, history, and lore would be lost if we all spoke the same thing?
It will depend on how long the US remains the reigning power. If China bowls the US over, English can be undone fairly quickly. Mandarin is spoken by 20% of the world population.
English is not the obstacle; the Latin alphabet is.
There is a much higher chance that Western countries could move from English to another Latin-alphabet language (e.g. Spanish) than to any language rooted in ideograms. Which is why, for example, Japanese has made no real inroads despite 40 years of massive economic influence.
plenty of overseas chinese in countries that don't speak english... chinese speakers of mandarin and indonesian, minnan and indonesian, mandarin and french, mandarin and german, mandarin and quebecois, etc.
Mandarin is spoken overwhelmingly by residents of China. English is an official language of education and government in at least one country on every continent. In South Asia it’s common for the upper middle classes and up to speak English better than what’s theoretically their native language. If the US was magically replaced by parallel universe with no people US English dominance would last at least a century. Spoken Latin and French both survived as lingua franca long past the apex of their sponsoring powers.
On en a plusieurs. Et c'est l'opinion d'un vilain qui est ici citée.
(I suggest we get back to english for the sake of the rest of the conversation since this exchange between us served its purpose of being insightful with a bit fun thrown in)
I'd love to see names always included once in their native script.
>Foreign Minister 河野 太郎 (Kōno Tarō) said Tuesday he plans to ask overseas media outlets to write Japanese names with the family name first, as is customary in the country.
Implicitly that would be a declaration that the English isn't authoritative.
That kinda makes them seem all the more alien, inserted in the middle of an English sentence like that. You could maybe flip it with the native script in parens.
Did this article put his given name first, despite being about him asking that the media put the family name first? I wonder if he finds that as frustrating as I do.
This outlet, like others, will follow their own official style guide until that style guide is updated. And, it appears Japan Times' style guide uses the ordering Kono would like them, and others, to change.
I doubt this individual example frustrates Kono any more than the general rule. He'll understand outlets don't vary such things case-by-case, according to individual news-subjects' preference, which is why he's making a formal request that norms change.
The headline would be clearer, both here and where it originally appeared, if it specified "international media", and used "respect order" rather than "switch order" – to avoid the interpretation that he was asking domestic media to switch to the English-speaking-world's more typical ordering.
I'm sure they, like most publications, have a house style guide that dictates things like this to ensure consistency across articles and over time. They'll presumably follow that style guide as it now stands until it's updated, at which time they'll change all articles to conform to the new style. Depending on the circumstance, what a person or entity wants to be called isn't the only consideration when deciding how to refer to them in print, and publications don't generally tend to want to leave it up to the whims of individual authors.
I deal with the reverse of this problem all the time. Living in Japan, my bank cards (and other ID) all have my name in the Japanese order, with my surname first followed by my first name and my middle name last. Without fail, the staff at the counter will address me by my middle name, on the assumption that foreigners' names have the family name last, so that must be the right name to use.
Yeah, and some get their Western name early, while some choose it as a teenager or so. Which sometimes leads to weird choices - I met a guy called "Nose", and a girl called "Money".
There is an excellent Chinese singer (of German Lieder, as it happens), who used to go by the name of Shen Yang (with Shen being the family name). Now, quoting Wikipedia:
> he went on to win the 2007 BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition.[4] After the win, noting confusion in the Western press over the name "Shen Yang", he decided to change its spelling to "Shenyang".
So that's somewhat unexpected, because while now the order is fixed, it really looks like he only has one name.
(BTW, Indonesians frequently have only one name (even in their official papers/passport), creating difficulties when booking flights, for example. Obviates difficulties with ordering the names, though :-)
I was working on a personal project recently which involved importing lots of Japanese names into a database for my app. I had originally made a "person" table with columns for "given_name" and "family_name" – but ended up going with a combined "name" column because I couldn't find a reliable way to determine if data from different sources was using the given-first or family-first convention (and I was automatically importing some of it, so I couldn't make case-by-case decisions).
This was just a fun app for personal use, so it wasn't the end of the world to just punt on the data, but it was frustrating nonetheless.
Whenever I'm on a team building something new, I've fought hard to stop people from splitting names into first/last. There's simply no right way to do it. In addition to conventions like family name first in Japan, Spanish naming conventions create confusion (First Paternal_Family Maternal_Family), and there are rare outliers like mononyms as well. There is almost no use case--aside from perhaps a genealogy site--where splitting the name provides any benefit.
Interesting! I wouldn't have thought that would be best practice, but in spending a little time trying to learn more (this page from W3[0] was really enlightening), it makes perfect sense why "only split if you absolutely need to" is good advice.
What about sorting, reordering (as in the article), or allowing the user to pick preferred order? Also allowing other data such as phonetic name to be applied per name (again useful for sorting and other features).
There are tons of reasons to split names and I’m just a basic user of contacts apps. This all comes to mind immediately since Apple splits names and Google doesn’t, making Apple products much more useful and elegant with Japanese names.
What I find interesting is that there are exceptions to the current practice in English. Yoko Taro (family name: Yoko) is known widely as Yoko Taro, yet most other Japanese game developers are known as GivenName FamilyName (in English).
I always was under the impression that a good portion of the news outlets that cite his name in the native order do so because they are fundamentally confused about what part of it is the first name and what part is the family name, which might be because the surname (Yokō, with a long second o) looks like a well-known even in the West female first name (Yōko, with a long first o, cf. John Lennon's wife) in the standard romanisation that neither uses macrons nor mirrors the native orthography (which would give Yokou vs. Youko). See all the instances of him being referred to as "Taro" (i.e. what is actually his first name):
I think reversing names was only ever something "official"/"respectable" translators did. Names that came up in a more casual/fan-based context first have stuck with Japanese order.
I thought this was because his recent work were done under his pen name "ヨコオタロウ (Yoko Taro)", which is fully katakana-ized version of his real name "横尾太郎 (Yoko Taro)" but treated as one word.
As a person, who tries to be polite and correct in conversations, especially also written ones, I am completely lost. For me it is usually impossible to find out in which order a name was written as both orders are being used. I would desperately love to have a clear typographical hint, like all caps, with smallcaps for the non leading letters, for which the family name is.
Pro tip for email communications: please sign any mail you send off. This gives the recipient a clear idea, how he could address you, by just copying from your signature.
In terms of Chinese names, my observation is that in English media, if your name is printed as "first_name last_name" then you haven't made it yet. But if you are somebody, your name will appear as "last_name first_name". E.g. Xi Jinping, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping. When was the last time you heard "Ming Yao the former Rockets center"?
All four of the people you used as examples were born in the Mainland and had always used that order. Do you have any examples of people switching from Firstname Lastname to Lastname Firstname after "making it"?
It's not about switching your name after you've made it. It's about western media taking the effort to print your name in the correct order because you've made it.
Not really a good counter example as "Jack Ma" is his English name (i.e. not his legal name, not the one printed on his passport. more like a nickname that can be easily remembered by westerners).
If you google his legal Chinese name, you will find that it's never "Yun Ma" in English media. Instead it's always "Ma Yun"...because he is a big shot.
That's because Jack is an English name he chose to be widely known by. If he had kept his given name as a primary form of address we'd probably see him colloquially referred to as "Ma" or "Ma Yun".
This is unexpected and quite interesting. I think we totally gloss over the fact that we've just been writing Japanese (and Korean) names incorrectly.
I've always thought it to be quite odd, and there are exceptions too. Mun Jae-in, Kim Il-Seung, Kim Jong-Il are written correctly, so you might think political figures get a pass, yet Syngman Rhee is backwards.
I don’t think it’s correct to say we’ve been writing them “incorrectly.” We have been writing the English representation of a name whose canonical representation isn’t even in English characters. The convention often is used by Japanese people themselves (for example, in corporate directories). This is simply a change in the English representation to more closely match the Japanese form.
I think for Syngman Rhee the reason he is known that way in English is because he spent a significant amount of his life living in the US and interacting with Americans; In America the convention followed by most people with Asian names is to use the English order in English.
As a Japanese, first we MUST stop pronounce Chinese names, both place and person, in Japanese on-yomi rule.
e.g. Beijing(北京) is called "Pekin". Xi Jinping (習近平) is Shu Kinpei.
It always confuse me when first heard those name in English.
So that might be why Beijing is called Peking in German... Although the (generally closer to original pronunciation) English romanizations of some Chinese names are becoming more common.
I'm an English speaker who about a year ago got interested in a young Japanese drummer,佐藤奏.
The standard English translation of her name is Kanade Sato. However, when I use google translate on links in Japanese like articles that mention her, it is amazing how often it comes out quite different, including putting the Sato first.
I would also like to mention that Japanese writing has several different systems. First there is Kanji, which is straight from Chinese script. Then there are a couple of syllable-based systems, and finally they use Roman script for many foreign words. Sentences tend to be a mix of Kanji and syllable-based words. Also interesting is that there are usually no spaces between words, and the reader is expected to figure it out on their own. But if this might be too confusing, then a dot is added in between.
One more oddity. Kanji characters can,as I understand it, have more than one word associated with them. As a consequence, there is a drummer in Japan whose given name is usually translated as Senri, but sometimes Chisato.
Personally I think this is a matter of translation. In English the personal name comes first followed by the surname. In Japanese honorifics come after the name but it would be quite silly to ask foreign media to call Abe Shinzo "Abe Shinzo Mr." instead of "Mr. Abe Shinzo" or for an American to ask British media to not refer to American mothers as "mum". Sometimes localizing a name means altering it.
I don’t think it’s just a matter of translation preference. I think it’s also to be respectful to the people whose names are being mentioned.
