Abe’s New Word Order
petertasker.asia
petertasker.asia
I use "GivenName FamilyName" when speaking English and "FamilyName GivenName" when speaking Japanese. I assumed this was the default. Of course, then I discovered Korean names and Chinese names generally didn't follow this rule in English.
Same in Korea, except in Korean it's fairly rare to use "you" as a mode of address and everybody has a title or family term of some kind so you can often get away with outright forgetting/never learning somebody's actual given name. But if I fill out a form or something, even if I have to write my name in Hangul, the chances are really high that somebody will assume I've used the western system because I'm a foreigner and my FamilyName is actually my GivenName. There are just way too many variables that can creep in.
-Name in Hangul with western order
-Name in Hangul with East Asian order
-Name in roman letters with western order
-Name in roman letters with East Asian order
-something else (mangled, middle name acting as family name, etc)
The other day, a bank didn't let me transfer money from an account I had with them to an account I had at another bank because, they said, my name was written differently in Hangul than in the receiving bank account details. I said I didn't write my name in Hangul at any time while setting up either of the bank accounts, otherwise there wouldn't be a discrepancy. Didn't work. Also I know for a fact that bank systems here just cut off names that exceed character limits in both English and Korean.
I think the Korean government could fix this if it automatically issued a canonical hangul version of foreigners' names when they get ID cards here, but it will never happen, I think, for reasons that go far beyond immediate/large/practical concerns about updating systems etc.
I just grin and bear it while thinking of that patio11 post that often gets shared here, where he says he has broken many name systems in Japan just by putting his name into them.[1] That has been my exact experience in Korea.
Finally: regarding Abe's New Word Order, it seems like too much of a coincidence that the summer olympics are in Japan next year and the Olympic system, as far as I remember, capitalises family names.
edit: I may regret this, and it's kind of off-topic, but from what I understand about Abe, it makes a certain kind of sense that he does not want the Japanese to follow western naming orders in English anymore - he is an ultranationalist and ethnonationalist and a member of Nippon Kaigi[2].
[1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
Like a list of names with their Hangul version? The problem is that you can't know how someone's name is pronounced for sure.
In Japanese I provide the katakana reading for my name myself, because the chance of meeting a native Japanese speaker who can correctly derive the reading of my Dutch name in katakana is remote. Fortunately, in Japan it is already customary to ask for a name's reading in kana, because kanji readings too can be ambiguous.
Names are interesting in that their pronunciation for the same spelling can vary even within a single language depending on where the person is from.
Just how their name would be said if written in hangul. Ideal but unlikely: let the person choose themselves, with assistance. Much more likely but acceptable: some government clerk decides. The important/useful thing would be to have a hangul version set officially and not have multiple versions at the whims of bank clerks. I really meant canonical, I didn't say anything about accurate pronunciation. It goes like this for Koreans writing their names in English as well. Because there have been two official romanisation systems for kor-eng, you get a lot of people preferring one or the other, and then you get people who just prefer a certain English spelling.
edit: Just like in the opposite direction, English can't really properly represent Korean sounds. hangul is actually more versatile here because there are very few silent letters, etc, it's (with the usual exceptions) mostly spelling=sound.
Do you find that the katakana approximates the native pronunciation of your name well? The Korean government already has, if I recall, an official list of hangul readings for words/names in a lot of different languages. The thing that used to throw me off is French and Spanish words in Hangul that are common in English, like "genre" which is a loanword in Korean too but pronounced "장르" (like.. "jang-leu"). To me, the korean version weirdly sounds more faithful (within confines of syllable blocks) to french "genre" than the english version does. Am terrible at french though.
Nope. That is a linguistic impossibility; mostly due to the lack of the schwa vowel (ə) in Japanese (Korean does have that, so my name is easier in hangul as far as vowels are concerned).
The katakana do approach it tolerably, and it is in essence my name when speaking Japanese.
With katakana and hangul it is always a matter of compromising in one direction or another. If you have a very common name there will be common transcriptions that most people will stick to, but you can't prepare a list of all foreign names in the world, so inevitably two people will prefer different compromises, especially if they are fluent in that language.
Personally, I would be very much miffed if someone forces a specific katakana reading of my given and family name on me. That actually happened once when I was in Japan as an exchange student at Rikkyō University. I don't normally use my second given name, so on one of the numerous forms that inevitably end up in front of you in Japan someone added their own interpretation of how that would sound in katakana. Some college administrative worker took the katakana provided in earlier communication for my first given name and family name and made up their own attempt based on how my second given name might be read in English (I'm Dutch). I was not amused.
I did the same thing while living in Japan, but mostly because a rigorous, per-syllable transliteration led to a name too long to fit on most official forms, causing an occasional bureaucratic scramble.
I know this is the norm for France and I vaguely believe it's normal in Europe more broadly.
And I have to admit, capitalizing the surname makes it clear which name it is, regardless of ordering issues.
Is it! OK, then I more or less retract that dumb speculation /implication about the olympics (except that it makes more sense given that this capitalisation system is also used in Europe, I had never seen it outside the Olympics). Thank you.
