Foreign Minister Taro Kono to ask media to switch order of Japanese names

Post by [deleted] » Tue, May 21, 2019, 9:51 PM UTC

Permit wrote: post #93

headsupftw wrote: post #75

In terms of Chinese names, my observation is that in English media, if your name is printed as "first_name last_name" then you haven't made it yet. But if you are somebody, your name will appear as "last_name first_name". E.g. Xi Jinping, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping. When was the last time you heard "Ming Yao the former Rockets center"?

Jack Ma seems like a counter example.

Post by sgustard » Tue, May 21, 2019, 9:55 PM UTC

xucheng wrote: post #76

xxpor wrote: post #2

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.

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.

Post by dragonwriter » Tue, May 21, 2019, 10:05 PM UTC

zapzupnz wrote: post #163

dragonwriter wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only Western nation that has a different naming scheme is Hungary 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…

That has nothing to do with name ordering. This discussion is about name order. I didn't think I had to spell that out considering the article is about name ordering. I should've been more specific.

Post by smrq » Tue, May 21, 2019, 10:09 PM UTC

stordoff wrote: post #5

What I find interesting is that there are exceptions to the current practice in English. Yoko Taro (family name: Yoko) is known widely as Yoko Taro, yet most other Japanese game developers are known as GivenName FamilyName (in English). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoko_Taro

Post by favorited » Tue, May 21, 2019, 10:12 PM UTC

caymanjim wrote: post #161

favorited wrote: post #154

I was working on a personal project recently which involved importing lots of Japanese names into a database for my app. I had originally made a "person" table with columns for "given_name" and "family_name" – but ended up going with a combined "name" column because I couldn't find a reliable way to determine if data from different sources was using the given-first or family-first convention (and I was automatically…

Whenever I'm on a team building something new, I've fought hard to stop people from splitting names into first/last. There's simply no right way to do it. In addition to conventions like family name first in Japan, Spanish naming conventions create confusion (First Paternal_Family Maternal_Family), and there are rare outliers like mononyms as well. There is almost no use case--aside from perhaps a genealogy site--whe…