When Chinese or Japanese concert Roman names to Hanzi/Kana, they try to observe the FIRSTNAME LASTNAME convention if preferred by that culture. Such as スティーブン・ポール・“スティーブ”・ジョブズ (Steven Paul “Steve” Jobs)
This is something that is hard for me to understand because I wouldn't think it was disrespectful to be called Barney James in another language.(honestly I wouldn't care if they called me Barney James in English)
But we don't usually reorder Chinese and Korean names, and before the Meiji era Japanese names weren't reordered (or rather, we don't reorder the names of historical figures!?), so it's Tokugawa Ieyasu not Ieyasu Tokugawa.
With the result that if I'm reading a random name from an Asian nation I have absolutely no idea which is the personal name and which the family name. Usually that's inconsequential, but it would cause problems if I ever had dealings with business contacts overseas.
Best thing would do is to have a single field for name and surname and other legal variations.
Like many pointed out the cultural differences are way too many to pull up with more than one field and manage them all algorithmically. That's a recipe for disaster when the culture changes the way they use the identity.
So does this mean the Minister's name is Tara KONO or Kono TARA? I can't tell from this article. I totally understand people wanting to have their names written correctly, but if the reader is confused, is that going to help people to understand one's name correctly? In the US, I don't think it would.
Represented as the Minister proposes, it would be KONO Tarо̄. This relies on a bit of cultural knowledge; 太郎 (Tarо̄) is a very common first name for males in Japan.
The article is a smidge ironic, though; in this article about proposing a Last First standard, the Times refers to the promulgator via First Last. I suppose they're technically in keeping with current standards by using First Last, since the Minister's proposal is brand new.
It is reporting an intention from a minister. When and if the minister actually acts on it, by extending an official request from the Japanese Government, I guess they will respond officially in some way. There is no need to drop one's pants just because a minister opened his mouth.
Why can't we just write names as "Smith, John" when it's in the Asian order and "John Smith" or "John·Smith" if its in the Western order? It would remove all the ambiguity using already existing conventions.
That’s what I was thinking in response to your first idea. Every US keyboard has a grave character and it’s not used for anything. Maybe `Smith John is better since it works forwards too as John `Smith. Without stepping on punctuation. Either is preferable to SMITH John which is better than nothing.
Either way let’s just agree to start using the ` from here out and the internet will catch on.
And it would never be used in Chinese or Korean writing. It would only ever be used for Latin alphabets when the order of names is reversed from the norm.
Again, such things are not used in Chinese or Korean names — in the Latin alphabet. I was sure I didn't have to spell that out.
No need to make an exception for Japanese, no need to start inventing needless uses for punctuation. The world is spinning just fine with names like Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-Un, free of superfluous characters marking their first and last names.
I've seen tabloid rags refer to Kim Jong Un as [sic] "Mister Un" more times than I can count. I think it would be useful to be able to know the ordering of a name without having to look it up.
Or just not read tabloids which, despite being rags, should know better anyway. Actually, it's because a journalistic publication should know better that I'm inclined to call such an example wilful ignorance.
People not knowing the Japanese name order, that's something that can be overcome with just the most minor amount of education. People who steadfastly get it wrong despite the standards of their profession, they don't count.
I guess there's just a dwindling number of reputable sources without paywalls. The proper papers whose articles can actually be shared and the rags such as you named are getting hard to distinguish.
When a Western newspaper writes in the English language for a Western audience, isn't the most important thing to make articles clear and easy to understand? I understand that it's also important to respect the culture and language and the background of the person that you write about, but I guess unless you really want to have the Japanese characters in your English newspaper, it's a trade-off.
I live in Japan, my children are half-Japanese (with my foreign family name), but I have to say it'd be weird to see an article that writes about, say, "Tom Smith and his daughter Smith Hanako". Similarly, reading a Japanese text, seeing "トム・スミスと娘のスミス花子" (tomu sumisu to musume no sumisu hanako) would feel weirdly inconsistent.
Other "problems" for Japan foreign residents:
* I'm of Japanese ethnicity but not Japanese, so must use katakana. Confuses everyone.
* My wife, also not Japanese, kept her maiden name; breaking all kinds assumptions on forms.
* Recently my wife has taken on Japanese citizenship and now uses the kanji form of my katakana last name. More confusion from various institutions.
* My kids did not take on the Japanese citizenship and pretty much stands on school rosters.
* And what about the katakana romanization of the names!? My first name has two different variations...
I could go on... but for name ordering problems, my bank credit card allows choices on how the name is to be used on the card. I naively picked FirstName MiddleInitial LastName for the credit card. This does not match any form of Japanese identification. So when I'm trying to buy say a SIM card, inevitably an exception is thrown and some crazy Japanese style escalation ensues.
I really don't see how it "It disregards the cultural history of names". As far as I'm concerned the order of the names is just a minor grammatical difference.
One person cannot speak for an entire gamut of people. There will be people for whom the way one says their name is not a simple matter of grammar but of identity, pride, family history, etc. The Japanese respect the rest of the world enough not to reverse our names — Brad Pitt doesn't become Pitt Brad — so there's no reason why we cannot accord the same back.
There may also be great personal meaning or even simple wordplay in their name, said in a specific order, that is lost in translation.
One (admittedly fatuous; ignore that I'm choosing a fictional character, it's merely for illustration) example is the main character from the manga The Disastrous Life of Saiki K — the name Saiki Kusuo contains a pun (the first three morae sound like 'psychic'), but this pun is lost whenever the name is written or said in Western order.
>One person cannot speak for an entire gamut of people.
You're right, in fact the article seems to be mainly about the Japanese Foreign Minister telling other Japanese people to order their names the Japanese way in English. Notice how The Japan Times, a Japanese company, neverless continues writing his name in the English order in the article.
>There may also be great personal meaning or even simple wordplay in their name
There's a lot of personal meaning in my name. However, regardless of the ordering，the meaning and pronounciation of my name is lost the moment I write in the Latin alphabet.
In an Ideal world we would all just leave names in their original script (Which is the convention in Asian academia for non-Asian names), but we don't live in such a world; We live in a world where English speakers in the Midwest struggle to pronounce the foreign names of their own hometowns (See Pekin IL).
But a lot of people do come only family name. I'm not sure if it's different in America, but everyone is using Obama, Bush, Häkkinen etc. Heck a lot of people don't even know their first names here. You can say that it's because they are famous, but I'm just trying to outline there are differences. No one close to them they in real life would refer them by family name.
Putin's passports says Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin yet everyone is using either Vladimir Putin or just Putin, but Russians don't. (In formal letters etc).
The problem is that there are way too many differences alone in the Western world, you can't satisfy everyone's feelings.
> The only Western nation that has a different naming scheme is Hungary
There are other countries in the West with different naming schemes than the one common in the Anglosphere, even if they happen to still have the given names first and some combination of family names thereafter; I've several times seen US outlets butcher the names of Mexican officials because they assume that the same name order applies when the order is merely superficially similar.
For instance, the headline (and URL) on this CSPAN piece:
There are several acceptable ways to refer to Enrique Peña Nieto as President of Mexico, but “President Nieto” isn't one of them, and Nieto alone isn't the same kind of name as an English last name.
That has nothing to do with name ordering. This discussion is about name order. I didn't think I had to spell that out considering the article is about name ordering. I should've been more specific.
It has exactly to do with name ordering, since the source of the issue is that the nearest equivalent of the English last name is actually the penultimate rather than final element of the name in the order at issue.
I disagree that this is about ordering. In no ordinary circumstances does that person's name become Peña Nieto Enrique, in that order.
His name uses the Spanish naming system whereby both the mother and father's name are included — like an English double-barrelled name without a hyphen — which is not affected by whether the given or family name(s) come(s) first.
Therefore, the issue is not about ordering, it's about name segmentation and culture-specific name boundaries; the issue is where given names end and family names begin, not what order they're in.
And speaking of Putin's passport: Russian international passports usually have the patronymic spelled only in the Cyrillic name, the international name is just First Last. So most likely Putin's passport says "Vladimir Putin" and "Владимир Владимирович Путин". I think it's the best decision - nothing good is going to come out from forcing patronymics on people who cannot even read Russian and exposing your citizens to all potential fuckups caused by name confusion.
Transliteration doesn't really come into it. Of course the Japanese would write スティーブ・ジョブス (but emphatically not ジョブス・スティーブ) rather than Steve Jobs, just the same way as we write Abe Shinzo rather than 安倍晋三.
Right. I am not disagreeing with you. I am pointing out that Chinese/Japanese both adopt Western name ordering for Western names in an effort to demonstrate that Chinese or Japanese name ordering should be adhered in English. Would you kindly inform me what I said is wrong?
When did I say anything of what you said is wrong? I was merely reinforcing my own point, in case anybody reading both comments felt any ambiguity; that the writing system doesn't matter, the name should still retain the correct order — and the correct order is the one by which the name's owner is called. We were both agreed, I was just adding detail.
I couldn't care less about the order of my name(s) or my name itself either...call me Mike, Michael or whatever is easier for you (Machiel, Maicon or Maycon, Michaela, Michelangelo, Michal etc.) Why do people make a such big deal about names anyway?
> It disregards the cultural history of names to suit what’s easiest for Western Europeans to understand.
Personally, I wish that was done more often in English. It doesn't make a damn bit of sense to wantonly import unmodified foreign orthography from on language into another. English is bad enough as it is. Word order and spelling (even for names) should be adapted to the rules of the language being spoken.
Yea, I have always this problem with people from Japan coming here. When they tell their names, I'm not sure if they do as they do in Japan or they do for me to understand. I always have to ask them.
