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".
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.
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.
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.
- 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.)
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”?
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 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'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.
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.
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.
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).
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"?
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.
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)
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.
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.
[+] [-] xxpor|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HuShifang|6 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] gmueckl|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mrob|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jlv2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] munificent|6 years ago|reply
Obviously, the correct answer is XML:
[+] [-] devy|6 years ago|reply
Another interesting common practice is that, famous Chinese names are already last name first - e.g. Yao Ming.
[+] [-] xucheng|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] SilasX|6 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] maxander|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yumraj|6 years ago|reply
Not Asian, East Asian[0]. Asia is big.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asia
[+] [-] bitwize|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dfrey|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragonwriter|6 years ago|reply
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”?
[+] [-] yellowapple|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gibolt|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leptoniscool|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ylyn|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ymkjp|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kyawzazaw|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hyperrail|6 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|6 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] bobthepanda|6 years ago|reply
So Japan isn't converging with the rest of the dominant Western convention.
[+] [-] johnchristopher|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snthd|6 years ago|reply
>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.
[+] [-] ip26|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patio11|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] wccrawford|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulific|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FabHK|6 years ago|reply
FirstWestern Family FirstChinese
Such as Andrew LEUNG Kwan-yue, Tommy CHEUNG Yu-yan, etc.
[+] [-] FabHK|6 years ago|reply
> 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)
[+] [-] favorited|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] stordoff|6 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoko_Taro
[+] [-] _ph_|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] headsupftw|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] munmaek|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hiroshi3110|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ahartmetz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rswail|6 years ago|reply
The Western world's engagement with China was via Hong Kong and Shanghai, where Cantonese is the dialect.
[+] [-] barry-cotter|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apexalpha|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] woodandsteel|6 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] Causality1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonjei|6 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BrandoElFollito|6 years ago|reply
Suppose we have FAMILYNAME Firstname, what is the way to correctly convey
Dear Mr... (formal opening ) Dear... (casual opening) ?
[+] [-] thepra|6 years ago|reply
I'm a developer and I'm not gonna fall for that.