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.