Coincidentally I was recently working on a project of localizing my company's product into Japanese, and the client who had requested the project asked if we could also address the name ordering issue. It turned out to be pretty non-trivial and we ended up not doing it, but a cursory search of our competitors showed that not many western SaaS products who localize to Japanese seem to do it either. I wonder if this policy stance will change that trend.
Working with Japanese colleagues and customers, you calling everyone by their last name with the suffix "-san". In discussions even when the person is not present, Americans still say "Abe-san" since it is how you always address them. Is "-san" only supposed to be used when you are addressing the person? I'm unsure on the correct way to use it.
You should -san the outgroup (including when speaking about them in the 3rd person); you should not -san the ingroup. Whether someone is outgroup or ingroup depends on who you're talking to and can change.
There are other options as well.
In general, Americans who are rubbing up against Japanese people in a not-specifically-Japanese context get lots of leeway on this question. (One has to be good if one works as a full-time employee of a traditionally managed Japanese corporation; if one is entertaining a delegation from Japan at a US event, one gets a lot of kudos for trying.)
Note also that there are some people with preferences here, including some preferences which aren't necessarily socially normative.
If I’m talking to you, who does not work at Stripe with me, and I promise a call from a named coworker, I would call them by their last name with no honorific. This is because my coworker is an ingroup when speaking to anyone outside the company in a business context (the outgroup).
If I were talking about that coworker with a member of my team, in most plausible cases the 3rd party coworker is the outgroup in that discussion, and I would refer to them as $NAME-san.
San could be translated into mr/ms and you drop it off pretty much only when you’re close enough with the person you’re describing. If you use just the last name it will sound “Oh yeah, i had meeting with Mikey” if you’re referring to person called Mike Miller. First name is usually only used by really close friends and lovers.
The other time is when you’re using some other suffix with them, eg. you refer to them by profession.
Japan has a group oriented culture so the family (group) name takes precedent over the individual's name. However a little more individualism might be a small step in the right direction. Certainly the Japan I know has much more in common with Europe than it does with China at this point.
This is fantastic. Living in both the English and Japanese-speaking worlds, it'll be nice not having to go through mental gymnastics to remember how to call somebody in whichever language. I think consistency is preferable; it's surely not impossible for people to be educated on name order.
> This is fantastic. Living in both the English and Japanese-speaking worlds [...] I think consistency is preferable
If I'm not mistaken, his suggestion would make the Japanese convention less consistent with the English convention (while making it more consistent with the Chinese convention).
> The Japanese don't reverse Western names, so Steve Jobs is never Jobs Steve.
Do the Japanese write Western names in the latin alphabet ("Steve Jobs"), or do they transform it into their own script based on how it sounds? If it's kept in the latin alphabet, of course they don't reverse it, the same way we wouldn't reverse it if we kept "Shinzo Abe" in Japanese script ("安倍 晋三").
I think you're missing the point. Whether in katakana or in romaji (Latin script), the Japanese don't reverse our names, so there's no reason for us to do that to theirs whatever script is used.
As I said to someone else, transliteration doesn't come into it. After all, the writing system doesn't matter when speaking a name when the pronunciation is known but the orthography isn't; it still must be said in the right order.
I have a friend who is (I guess) Japanese-American. Someone like his great-great-grandfather was Japanese and the family name has been passed down, but for all intents and purposes, he's a white American.
The same way he orders it - whether in Japan or in America. Japanese people don't flip the order of the names Americans call themselves. We should extend them the same courtesy.
Indeed. It's really quite simple; we should call people as they call themselves, not how we think they should be called. It's the basic respect we expect for ourselves but the West is bizarrely inclined not to give to others. We come up with all sorts of systems, checks, and balances to decide what the order should be rather than just use the order that it is already in.
Why would you need to? You must've gotten the name from some source, just write it in the same order it is there - transliterating into a different writing system if necessary, but there's just no need to ever mess with the order.
I'd personally love to see romanized Chinese/Japanese names contain a space between all characters. Westerners would still botch them, but would do a better job discerning where to divide the pronunciation.
Seems they get Korean names right more often than not...see a lot of Kim Jong Il (and similar)....except if they have a westernized first name like Gloria Kim.
I really hope this become the Standard for all Japanese names in Western Media.
It is annoying when you hear how in Japanese Anime speaks and you have subtitle or online discussion using the name in totally different order. Or other forms of Media when you know that is not how the name was suppose to work.
i understand using family name first for leader/president or public press, but iirc most of the asian country still using given name before family name in their passports
Passports have completely separate fields for "surname" and "given names". And the machine-readable representation at the bottom is always SURNAME<GIVEN< even for countries that have the opposite convention.
What's next? Make us drive on the right side of the street? Hard pass on any attempt to make Japan more like the rest of the world... Except maybe when it comes to fax machines. We should really let those things die.
English should adopt the French convention of capitalizing the family (last) name. For example, this would make it ABE Shinzo, which would remove ambiguity. When encountering East (thanks for the reminder) Asian (or Hungarian, for that matter) names in emails for example, I'm usually worried about if their "last" name in the directory is their given name and what they should be addressed by or their actual last name.
Agree. This is, actually, a regular (if not standard) practice in many domains of academic bibliography for Chinese authors (which is useful, as some individuals with Chinese personal and family names working in Anglophone contexts do follow the English convention of putting personal names first -- meaning that you often can't tell which is the personal and which is the family name in pinyin, e.g. "Li Jia")
Fun fact: Han Chinese surnames are almost always one character, but there are a very few that are two characters[1] -- usually, they're very old, very aristocratic names. E.g. "Sima 司馬", "Ouyang 歐陽", and "Zhuge 諸葛".
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_compound_surname
I have seen emails from Japanese colleagues where the last name is capitalized for clarity.
Capitalization is particularly useful for Chinese names where names are not written in Chinese symbols (hanzi/漢字) because the romanized names could be ambiguous as to what is the first name; for example: 江劉鋒 JIANG Liufeng (where both Jiang and Liu could be potential Chinese surnames)
> the romanized names could be ambiguous as to what is the first name; for example: 江劉鋒 JIANG Liufeng (where both Jiang and Liu could be potential Chinese surnames)
On the other hand, it'd be pretty hard for the surname to occur in the middle of the name, where you have the 刘.
「劉」is being used as part of a first name in this case.
Yes, but I don't see what the ambiguity is supposed to be. How would you interpret the name such that the 劉 wasn't part of the given name?
On the Uber app, they only provide the given name and not the full surname. I mistakenly thought my driver was surnamed LIU, when his actual surname is JIANG. Just pointing an anecdote when I was in Taiwan
If you only hear it spoken, or you don't understand the naming convention and start making guesses about what you think is going on. People in countries where middle names are normal also tend to make the assume that one of the syllables is a middle name.
> People in countries where middle names are normal also tend to make the assume that one of the syllables is a middle name.
Some Chinese do think of it that way.
That's interesting, I thought the given name in Chinese was almost always two characters. Is this not the case?
我是中文学生 :)
Funnily the first thing you learn in Chinese is how to say who you are. But there's very little help with actually picking a Chinese name!
It's not for Malaysian born Chinese. We usually have three names. For example, mine is SOH Kam Yung:
SOH - family name
Kam - 'generational' name (same as for my brothers)
Yung - my given name
For simplicity, I usually add a hyphen (Kam-Yung) in my name to make it easier for people to refer to me in non-formal settings, i.e. I should be called "Kam Yung" or "Mr. Soh".
Calling me "Kam" (it has happened) is nonsensical from my point of view.
Same for Koreans. Capitalizing the first character of the 'generational' name and lowercase for given name could work.
But I think emphasizing the given name offers better UX so given name should be all caps and family name should be all lowercase like this: YUNG Kam soh or soh Kam YUNG.
> But I think emphasizing the given name offers better UX […]
How? You are introducing a custom capitalization convention nobody uses. People expect the UPPERCASED name, if present, to be the surname (or whatever you can sensible put after Mr/Ms). Going against strong conventions is not a good user experience.
> Calling me "Kam" (it has happened) is nonsensical from my point of view.
Would just Yung be ok?
> Would just Yung be ok?
For me, that's only for family members and very close friends. :-)
It's like a personal nickname that you feel comfortable with if only a close circle of people use.
As others have alluded to--here's an explanation for _a good portion_ of the people who have two character given names. The first character of the given name is defined by ancestors, generations ago in a poem. Each subsequent generation uses the next character of that poem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_name
This stopped for much of the mainland in the last century due to a few revolutions that happened there.
"I thought the given name in Chinese was almost always two characters. Is this not the case?"
Not at all. Nowadays there are hundreds of millions of people in Mainland China with a single-character given name. Case in point: former tennis player Li Na, former basketball player Yao Ming.
I say "Mainland China" because I notice people from Hongkong and Taiwan have mostly two-character given names.
One character names are quite common, but 3+ character names exist also, especially for ethnic minorities. This applies to given and surnames.
Any 'always' cases with names are never to be trusted. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
given name != surname
surname = "last" name = family name
> That's interesting, I thought the given name in Chinese was almost always two characters. Is this not the case?
It depends, I think. I don't know about all of China, but in some places they alternate the length of the given name by generation (e.g. if you have a two-character given name, you give your children a one-character name, and vice versa).
>I thought the given name in Chinese was almost always two characters. Is this not the case?
Mostly in Old, Traditional or Southern part of China.
When was the last time mainland China had a leader with a one character given name?
But ya, it is a matter of preference.
> When was the last time mainland China had a leader with a one character given name?
The person commonly known as Sun Yat-sen in the west. His given name is 文, he used it to sign all official documents.
Crazy that 中山 was his Japanese name....
Fun fact: some German names (e.g. Strauß) change spelling when capitalized. The letter "ß" is a ligature that only exists as a lower case letter and has to be written as "SS" when capitalized.
