Foreign Minister Taro Kono to ask media to switch order of Japanese names
japantimes.co.jp
japantimes.co.jp
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 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.
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.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex
EDIT: I guess there are better ones: metaphone [2] is a modern improvement on soundex.
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.
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...?
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
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".
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)
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.
Some Chinese do think of it that way.
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!
surname = "last" name = family name
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.
Mostly in Old, Traditional or Southern part of China.
But ya, it is a matter of preference.
The person commonly known as Sun Yat-sen in the west. His given name is 文, he used it to sign all official documents.
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.
Any 'always' cases with names are never to be trusted. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Not Asian, East Asian[0]. Asia is big.
/me wavesSometimes, 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.
or
"Hello, I'm Xu Cheng. Please call me Cheng."
solves the problem either way.
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.
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."
"My name is something somethingElse, <whichever_is_family_name> is my family name, please call me <choice_to_be_called>"
Obviously, the correct answer is XML:
<name><family>Shinzo</family><given>Abe</given></name>Another interesting common practice is that, famous Chinese names are already last name first - e.g. Yao Ming.
Same thing in Germany.
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.)
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?
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.
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.
I started spelling it "Dealmeida" to avoid confusion.
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 ).
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.
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.
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".
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.
By what would you prefer your work be referred to, assuming a formal setting?
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)
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?
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.
(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)
So Japan isn't converging with the rest of the dominant Western convention.
>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.
it looks like his father's name is Yōhei Kōno which which suggests that Kono is his family name.
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.
FirstWestern Family FirstChinese
Such as Andrew LEUNG Kwan-yue, Tommy CHEUNG Yu-yan, etc.
> 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 :-)
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.
[0]https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names
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.
[0]:https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
[1] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-04-13-yoko-taro-...
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/yoko-taro-nier-automata/
etc.
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.
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.
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.
The Western world's engagement with China was via Hong Kong and Shanghai, where Cantonese is the dialect.
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
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)
Suppose we have FAMILYNAME Firstname, what is the way to correctly convey
Dear Mr... (formal opening ) Dear... (casual opening) ?
I'm a developer and I'm not gonna fall for that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Either way let’s just agree to start using the ` from here out and the internet will catch on.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The other time is when you’re using some other suffix with them, eg. you refer to them by profession.
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.
I'm not sure but in that case it would be Abe-tachi?
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.
I think Japanese names sound wrong in western name order: most family names have a distinctive sound and construction.
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").
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.
How would his name be written?
金城 武 KANESHIRO Takeshi
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.