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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.
How is it non-standard?
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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:…
That's interesting, I thought the given name in Chinese was almost always two characters. Is this not the case? 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!
Mostly in Old, Traditional or Southern part of China.
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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:…
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)
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.
FWIW, many Hong Kong people have both a Chinese name and a Western one, and then it works quite nicely, respecting both conventions: FirstWestern Family FirstChinese Such as Andrew LEUNG Kwan-yue, Tommy CHEUNG Yu-yan, etc.
Is that western name official (on birth certificate or passport) or informal?
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.
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 f…
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".
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?
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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…
> Perhaps I would be talking to "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…
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This might be suitable. 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…
Band names in English have the same convention. The Beatles is under B.