Names are fun. I recently had dealings with a company that assumed in its employee roster that the last word entered in the name field was your last name (i.e. anything beyond the last space). One of my coworkers was from Spain and had a last name consisting of two words separated by a space. She was the very definition of a failure case for that system.
That mistake has been fixed: ẞ
It was terrible because you could get all 3 choices in a lowercase usage (s, ss, ß) and then lose that distinction when capitalizing. You couldn't reliably uncapitalize such words unless somebody disobeyed the rules by leaving the ß unmolested.
Lingering affects will be with us for ages, for example in the rules that computers use to do sorting and searching. The default capitalization rules for Unicode can't really change because that would break somebody's database or filesystem.
Note that there is now an official capital "ß", after being adopted as official in 2017. It has been in Unicode for longer. The situation is fairly complicated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_%E1%BA%9E
In Spain there are two last names, not a last name "with a space" between words. Traditionally paternal first, maternal second, although the law has changed to be able to use any order. Both must be present in legal documents or ID card, passport, etc.
It is a real pain for Spaniards living abroad. It is not a middle name, a two worded last name, or anything of that sort. Full legal name = First name + Parent A's 1st last name + Parent B's 1st last name.
Edit : As pointed out in another comment, a Spanish last name can be a two worded one, and a first name can be as well, and often is. So you could end up with for instance, a 5-word nightmarish José Carlos ( 1st name ) García ( 1st last name ) De Maestre ( 2nd last name ).
> One of my coworkers was from Spain and had a last name consisting of two words separated by a space.
It's two last names, father and mother first last names. I guess the same definition works, but it's worth noting that any last name might contain a space.
Not necessarily. My last name is Ferreira De Almeida. "Ferreira" comes from my mother, and "De Almeida", with space, comes from my father.
I started spelling it "Dealmeida" to avoid confusion.
And some languages have no upper and lower case, like my native language (Hebrew).
Some Japanese people do this already when writing their names in English, and Wikipedia's article "Japanese name" claims that it's recommended by the Ministry of Education. I'm usually against non-standard capitalization, but because it reduces the potential for confusion I support it here.
How is it non-standard?
I've never seen it used in mainstream news or literature, only in software and scientific papers, and not always then. I just searched for '.jp' in the Linux kernel changelog and none of the Japanese contributors I found wrote their names like that.
INADA Naoki, a Python contributor, signs their emails at least in the style.
This is the first I've heard of it. It's certainly not common in a general context.
The European Parliament uses this convention because not every EU country puts surnames last, in particular Hungary doesn't.
My last name is mixed case, so capitalizing it makes it wrong.
Wrong, or contrary to your preferred style?
I see names like Macdonald and MacDonald, where one family prefers the mid-capitalisation to another or family names like De Havilland. But it seems like a reasonable disambiguation to capitalise a family name.
Could you be more specific about what makes it "wrong".
FWIW my family name is commonly misspelt, life is too short to get too hung up about it. In my case it's just a name that existed prior to English standardisation.
In genealogical research it's typical to not only standardize capitalization of family names (typically to ALL CAPS) but to also standardize spelling to the most common or first used spelling. Otherwise searching becomes a very frustrating venture, and these things change surprisingly quickly through generations.
Good luck with mcguire. ;-)
A long time back soundex [1] was used for matching things like names. I imagine there might be yet better algorithms these days but that one probably still solves this problem relatively well.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex
EDIT: I guess there are better ones: metaphone [2] is a modern improvement on soundex.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphone
Would this not render fairly unambiguously to MAGUIDHIR (?spelling, corrected in an edit as I got it wildly wrong)? It only seems confusing if you're not Irish, and I'm already completely at sea with names that aren't Western European so this seems like a fine tradeoff to make.
Unambiguously? Yep. (And wow, I'm impressed.)
But you're going to dreadfully confuse people looking for Mark McGwire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_McGwire), for example. (And possibly "MacGuiver". I'm kind of unconvinced that it's related.)
wrong could be contrary to your preferred style. that's just how it goes. just because you don't care if others misspell you name doesn't mean that applies to all others.
I care, it's just it's an emotional response and over time I've realised that there's no real logical reason to correct it in most every situation. Of course people are not logical, and I don't expect others to share my values -- in part that's the point of asking question to get another perspective that I can use to alter my own.
Perhaps adjusting the capitalization, e.g. McMILLAN rather than MCMILLAN?
This might be suitable.
I don't know about jlv2, but the Dutch frequently have a tussenvoegsel[1], an insertion between their names which is properly lowercased but is a part of the family name.
So the physicist who researched molecular stickiness is named Johannes Diderik van der Waals. His surname is "van der Waals" and a scientific reference should be cited as "van der Waals, JD", sorted alongside other surnames starting with W (either sorted at WAALS∅∅JD where ∅ is a symbol that evaluates less than any letter, or occasionally you will see them sorted at W∞VAN∅DER∅WAALS∅∅JD so that all of the tussenvoegsels end up at the end of their section, where ∞ is a symbol that evaluates greater than any letter).
It is considered formally incorrect to capitalize tussenvoegsels, except when they begin a sentence or when you precede them with an article like Mr. or Dr. You would probably want to write his name in this last-name-capitalized-first-no-commas convention as “van der KAMP Johannes Diderik;” writing ”VAN DER KAMP” looks wrong to me—but I am not sure what the French do.
Is there a Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Surnames yet? There’s famously one for names in general.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tussenvoegsel
Your post made me want to check the rules of the "particule" in French [1], with regard to French names, as in: Charles de Gaulle, Jean de La Fontaine or Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu.
Turns out, capitalization depends on the grammatical construct. It's always capitalized at the beginning of a sentence, or to avoid ambiguity as in "Les mémoires de De Sèze". It's never capitalized when writing the full name (Jean de La Fontaine). In other constructs, it's complicated, and quite subjective...
Foreign names with particules follow the rules of the country of origin.
[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particule_(onomastique)#Majusc...?
As a french, it seems perfectly normal to see Charles DE GAULLE.
This convention comes from the bureaucracy in France, they usually write your family name in capital letter. By the way my company does the same, all our names are in capital letter in Exchange
Band names in English have the same convention. The Beatles is under B.
The The is fun to think about.
It makes all names wrong but I guess mixed case names are probably harder to read. "Small Caps" could be used to avoid that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_caps
So is mine, but it would make life easier all around.
One could restrict it to the first mentioning in any (con)text. Would that be acceptable?
This doesn't work in media that doesn't distinguish letters by case. That's still fairly common for things like forms and other official records that only use capital letters.
Obviously, the correct answer is XML:
Except people are going to enter the name incorrectly anyway, as you demonstrated. (Abe is his family name.)
The comment is satire.
Ugh, actually I just got it wrong. Reading comprehension fail.
Which really just points to the need for the simple XML format you've proposed!
In a lot of U.S Government Forms, "LastName, FirstName" format is prevalent, and there should be no ambiguity without messing with the cases.
Another interesting common practice is that, famous Chinese names are already last name first - e.g. Yao Ming.
> In a lot of U.S Government Forms, "LastName, FirstName" format is prevalent, and there should be no ambiguity without messing with the cases.
Same thing in Germany.
Yes, this works well in writing and it is common practice in Eastern Asia. However, how about oral conversation?
Sometimes, I am not sure what is the proper way to introduce my Chinese name in English conversations? If I put family name at first, it would confuse English speakers. If I put given name first, the sound of my name feels so weird to me as that is not what I heard outside English environments.
"Bond. James Bond" covers all the options.
“Please bring coffee for mister Jamesbond. So, dear Bond, how was your trip?”
You don't just misspell his surname, but you serve him coffee rather than a shaken (not stirred) Martini...? You sir, are an evil villain.
"Hello, I'm Cheng Xu. Please call me Cheng."
or
"Hello, I'm Xu Cheng. Please call me Cheng."
solves the problem either way.
Well, it doesn't solve the problem of communicating whether you are using the family name or given name, which is an important piece of information to know since it indicates the level of familiarity / intimacy / distance. This distinction is a bit less common for personal conversations in English-speaking countries but important in many parts of the world.
Perhaps I would be talking to "Cheng", but later I would be talking about "Professor Cheng".
> Perhaps I would be talking to "Cheng"
In my experience, while it is common for a Chinese personal name to be one syllable, it's not at all common for a person to be addressed by that one-syllable name. There are several strategies:
1. A person with a one-syllable name might be addressed by their whole name. For example, a 孙艺 might be called 孙艺 in speech, even though 孙 is the family name.
2. The person might have a nickname. For example, I know someone who goes by his nickname 哈哈; I've never heard his actual name.
3. The one-syllable name might be reduplicated; 袁璐 might be addressed as 璐璐.
4. The one-syllable name might be prefixed with 小; 李宁 might be addressed as 小宁.
Options 3 and 4 are diminutive constructions and may be too intimate for a strange man (or even a familiar man) to use to a woman.
I was thinking of the context where you are talking to someone in English, but they have a Chinese name. In Chinese I assume it would be much less ambiguous how to address someone with a Chinese name.
Interestingly, in Chinese no-one would call him just 'Cheng'.
And in Chinese nobody would be confused about whether his family name was Xu or Cheng.
Also reasonable:
"I am Doctor Xu."
"I'm Xu Cheng. I prefer my students to call me Doctor Xu."
"Hi, everybody calls me Frazz. Here's my card if you need to reach me."
Just tell me. Honestly, I can handle the idea that other cultures do names differently.
"My name is something somethingElse, <whichever_is_family_name> is my family name, please call me <choice_to_be_called>"
You know I have to do it...