I only notice this in Japanese Anime and Movie DUP and I thought it was very strange. In writing in English, GivenName : FamilyName makes sense because that is how all English speaking countries work, but when you speaks it in that order, it all went off.
In Hong Kong most people have a Christian / English name so it isn't much of a problem. Although this tradition will likely erode away for obvious reasons.
I doubt this figured much into Abe's reasoning. It's Abe. Wouldn't be surprised if he started wearing a topknot into the Diet.
[0] Some Western languages also have big-endian name order. Hungarian, for instance; Paul Erdős is really Erdős Pál.
In French it depends on the context, informally you're "Jacques Dupont", formally "M. DUPONT Jacques".
"In Hungarian, the Eastern order of Japanese names is officially kept and Hungarian transliteration is used (e.g. Mijazaki Hajao), but Western name order is also sometimes used with English transliteration (e.g. Hayao Miyazaki)." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_name#Name_order
If this catches on, maybe there will be three eras of Japanese name order in English. Pre-Meiji, Post-Meiji, Post-Reiwa.
This convention is widely practiced in Western journalism, but unfortunately it hasn't become common knowledge. As a Chinese person working in UK, I frequently have to explain my name order, despite the fact that most people have definitely seen "Eastern" names like Xi Jinping and Yao Ming in the news. I guess most people never asked themselves whether "Xi" and "Yao" are given names or family names.
Personally I welcome this change by the Japanese government. My hope is that this will raise awareness of the "Eastern" name order.
e.g. "MIYAZAKI Hayao (宮崎 駿 born January 5, 1941) is a Japanese animator, filmmaker, screenwriter, author, and manga artist. A co-founder of Studio Ghibli, a film and animation studio, he has attained international acclaim as a masterful storyteller and as a maker of animated feature films, and is widely regarded as one of the most accomplished filmmakers in the animation business."
For comparison, consider the loan word in English, "Sushi". No one in English would consider calling it by the name "Raw Fish and Rice" because the term "Sushi" implies a specific cultural context and carries the connection to Japan, Japanese culture and history etc. Trying to take the word "Sushi" away from the concept of "Sushi" would be almost rude, as it is de-valuing the social context that it is connected with.
By comparison, at the moment, East Asian people typically re-order their names to fit Western norms in Western contexts, which by the the opposite token implies that the name ordering isn't that important, and doesn't carry any significance to the person who wears the name. Deciding to use the traditional ordering isn't about telling other languages how they're supposed to work, it's about asking other people to acknowledge your cultural context as legitimate and equal to their own.
The decision to do this now may well, in this case, be steeped in nationalist sentiment as the article implies.
To me it seems like a better idea is to promulgate the convention of uppercasing the English family name in contexts where different name orders are likely to appear. I believe I have seen that convention on TV broadcasts of the Olympics, and it seems like a good idea.
As mentioned in the article, only the Japanese do this. (Well, Hungarians do too, but they're not even West Asian.) East Asians except for the Japanese do not reorder their names. Normal practice for a Chinese person would be to use an English name in English contexts.
It's not really different from the Maharashtran givernment deciding to write Bombay as "Mumbai" in English (which is how my grandfather pronounced it even when speaking English).
Unaddressed in the essay is how the construct SURNAME given_name (e.g. BREL Jaques) is quite common in countries like France -- not used in social conversation but in all official contexts including work and school. And let's not forget "Bond, James Bond."
The "communitarian/individualist" split and even more so its onomastic implication is overrated IMHO as you can see from my French example above.
I suppose this sort of thing instantly confuses me - why aren't we already calling the city München if that is what the Germans are doing?
The name of the city is derived from the Old/Middle High German term Munichen, meaning "by the monks".
The city state of Monaco is also called Monaco in Italian. Both the English and the Italian names are derived from the Greek word Monoikos, meaning "single house".
The German city of München is called Monaco in Italian and Monacum/Monachium in Latin. The Italian name derives from the Latin name, which in turn is derives from the Latin word for monk.
To avoid confusion, the German city is more commonly referred to as "Monaco di Baviera" (Monaco of Bavaria) to better differentiate it from the microstate.
I recall a story but I'm not sure of its authenticity, it described western traders asking portuguese translators to give them the pronunciation of 日本 (Nihon/Nippon the native word for Japan). The PT translators interpreted the characters through Mandarin and come out with "Jipangu" which would be the root etymology for our english term "Japan".
If Mandarin had been involved, we'd call Japan something like Arben (Riben) in English.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC#Pronunciat...
https://www.citymetric.com/horizons/which-european-cities-ha...
One fun fact in there: there's a town in Bulgaria called Plovdiv, but the Italians call it Philipoppoli - and they've been calling it that since long, long before it was called Plovdiv!
Judging by Italian wikipedia, Filippopoli, which makes much more etymological sense.
I wonder what the Italians think of this:
> The city has historically developed on seven syenite hills, some of which are 250 metres (820 feet) high. Because of these hills, Plovdiv is often referred to in Bulgaria as "The City of the Seven Hills".
