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Comment by jasonjei | Hacker News Reader

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)

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> 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.

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