Falsehoods programmers believe about names:
- Everyone has exactly one well-defined "family name". (In Latin America people have more than one, and some cultrues may go by a single name that isn't a family indicator.)
- In every formal context, the "family name" is how you should address someone. (You do not address the queen of England as "Mrs. Windsor", and Saddam Hussein preferred to be known as "Saddam", which is not a family name.)
(With that said, if it's understood that those assumptions hold, this is a great convention and I endorse it ... at least for the first mention in an article.)
> In every formal context, the "family name" is how you should address someone. (You do not address the queen of England as "Mrs. Windsor", and Saddam Hussein preferred to be known as "Saddam", which is not a family name.)
Don't these "falsehoods" just become ridiculous at some point? Like, am I really supposed to carve out special cases in my shitty app's business logic for the Queen and Saddam Hussein?
A better counterexample here would be Russian conventions of address. I'm not sure why the grandparent comment used such rare, basically-ignorable cases instead.
Shouldn't you instead make your app without these assumptions so that you don't have to?
As someone whose (bog-standard American-style) last name is also a common first name, this convention would save me a lot of trouble as well. It’s a consistent source of confusion for secretaries, receptionists, and so on.
Our current prime minister is Edouard PHILIPPE: two first names. Out of the 20 most common family names, half are also used as first names.
It is not that commonly used, though. Mostly on official documents.
> When encountering Asian
Not Asian, East Asian[0]. Asia is big.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asia
When Japanese people write out their names in English, they often use this convention anyway (esp. in papers and the like), since it may not be clear which name order the writer has chosen to use.
It probably doesn't matter too much, but this is a lossy conversion. For example "Fred McIntosh" -> "MCINTOSH Fred". So the capitalization of the "I" is lost.
> English should adopt the French convention of capitalizing the family (last) name.
I've seen that convention used in English-language sources more often than in French-language sources, which seem to usually use the pattern (also dominant in English) of initial caps for names with none of the name elements in all caps. Is that really a “French convention”?
I've seen this convention used by English-speaking academic mathematicians (who perhaps picked it up from the French).
That's not used in literature or journalism, but in most other cases (forms, etc) it is pretty standard.
I can confirm. Also, in many cases, French names are last name first, e.g. in the military, but there is a comma to separate, e.g. "Lacombe, Lucien"
The "Last, First" convention exists in English as well. To me it reads as something you'd see in the index of a book, since indices are usually ordered by last name but they'll want to show the first names as well.
Yes, it is extremely common and standard in France.
Sticking to a consistent ordering of given and (middle and) (paternal and) (maternal and) family names would also remove ambiguity.
It would but then a good part of the world would have to change their convention. I don’t think they see any good reason to adopt our conventions.
It could be per-language, i.e. use family-given when speaking Japanese or given-family when speaking English. That's more what I'm getting at.
This would also (I'd propose) hold true for non-Japanese names; if family-given is conventional when speaking Japanese, and my English name is John Johnson, it'd only be fair for my Japanese name to be ordered as Johnson John.
Any suggestions for surnames with only one letter? They exist, and would still be ambiguous :)
Would it be though? If all caps becomes standard, and the given name isn't in caps, it would mean the single letter family name is the single letter one.
Place a semicolon after the name, would that work?
I remember some mail always uses capitalized case [IRS and SSA?]..
This does happen in Singapore.
Is this common? We used to have an office in SG, and I don't recall ever seeing it.
I've worked and lived in Singapore for two years and haven't encountered it yet.
Mainly in the civil service, I guess.
https://www.gov.sg/sgdi/ministries/pmo
My wife is a Mongolian Chinese from Xinjiang, and she doesn't have a last name like other Mongolians follow single name convention. That brings lots of mess to our life in Japan.
Firstly I should note that her Chinese passport records her first name as the last name, which I think is a widely adopted way; however, whenever I purchase a boarding pass for her, I need to inquire the company how to fill a required first name field in the form. Most commonly, they let me use a placeholder "MS" in the first name field. Still, even following their instructions, we face minor trouble at ticket counter sometimes. That is fine because the airline offers us compensation such as free first-class seat conversion. So boarding pass is a frequency-wise problem for us.
In severity-wise, the social security system in Japan frightened me. Oh dear. Very soon after I started my career, their representative called me that they would input whitespace (I guess it's in multibyte) as her last name, and told me that they could not guarantee it won't cause any trouble. Imagine you work for 30-40 years and the government's mother-AI sentences that you are not eligible for the national pension as your residential profile doesn't match with the whitespace! Not quite surreal to think about it if the AI learned the less diverse culture in Japan. But I digress. Currently, my wife and I consider registering the legal FBN to use my family name to prevent upcoming troubles.
Software developers, please have a moment to think of the NULL name when your product owner tries to set the first name as required.
Burmese here, we don't have family names as well and run into this similar problem in all other countries.
There is an impressive amount of variation regarding personal name formats even within Asia.
In my culture (Thai), I put my given name first and then my family name (inherited from my father), like in most of the west, but actually my name of formal address is my first, given name, and my family name is hardly ever used except as a differentiator. [1]
In Vietnamese culture, I believe the given name is also the name of formal address, yet the family name comes first as in China and Japan. Hence Nguyen Anh would be called "Anh".
[1] http://blog.jclark.com/2007/12/thai-personal-names.html
I have seen the following variations in Pakistan. Given name is what people prefer to be called informally. * marks if people strongly prefer to be referred to by this name in a formal setting. Prefixes are usually religious in nature (Muhammad/Syed) and then you are never supposed to use them except when reading out the full name.
FamilyName GivenName*
<optional prefix> GivenName FamilyName
GivenName* Father'sGivenName
GivenName Father'sGivenName FamilyName
Father'sGivenName GivenName FamilyName
Prefix GivenName*
My name is of the third type and as a scientist it annoys me immensely that my work is referred to by my Father'sGivenName in western culture when no one has ever called me that in real life in my culture.
I did not know that this was common in Pakistan. I am from south India and my name (and almost all names in this part of the country) are of the form. <GivenName> <Father's Given Name>. This gets less common as one moves towards the north of the country, where <Given Name> <Family Name> is more common. So I had assumed the Pakistan would be same given its proximity to and shared culture with North India. (actually the name is <initial> <given nane> where the initial is the first letter of the father/mother's name. When expanded to satisfy the north - esp for passports or in a western system, it becomes <first>-<Father's first> or <fathers first> - <first>. the reason it is that way in the south was related to the self respect movement aimed at eliminating caste among others. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_name#Tamil_Nadu)
My family immigrated from North India (UP) at partition and we use the <GivenName> <Father's Given Name> convention. Most of these other mentioned conventions are from Pakistan's Punjab, but also from other areas.
> My name is of the third type and as a scientist it annoys me immensely that my work is referred to by my Father'sGivenName in western culture
By what would you prefer your work be referred to, assuming a formal setting?
Not OP. But similar situation. My name is of the form <given nane> <father's given name> (a bit more complicated than that, see my other comment). So if my father's given name is Jack, my name may be Michael Jack. In my native setting I am always referred to as Mr Michael. Very rarely Mr Michael Jack. Never Mr Jack, because that is how my father would be referred to as. So in a western setting I am almost always called Mr Jack and in my mind it is my dad, not me.
As Dr. GivenName in formal settings. As or GivenName et al. in references. As just GivenName in informal settings.
I think this is the start of the hockey stick graph in the unicode-ification of the world
We are becoming a closer more integrated world and we will find it waaaaay easier to have common shared conventions and regulations - but that does not mean we all choose an existing one, (ie cultural hegemony) we just migrate to a new one, more complex perhaps but one that fits (more or less) everybody.
It's fascinating (been fighting unicode legacy issues today so it's top of mind)
In this example the Japanese are actually asking foreign media outlets to switch to the naming conventions they already use for Korea and China, $LASTNAME $FIRSTNAME. (E.g. Tsai Ing-wen, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, Moon Jae-in, and now Abe Shinzo)
So Japan isn't converging with the rest of the dominant Western convention.
Factoid: reminds me of a strip in a recent superman comics, I quote a villain getting his message broadcasted on every devices of the planet: "You really should settle on a common language or you'll never achieve anything significant as a specie".
I think we're pretty close with English, or it's at least the best candidate. Most of the knowledge recently produced (since WWII) is in it, and the world's largest economy uses it. It's also taken a little something from every one.
With that said, I think national pride will prevent such a thing happening. As an American, I wouldn't want to learn someone else's language as a "common tongue", though have no objections to using it for communication. Same thing with units: I'll convert if needed, but won't use yours. I've also got a bit of an objection to "design by committee" (i.e. esperanto) because it is either influenced primarily by one language (which goes back to the "other guy's language" objection above) or has little influence from other languages (meaning massive barriers to adoption). Most Americans are also highly resistant to bureaucrats dispensing "what's best" from on high, be it with language, units, or most other things.
It's also a cultural thing: how much tradition, history, and lore would be lost if we all spoke the same thing?
It will depend on how long the US remains the reigning power. If China bowls the US over, English can be undone fairly quickly. Mandarin is spoken by 20% of the world population.
English is not the obstacle; the Latin alphabet is.
There is a much higher chance that Western countries could move from English to another Latin-alphabet language (e.g. Spanish) than to any language rooted in ideograms. Which is why, for example, Japanese has made no real inroads despite 40 years of massive economic influence.
How many of them live outside of China AND don't speak English?
plenty of overseas chinese in countries that don't speak english... chinese speakers of mandarin and indonesian, minnan and indonesian, mandarin and french, mandarin and german, mandarin and quebecois, etc.