That topic has so much missed potential. He admits he left off Venice, but what about Aachen/Aix-la-Chapelle, a historical town if there ever was one. Most of his examples are just different languages changing spelling to fit their conventions (eg Italian names ending in -o). But it totally overlooks pronunciation (Paris is totally different in French and English). It would be much more interesting to understand why cities sound different in different languages, for example London in English and Londres in French--why did they add they add the r sound to that word?
I heard about Durres, Albania, for the first time today, too.
I had wondered about a connection between door, Germanic \dorz, Latin forum* and port, porta, portal before (Latin f frequently corresponds to English d, e.g. inferior, En under).
Suppose -dres for Londres once meant port, which is always a good guess for any bigger city's name. I can't confirm it though.
Durres derives from Dorian Greek Durrhakhion, but Greek has thura for "door"; so if I'm correct, they would have loaned the form with d. Ironically, Albanian dere "door" has a homophone "bitter; difficult, tiresome" (from a different root if akin to Greek due "misery") and one traditional explanation of Albanias means difficult coast (although there was a historical kingdom Albania far off from the coast).
By the way: It's Londer in Albanian, too, and Londres in many Romance languages.
tl;dr: nobody really knows, and the first address for French etymology doesn't explain Londres either
You mean, what the Deutsche are doing :) Why stop at the city level?
(I just now notice that a sincere implementation of this effort would require adding some diacritics to the German writing system to accomodate the Saxonian dialect.)
Pointing that it’s common in other cultures weakens the article’s argument that “East Asians put their family name first because family affiliation was traditionally the most important information about a person, the individual identity coming second.”
{"name": ["JohnSmith", "JohnEdwardSmith", "JohnESmith"]}
{"name": ["AnneGauthier"]}
{"name": ["ZoolisCartom", "CartomZolis"]}
____
More on-topic, from a linguistic standpoint I believe natives should always define their own namespace, others should merely conform (e.g. use as-literal-as-possible transliteration following accepted standards).
A foreign name is an invitation to meet another culture.
Never build a system that leverages an existing system not designed for the same level of constraints and use cases. Golang made that mistake and it's turning into a big mess.
Note that owners would choose their array, i.e. how they wish to normalize their own name(s). In most countries it would probably be issued by the State, though.
But hey that's a joke, a thought experiment at best; I think strings with spaces are perfectly fine. The concept of a defining single string for a name (implying order is fixed, forever) is however good. In practice it's already what most contacts apps let you do — input first, last, middle, handle, etc. and define order to display, but it's generally a global setting; it could be granular (per contact), with quick/helper rules per nationality for instance.
I'm not sure we'll ever solve this linguistic and cultural matter only using technology though. ;-)
Edit (final, promise): I simply move that:
- people choose what are "valid" representations of their name (owner decides, others conform)
- systems make it easy for others (people, systems) to pick one (by default you'd assume item 0 in the array).
But that's not how things work in more than half the world. Just taking the capitalization issue: Even the French name DuPont will break your example. Non-latin scripts generally don't have capitalization, and even European ones have letters that can't be capitalized (for example ß). So using capitalization as a field separator simply doesn't work, because it was never designed for that purpose in the real world.
And people keep writing these simplistic systems because nothing breaks so long as all of their users are homogeneous. Except that the system they are building upon doesn't have the same implicit constraints as they've set up. And then things go very, very wrong in production.
Here's ß capitalised: ẞ
Bad example, but you're otherwise correct. My personal pet peeve is systems mangling names with umlauts. Such names used to be common in my country, but they've become pretty rare now with globalisation likely to blame. But a workaround nowadays seems to be to give two different first names: one that has no special letters and another with.
In German, that character is never used at the beginning of a word or name, so it's really irrelevant.
I think a better example of something that doesn't fit that scheme is a Dutch surname like "van der Beek": they're multiple words, separated by spaces, and not all of them are capitalized. Some German names are similar: "von Staufenberg".
Also, some cultures have more than 3 names. Hispanic people frequently have 4 or (I think) even 5 names, not just 3.
The thought experiment is not about software, nor is it about programmers.
It's about writing e.g. "JohnSmith" on your freaking passport in the name field. It's about people being free to have it written "John Smith" or "Smith John" or "johnSMITH" or however they want. It's about your business card, your mailbox, the name on your bank account.
I was just phrasing one example implementation of that idea.
Also, I appreciate the downvotes due my failure to convey my idea clearly, but for a thought experiment it's pretty harsh — how is it not 100% on topic when the article specifically talks about writing "Ryo Saeba" as "SAEBA Ryo"? I'm just saying, 'fine', but make it unique and user-choice.
That said I'm resting this case, the best jokes are the shortest I suppose. I was merely inviting comments to tell their own preferences. For instance, I reduce my first name to a sound that matches a greek letter's name, so I like to spell it e.g. "χLee" — and I'd love for it to be official spelling, I hate with a passion that my country doesn't allow name changes unless major reason. It's my name, isn't it? (if I read your linked blob correctly)