Abe’s New Word Order

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-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nippon_Kaigi

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!

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.

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.