Mandarin is spoken overwhelmingly by residents of China. English is an official language of education and government in at least one country on every continent. In South Asia it’s common for the upper middle classes and up to speak English better than what’s theoretically their native language. If the US was magically replaced by parallel universe with no people US English dominance would last at least a century. Spoken Latin and French both survived as lingua franca long past the apex of their sponsoring powers.
I would imagine the writing system to be a large stumbling block for the rest of the world.
Mi pensis, ke ni havas unu.
On en a plusieurs. Et c'est l'opinion d'un vilain qui est ici citée.
(I suggest we get back to english for the sake of the rest of the conversation since this exchange between us served its purpose of being insightful with a bit fun thrown in)
This results in the "15 competing standards" situation of the present where none of them is actually _the_ common language.
u'i mi pu'i tavla fo lo jbobau .i la lojban ku zabna
I'd love to see names always included once in their native script.
>Foreign Minister 河野 太郎 (Kōno Tarō) said Tuesday he plans to ask overseas media outlets to write Japanese names with the family name first, as is customary in the country.
Implicitly that would be a declaration that the English isn't authoritative.
That kinda makes them seem all the more alien, inserted in the middle of an English sentence like that. You could maybe flip it with the native script in parens.
I like that Wikipedia does this regarding people and titled works of art, at least heading their own articles. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar%C5%8D_K%C5%8Dno
Did this article put his given name first, despite being about him asking that the media put the family name first? I wonder if he finds that as frustrating as I do.
This outlet, like others, will follow their own official style guide until that style guide is updated. And, it appears Japan Times' style guide uses the ordering Kono would like them, and others, to change.
I doubt this individual example frustrates Kono any more than the general rule. He'll understand outlets don't vary such things case-by-case, according to individual news-subjects' preference, which is why he's making a formal request that norms change.
The headline would be clearer, both here and where it originally appeared, if it specified "international media", and used "respect order" rather than "switch order" – to avoid the interpretation that he was asking domestic media to switch to the English-speaking-world's more typical ordering.
I'm sure they, like most publications, have a house style guide that dictates things like this to ensure consistency across articles and over time. They'll presumably follow that style guide as it now stands until it's updated, at which time they'll change all articles to conform to the new style. Depending on the circumstance, what a person or entity wants to be called isn't the only consideration when deciding how to refer to them in print, and publications don't generally tend to want to leave it up to the whims of individual authors.
He “plans to ask” the media to do so.
It looks like it. From his wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar%C5%8D_K%C5%8Dno
it looks like his father's name is Yōhei Kōno which which suggests that Kono is his family name.
Taro is also a very common Japanese male name. Think of "John".
You can also just read the Japanese pronunciation in brackets :)
yes, it made the article itself confusing and look like a mockery of what he is asking
I deal with the reverse of this problem all the time. Living in Japan, my bank cards (and other ID) all have my name in the Japanese order, with my surname first followed by my first name and my middle name last. Without fail, the staff at the counter will address me by my middle name, on the assumption that foreigners' names have the family name last, so that must be the right name to use.
FWIW, many Hong Kong people have both a Chinese name and a Western one, and then it works quite nicely, respecting both conventions:
FirstWestern Family FirstChinese
Such as Andrew LEUNG Kwan-yue, Tommy CHEUNG Yu-yan, etc.
Is that western name official (on birth certificate or passport) or informal?
Could be both. Some have it in their formal identifications, but many don't.
Yeah, and some get their Western name early, while some choose it as a teenager or so. Which sometimes leads to weird choices - I met a guy called "Nose", and a girl called "Money".
There is an excellent Chinese singer (of German Lieder, as it happens), who used to go by the name of Shen Yang (with Shen being the family name). Now, quoting Wikipedia:
> he went on to win the 2007 BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition.[4] After the win, noting confusion in the Western press over the name "Shen Yang", he decided to change its spelling to "Shenyang".
So that's somewhat unexpected, because while now the order is fixed, it really looks like he only has one name.
(BTW, Indonesians frequently have only one name (even in their official papers/passport), creating difficulties when booking flights, for example. Obviates difficulties with ordering the names, though :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenyang_(singer)
I learned this fact when reading about Thant:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_Thant
I was working on a personal project recently which involved importing lots of Japanese names into a database for my app. I had originally made a "person" table with columns for "given_name" and "family_name" – but ended up going with a combined "name" column because I couldn't find a reliable way to determine if data from different sources was using the given-first or family-first convention (and I was automatically importing some of it, so I couldn't make case-by-case decisions).
This was just a fun app for personal use, so it wasn't the end of the world to just punt on the data, but it was frustrating nonetheless.
Whenever I'm on a team building something new, I've fought hard to stop people from splitting names into first/last. There's simply no right way to do it. In addition to conventions like family name first in Japan, Spanish naming conventions create confusion (First Paternal_Family Maternal_Family), and there are rare outliers like mononyms as well. There is almost no use case--aside from perhaps a genealogy site--where splitting the name provides any benefit.
Interesting! I wouldn't have thought that would be best practice, but in spending a little time trying to learn more (this page from W3[0] was really enlightening), it makes perfect sense why "only split if you absolutely need to" is good advice.
[0]https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names
What about sorting, reordering (as in the article), or allowing the user to pick preferred order? Also allowing other data such as phonetic name to be applied per name (again useful for sorting and other features).
There are tons of reasons to split names and I’m just a basic user of contacts apps. This all comes to mind immediately since Apple splits names and Google doesn’t, making Apple products much more useful and elegant with Japanese names.
Whenever I'm making an app I do "full name" and "nickname" or "address_as" fields. It solves a lot of problems.
That's pretty much where I landed too. When I make the query to populate my models, I just go `coalesce(preferred_name, full_name) as name`.
Ah, you have discovered one of the Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names[0].
[0]:https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
OP specifically said “Japanese names” which are bound by strict registry policies and do not have any exceptions.
What I find interesting is that there are exceptions to the current practice in English. Yoko Taro (family name: Yoko) is known widely as Yoko Taro, yet most other Japanese game developers are known as GivenName FamilyName (in English).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoko_Taro
I always was under the impression that a good portion of the news outlets that cite his name in the native order do so because they are fundamentally confused about what part of it is the first name and what part is the family name, which might be because the surname (Yokō, with a long second o) looks like a well-known even in the West female first name (Yōko, with a long first o, cf. John Lennon's wife) in the standard romanisation that neither uses macrons nor mirrors the native orthography (which would give Yokou vs. Youko). See all the instances of him being referred to as "Taro" (i.e. what is actually his first name):
[1] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-04-13-yoko-taro-...
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/yoko-taro-nier-automata/
etc.
I think reversing names was only ever something "official"/"respectable" translators did. Names that came up in a more casual/fan-based context first have stuck with Japanese order.
Hatsune Miku and her fellow vocaloids also seem to be an exception. They're not real people of course, but they may as well be here.
I always thought Miku was her given name.
It is, that's why she's an exception (to the practice of writing Japanese surnames last in English).
to be fair Yoko Taro is kind of an exception to most rules
I thought this was because his recent work were done under his pen name "ヨコオタロウ (Yoko Taro)", which is fully katakana-ized version of his real name "横尾太郎 (Yoko Taro)" but treated as one word.
Heh, and on that very Wikipedia page, his wife's name is written in the opposite order.
As a person, who tries to be polite and correct in conversations, especially also written ones, I am completely lost. For me it is usually impossible to find out in which order a name was written as both orders are being used. I would desperately love to have a clear typographical hint, like all caps, with smallcaps for the non leading letters, for which the family name is.
Pro tip for email communications: please sign any mail you send off. This gives the recipient a clear idea, how he could address you, by just copying from your signature.
In terms of Chinese names, my observation is that in English media, if your name is printed as "first_name last_name" then you haven't made it yet. But if you are somebody, your name will appear as "last_name first_name". E.g. Xi Jinping, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping. When was the last time you heard "Ming Yao the former Rockets center"?
All four of the people you used as examples were born in the Mainland and had always used that order. Do you have any examples of people switching from Firstname Lastname to Lastname Firstname after "making it"?
It's not about switching your name after you've made it. It's about western media taking the effort to print your name in the correct order because you've made it.
Jack Ma seems like a counter example.
Not really a good counter example as "Jack Ma" is his English name (i.e. not his legal name, not the one printed on his passport. more like a nickname that can be easily remembered by westerners).
If you google his legal Chinese name, you will find that it's never "Yun Ma" in English media. Instead it's always "Ma Yun"...because he is a big shot.
That's because Jack is an English name he chose to be widely known by. If he had kept his given name as a primary form of address we'd probably see him colloquially referred to as "Ma" or "Ma Yun".
This is unexpected and quite interesting. I think we totally gloss over the fact that we've just been writing Japanese (and Korean) names incorrectly.
I've always thought it to be quite odd, and there are exceptions too. Mun Jae-in, Kim Il-Seung, Kim Jong-Il are written correctly, so you might think political figures get a pass, yet Syngman Rhee is backwards.
I don’t think it’s correct to say we’ve been writing them “incorrectly.” We have been writing the English representation of a name whose canonical representation isn’t even in English characters. The convention often is used by Japanese people themselves (for example, in corporate directories). This is simply a change in the English representation to more closely match the Japanese form.
I think for Syngman Rhee the reason he is known that way in English is because he spent a significant amount of his life living in the US and interacting with Americans; In America the convention followed by most people with Asian names is to use the English order in English.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syngman_Rhee
He didn't move to the US until he was ~29, in 1904. So even back then we got their names backwards.
As a Japanese, first we MUST stop pronounce Chinese names, both place and person, in Japanese on-yomi rule. e.g. Beijing(北京) is called "Pekin". Xi Jinping (習近平) is Shu Kinpei. It always confuse me when first heard those name in English.
