151–160 of 262 posts
I'd love to see names always included once in their native script. >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.
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One person cannot speak for an entire gamut of people. There will be people for whom the way one says their name is not a simple matter of grammar but of identity, pride, family history, etc. The Japanese respect the rest of the world enough not to reverse our names — Brad Pitt doesn't become Pitt Brad — so there's no reason why we cannot accord the same back. There may also be great personal meaning or even simple w…
But a lot of people do come only family name. I'm not sure if it's different in America, but everyone is using Obama, Bush, Häkkinen etc. Heck a lot of people don't even know their first names here. You can say that it's because they are famous, but I'm just trying to outline there are differences. No one close to them they in real life would refer them by family name. Putin's passports says Vladimir Vladimirovich Pu…
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.
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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.
"Hello, I'm Cheng Xu. Please call me Cheng." or "Hello, I'm Xu Cheng. Please call me Cheng." solves the problem either way.
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.
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I think we're pretty close with English, or it's at least the best candidate. Most of the knowledge recently produced (since WWII) is in it, and the world's largest economy uses it. It's also taken a little something from every one. 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 objection…
It will depend on how long the US remains the reigning power. If China bowls the US over, English can be undone fairly quickly. Mandarin is spoken by 20% of the world population.
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.
Another interesting common practice is that, famous Chinese names are already last name first - e.g. Yao Ming.
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.
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.
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But a lot of people do come only family name. I'm not sure if it's different in America, but everyone is using Obama, Bush, Häkkinen etc. Heck a lot of people don't even know their first names here. You can say that it's because they are famous, but I'm just trying to outline there are differences. No one close to them they in real life would refer them by family name. Putin's passports says Vladimir Vladimirovich Pu…
The convention of calling a person by just their last name has no bearing on their name order. Obama is still Barack Obama, not Obama Barack. 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.
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Perhaps adjusting the capitalization, e.g. McMILLAN rather than MCMILLAN?
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…
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
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My last name is mixed case, so capitalizing it makes it wrong.
Wrong, or contrary to your preferred style? 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…