So that might be why Beijing is called Peking in German... Although the (generally closer to original pronunciation) English romanizations of some Chinese names are becoming more common.
It's called ~"Peking" in most European languages.
Most of Europe probably got it from France, who used the Cantonese pronunciation: bāk-gīng
The capital city of China is called "Beijing" in Mandarin and "Pekin" in Cantonese (as I understand it).
The Western world's engagement with China was via Hong Kong and Shanghai, where Cantonese is the dialect.
Why? You’re speaking Japanese, not Chinese, and all Chinese characters have onyomi. It’s like saying English speakers should call Germany Deutschland.
Dutch here, due to historical trade relations we also still use Peking!
That's how they pronounced the name of the city in southern China, which is where the trade started.
http://cantonese.org/search.php?q=北京
I'm an English speaker who about a year ago got interested in a young Japanese drummer,佐藤奏.
The standard English translation of her name is Kanade Sato. However, when I use google translate on links in Japanese like articles that mention her, it is amazing how often it comes out quite different, including putting the Sato first.
I would also like to mention that Japanese writing has several different systems. First there is Kanji, which is straight from Chinese script. Then there are a couple of syllable-based systems, and finally they use Roman script for many foreign words. Sentences tend to be a mix of Kanji and syllable-based words. Also interesting is that there are usually no spaces between words, and the reader is expected to figure it out on their own. But if this might be too confusing, then a dot is added in between.
One more oddity. Kanji characters can,as I understand it, have more than one word associated with them. As a consequence, there is a drummer in Japan whose given name is usually translated as Senri, but sometimes Chisato.
Kanade and Senri together (skip the first minute, it's just the MC lady talking) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sf3DgS3LEA
Personally I think this is a matter of translation. In English the personal name comes first followed by the surname. In Japanese honorifics come after the name but it would be quite silly to ask foreign media to call Abe Shinzo "Abe Shinzo Mr." instead of "Mr. Abe Shinzo" or for an American to ask British media to not refer to American mothers as "mum". Sometimes localizing a name means altering it.
I don’t think it’s just a matter of translation preference. I think it’s also to be respectful to the people whose names are being mentioned.
When Chinese or Japanese concert Roman names to Hanzi/Kana, they try to observe the FIRSTNAME LASTNAME convention if preferred by that culture. Such as スティーブン・ポール・“スティーブ”・ジョブズ (Steven Paul “Steve” Jobs)
This is something that is hard for me to understand because I wouldn't think it was disrespectful to be called Barney James in another language.(honestly I wouldn't care if they called me Barney James in English)
This is framed as "respectful", but it's another way to mark the person as an outsider.
But we don't usually reorder Chinese and Korean names, and before the Meiji era Japanese names weren't reordered (or rather, we don't reorder the names of historical figures!?), so it's Tokugawa Ieyasu not Ieyasu Tokugawa.
With the result that if I'm reading a random name from an Asian nation I have absolutely no idea which is the personal name and which the family name. Usually that's inconsequential, but it would cause problems if I ever had dealings with business contacts overseas.
How should they be addressed, then?
Suppose we have FAMILYNAME Firstname, what is the way to correctly convey
Dear Mr... (formal opening ) Dear... (casual opening) ?
Best thing would do is to have a single field for name and surname and other legal variations. Like many pointed out the cultural differences are way too many to pull up with more than one field and manage them all algorithmically. That's a recipe for disaster when the culture changes the way they use the identity.
I'm a developer and I'm not gonna fall for that.
So does this mean the Minister's name is Tara KONO or Kono TARA? I can't tell from this article. I totally understand people wanting to have their names written correctly, but if the reader is confused, is that going to help people to understand one's name correctly? In the US, I don't think it would.
Represented as the Minister proposes, it would be KONO Tarо̄. This relies on a bit of cultural knowledge; 太郎 (Tarо̄) is a very common first name for males in Japan.
The article is a smidge ironic, though; in this article about proposing a Last First standard, the Times refers to the promulgator via First Last. I suppose they're technically in keeping with current standards by using First Last, since the Minister's proposal is brand new.
> The article is a smidge ironic, though
It is reporting an intention from a minister. When and if the minister actually acts on it, by extending an official request from the Japanese Government, I guess they will respond officially in some way. There is no need to drop one's pants just because a minister opened his mouth.
Why can't we just write names as "Smith, John" when it's in the Asian order and "John Smith" or "John·Smith" if its in the Western order? It would remove all the ambiguity using already existing conventions.
Because the comma breaks English grammar when it’s in the middle of a sentence.
The same way it takes two sentences to mention Mr. Smith?
That's a good point. Perhaps we could use Smith`John since the grave character is rarely used.
That’s what I was thinking in response to your first idea. Every US keyboard has a grave character and it’s not used for anything. Maybe `Smith John is better since it works forwards too as John `Smith. Without stepping on punctuation. Either is preferable to SMITH John which is better than nothing.
Either way let’s just agree to start using the ` from here out and the internet will catch on.
Inventing things like this is needless. We don't put commas or grave characters in Chinese and Korean names.
And it would never be used in Chinese or Korean writing. It would only ever be used for Latin alphabets when the order of names is reversed from the norm.
Again, such things are not used in Chinese or Korean names — in the Latin alphabet. I was sure I didn't have to spell that out.
No need to make an exception for Japanese, no need to start inventing needless uses for punctuation. The world is spinning just fine with names like Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-Un, free of superfluous characters marking their first and last names.
I've seen tabloid rags refer to Kim Jong Un as [sic] "Mister Un" more times than I can count. I think it would be useful to be able to know the ordering of a name without having to look it up.
Or just not read tabloids which, despite being rags, should know better anyway. Actually, it's because a journalistic publication should know better that I'm inclined to call such an example wilful ignorance.
People not knowing the Japanese name order, that's something that can be overcome with just the most minor amount of education. People who steadfastly get it wrong despite the standards of their profession, they don't count.
>Or just not read tabloids
You make a good point. If only the likes of The Guardian and Bloomberg didn't make it to the front page on HN regularly.
I guess there's just a dwindling number of reputable sources without paywalls. The proper papers whose articles can actually be shared and the rags such as you named are getting hard to distinguish.
It disregards the cultural history of names to suit what’s easiest for Western Europeans to understand.
When a Western newspaper writes in the English language for a Western audience, isn't the most important thing to make articles clear and easy to understand? I understand that it's also important to respect the culture and language and the background of the person that you write about, but I guess unless you really want to have the Japanese characters in your English newspaper, it's a trade-off.
I live in Japan, my children are half-Japanese (with my foreign family name), but I have to say it'd be weird to see an article that writes about, say, "Tom Smith and his daughter Smith Hanako". Similarly, reading a Japanese text, seeing "トム・スミスと娘のスミス花子" (tomu sumisu to musume no sumisu hanako) would feel weirdly inconsistent.
Other "problems" for Japan foreign residents: * I'm of Japanese ethnicity but not Japanese, so must use katakana. Confuses everyone. * My wife, also not Japanese, kept her maiden name; breaking all kinds assumptions on forms. * Recently my wife has taken on Japanese citizenship and now uses the kanji form of my katakana last name. More confusion from various institutions. * My kids did not take on the Japanese citizenship and pretty much stands on school rosters. * And what about the katakana romanization of the names!? My first name has two different variations...
I could go on... but for name ordering problems, my bank credit card allows choices on how the name is to be used on the card. I naively picked FirstName MiddleInitial LastName for the credit card. This does not match any form of Japanese identification. So when I'm trying to buy say a SIM card, inevitably an exception is thrown and some crazy Japanese style escalation ensues.
We're already writing it in the Roman alphabet, but using the associated punctuation would offend you?
im Disappointed in your bad faith reply more than anything. who care’s about punctuation
I really don't see how it "It disregards the cultural history of names". As far as I'm concerned the order of the names is just a minor grammatical difference.
One person cannot speak for an entire gamut of people. There will be people for whom the way one says their name is not a simple matter of grammar but of identity, pride, family history, etc. The Japanese respect the rest of the world enough not to reverse our names — Brad Pitt doesn't become Pitt Brad — so there's no reason why we cannot accord the same back.
There may also be great personal meaning or even simple wordplay in their name, said in a specific order, that is lost in translation.
One (admittedly fatuous; ignore that I'm choosing a fictional character, it's merely for illustration) example is the main character from the manga The Disastrous Life of Saiki K — the name Saiki Kusuo contains a pun (the first three morae sound like 'psychic'), but this pun is lost whenever the name is written or said in Western order.
>One person cannot speak for an entire gamut of people.
You're right, in fact the article seems to be mainly about the Japanese Foreign Minister telling other Japanese people to order their names the Japanese way in English. Notice how The Japan Times, a Japanese company, neverless continues writing his name in the English order in the article.
>There may also be great personal meaning or even simple wordplay in their name
There's a lot of personal meaning in my name. However, regardless of the ordering，the meaning and pronounciation of my name is lost the moment I write in the Latin alphabet.
In an Ideal world we would all just leave names in their original script (Which is the convention in Asian academia for non-Asian names), but we don't live in such a world; We live in a world where English speakers in the Midwest struggle to pronounce the foreign names of their own hometowns (See Pekin IL).
But a lot of people do come only family name. I'm not sure if it's different in America, but everyone is using Obama, Bush, Häkkinen etc. Heck a lot of people don't even know their first names here. You can say that it's because they are famous, but I'm just trying to outline there are differences. No one close to them they in real life would refer them by family name.
Putin's passports says Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin yet everyone is using either Vladimir Putin or just Putin, but Russians don't. (In formal letters etc).
The problem is that there are way too many differences alone in the Western world, you can't satisfy everyone's feelings.
The convention of calling a person by just their last name has no bearing on their name order. Obama is still Barack Obama, not Obama Barack.
If Russians don't say Vladimir, that doesn't make his name Putin Vladimir.
The only Western nation that has a different naming scheme is Hungary, which uses the Japanese-like family-name-first scheme.
> The only Western nation that has a different naming scheme is Hungary
There are other countries in the West with different naming schemes than the one common in the Anglosphere, even if they happen to still have the given names first and some combination of family names thereafter; I've several times seen US outlets butcher the names of Mexican officials because they assume that the same name order applies when the order is merely superficially similar.
For instance, the headline (and URL) on this CSPAN piece:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?451988-5/united-nations-genera...
There are several acceptable ways to refer to Enrique Peña Nieto as President of Mexico, but “President Nieto” isn't one of them, and Nieto alone isn't the same kind of name as an English last name.
That has nothing to do with name ordering. This discussion is about name order. I didn't think I had to spell that out considering the article is about name ordering. I should've been more specific.
> That has nothing to do with name ordering.
It has exactly to do with name ordering, since the source of the issue is that the nearest equivalent of the English last name is actually the penultimate rather than final element of the name in the order at issue.
I disagree that this is about ordering. In no ordinary circumstances does that person's name become Peña Nieto Enrique, in that order.
His name uses the Spanish naming system whereby both the mother and father's name are included — like an English double-barrelled name without a hyphen — which is not affected by whether the given or family name(s) come(s) first.
Therefore, the issue is not about ordering, it's about name segmentation and culture-specific name boundaries; the issue is where given names end and family names begin, not what order they're in.
And speaking of Putin's passport: Russian international passports usually have the patronymic spelled only in the Cyrillic name, the international name is just First Last. So most likely Putin's passport says "Vladimir Putin" and "Владимир Владимирович Путин". I think it's the best decision - nothing good is going to come out from forcing patronymics on people who cannot even read Russian and exposing your citizens to all potential fuckups caused by name confusion.
Chinese and Japanese, however, usually adopts the preference of locale name ordering.
For example, Stephen Paul Jobs is rendered from Roman to Kana as スティーブン・ポール・“スティーブ”・ジョブズ Suteibun Pouru Jobuzu
In Chinese as 史蒂夫·喬布斯 Shidifu Qiaobusi
But still, as you notice, in the right order.
Transliteration doesn't really come into it. Of course the Japanese would write スティーブ・ジョブス (but emphatically not ジョブス・スティーブ) rather than Steve Jobs, just the same way as we write Abe Shinzo rather than 安倍晋三.
Right. I am not disagreeing with you. I am pointing out that Chinese/Japanese both adopt Western name ordering for Western names in an effort to demonstrate that Chinese or Japanese name ordering should be adhered in English. Would you kindly inform me what I said is wrong?
When did I say anything of what you said is wrong? I was merely reinforcing my own point, in case anybody reading both comments felt any ambiguity; that the writing system doesn't matter, the name should still retain the correct order — and the correct order is the one by which the name's owner is called. We were both agreed, I was just adding detail.
I couldn't care less about the order of my name(s) or my name itself either...call me Mike, Michael or whatever is easier for you (Machiel, Maicon or Maycon, Michaela, Michelangelo, Michal etc.) Why do people make a such big deal about names anyway?
Sometimes people care about different things than you do.
> It disregards the cultural history of names to suit what’s easiest for Western Europeans to understand.
Personally, I wish that was done more often in English. It doesn't make a damn bit of sense to wantonly import unmodified foreign orthography from on language into another. English is bad enough as it is. Word order and spelling (even for names) should be adapted to the rules of the language being spoken.
Yea, I have always this problem with people from Japan coming here. When they tell their names, I'm not sure if they do as they do in Japan or they do for me to understand. I always have to ask them.
Coincidentally I was recently working on a project of localizing my company's product into Japanese, and the client who had requested the project asked if we could also address the name ordering issue. It turned out to be pretty non-trivial and we ended up not doing it, but a cursory search of our competitors showed that not many western SaaS products who localize to Japanese seem to do it either. I wonder if this policy stance will change that trend.
Working with Japanese colleagues and customers, you calling everyone by their last name with the suffix "-san". In discussions even when the person is not present, Americans still say "Abe-san" since it is how you always address them. Is "-san" only supposed to be used when you are addressing the person? I'm unsure on the correct way to use it.
You should -san the outgroup (including when speaking about them in the 3rd person); you should not -san the ingroup. Whether someone is outgroup or ingroup depends on who you're talking to and can change.
There are other options as well.
In general, Americans who are rubbing up against Japanese people in a not-specifically-Japanese context get lots of leeway on this question. (One has to be good if one works as a full-time employee of a traditionally managed Japanese corporation; if one is entertaining a delegation from Japan at a US event, one gets a lot of kudos for trying.)
Note also that there are some people with preferences here, including some preferences which aren't necessarily socially normative.
> you should not -san the ingroup
I'm not sure but in that case it would be Abe-tachi?
No, -tachi is plural rather than an honorific.
If I’m talking to you, who does not work at Stripe with me, and I promise a call from a named coworker, I would call them by their last name with no honorific. This is because my coworker is an ingroup when speaking to anyone outside the company in a business context (the outgroup).
If I were talking about that coworker with a member of my team, in most plausible cases the 3rd party coworker is the outgroup in that discussion, and I would refer to them as $NAME-san.
San could be translated into mr/ms and you drop it off pretty much only when you’re close enough with the person you’re describing. If you use just the last name it will sound “Oh yeah, i had meeting with Mikey” if you’re referring to person called Mike Miller. First name is usually only used by really close friends and lovers.
The other time is when you’re using some other suffix with them, eg. you refer to them by profession.
Personally I support this.
I think Japanese names sound wrong in western name order: most family names have a distinctive sound and construction.
Japan has a group oriented culture so the family (group) name takes precedent over the individual's name. However a little more individualism might be a small step in the right direction. Certainly the Japan I know has much more in common with Europe than it does with China at this point.
This is fantastic. Living in both the English and Japanese-speaking worlds, it'll be nice not having to go through mental gymnastics to remember how to call somebody in whichever language. I think consistency is preferable; it's surely not impossible for people to be educated on name order.
> This is fantastic. Living in both the English and Japanese-speaking worlds [...] I think consistency is preferable
If I'm not mistaken, his suggestion would make the Japanese convention less consistent with the English convention (while making it more consistent with the Chinese convention).
It would make the English rendering of Japanese names consistent with … well, themselves. 安倍 (Abe) 晋三 (Shinzo) will be Abe Shinzo, not Shinzo Abe.
The Japanese don't reverse Western names, so Steve Jobs is never Jobs Steve.
> The Japanese don't reverse Western names, so Steve Jobs is never Jobs Steve.
Do the Japanese write Western names in the latin alphabet ("Steve Jobs"), or do they transform it into their own script based on how it sounds? If it's kept in the latin alphabet, of course they don't reverse it, the same way we wouldn't reverse it if we kept "Shinzo Abe" in Japanese script ("安倍 晋三").
I think you're missing the point. Whether in katakana or in romaji (Latin script), the Japanese don't reverse our names, so there's no reason for us to do that to theirs whatever script is used.
As I said to someone else, transliteration doesn't come into it. After all, the writing system doesn't matter when speaking a name when the pronunciation is known but the orthography isn't; it still must be said in the right order.
Ah I see! Yes indeed.
I have a friend who is (I guess) Japanese-American. Someone like his great-great-grandfather was Japanese and the family name has been passed down, but for all intents and purposes, he's a white American.
How would his name be written?
The same way he orders it - whether in Japan or in America. Japanese people don't flip the order of the names Americans call themselves. We should extend them the same courtesy.
Indeed. It's really quite simple; we should call people as they call themselves, not how we think they should be called. It's the basic respect we expect for ourselves but the West is bizarrely inclined not to give to others. We come up with all sorts of systems, checks, and balances to decide what the order should be rather than just use the order that it is already in.
The difficulty with that is that when writing a news article you can't always ask the person how they would prefer their name written.
Why would you need to? You must've gotten the name from some source, just write it in the same order it is there - transliterating into a different writing system if necessary, but there's just no need to ever mess with the order.
I'd personally love to see romanized Chinese/Japanese names contain a space between all characters. Westerners would still botch them, but would do a better job discerning where to divide the pronunciation.
What about this kind of names? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNoS2BU6bbQ
Seems they get Korean names right more often than not...see a lot of Kim Jong Il (and similar)....except if they have a westernized first name like Gloria Kim.
Unfortunately they'll have to get 51% consensus to change the algorithm, thanks to Nakamoto Satoshi.
The names in the credits of Japanese films often vary from person to person. Is it just personal preferences?
In Japanese? It’s almost guaranteed to be LASTNAME FIRSTNAME if in Chinese symbols (kanji/漢字) unless the name is written in kana.
金城 武 KANESHIRO Takeshi
I really hope this become the Standard for all Japanese names in Western Media.
It is annoying when you hear how in Japanese Anime speaks and you have subtitle or online discussion using the name in totally different order. Or other forms of Media when you know that is not how the name was suppose to work.
i understand using family name first for leader/president or public press, but iirc most of the asian country still using given name before family name in their passports
Passports have completely separate fields for "surname" and "given names". And the machine-readable representation at the bottom is always SURNAME<GIVEN< even for countries that have the opposite convention.
What's next? Make us drive on the right side of the street? Hard pass on any attempt to make Japan more like the rest of the world... Except maybe when it comes to fax machines. We should really let those things die.
If you read the article, you'd see that is the opposite of what is being requested.
Ah... then OK, I agree with him. It's weird to use western style with Japanese names.