Fun fact: Han Chinese surnames are almost always one character, but there are a very few that are two characters[1] -- usually, they're very old, very aristocratic names. E.g. "Sima 司馬", "Ouyang 歐陽", and "Zhuge 諸葛".
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.
Some Chinese do think of it that way.
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!
SOH - family name
Kam - 'generational' name (same as for my brothers)
Yung - my given name
For simplicity, I usually add a hyphen (Kam-Yung) in my name to make it easier for people to refer to me in non-formal settings, i.e. I should be called "Kam Yung" or "Mr. Soh".
Calling me "Kam" (it has happened) is nonsensical from my point of view.
But I think emphasizing the given name offers better UX so given name should be all caps and family name should be all lowercase like this: YUNG Kam soh or soh Kam YUNG.
How? You are introducing a custom capitalization convention nobody uses. People expect the UPPERCASED name, if present, to be the surname (or whatever you can sensible put after Mr/Ms). Going against strong conventions is not a good user experience.
Would just Yung be ok?
For me, that's only for family members and very close friends. :-)
It's like a personal nickname that you feel comfortable with if only a close circle of people use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_name
This stopped for much of the mainland in the last century due to a few revolutions that happened there.
Not at all. Nowadays there are hundreds of millions of people in Mainland China with a single-character given name. Case in point: former tennis player Li Na, former basketball player Yao Ming.
I say "Mainland China" because I notice people from Hongkong and Taiwan have mostly two-character given names.
Any 'always' cases with names are never to be trusted. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
surname = "last" name = family name
It depends, I think. I don't know about all of China, but in some places they alternate the length of the given name by generation (e.g. if you have a two-character given name, you give your children a one-character name, and vice versa).
Mostly in Old, Traditional or Southern part of China.
But ya, it is a matter of preference.
The person commonly known as Sun Yat-sen in the west. His given name is 文, he used it to sign all official documents.
Names are fun. I recently had dealings with a company that assumed in its employee roster that the last word entered in the name field was your last name (i.e. anything beyond the last space). One of my coworkers was from Spain and had a last name consisting of two words separated by a space. She was the very definition of a failure case for that system.
It was terrible because you could get all 3 choices in a lowercase usage (s, ss, ß) and then lose that distinction when capitalizing. You couldn't reliably uncapitalize such words unless somebody disobeyed the rules by leaving the ß unmolested.
Lingering affects will be with us for ages, for example in the rules that computers use to do sorting and searching. The default capitalization rules for Unicode can't really change because that would break somebody's database or filesystem.
It is a real pain for Spaniards living abroad. It is not a middle name, a two worded last name, or anything of that sort. Full legal name = First name + Parent A's 1st last name + Parent B's 1st last name.
Edit : As pointed out in another comment, a Spanish last name can be a two worded one, and a first name can be as well, and often is. So you could end up with for instance, a 5-word nightmarish José Carlos ( 1st name ) García ( 1st last name ) De Maestre ( 2nd last name ).
It's two last names, father and mother first last names. I guess the same definition works, but it's worth noting that any last name might contain a space.
I started spelling it "Dealmeida" to avoid confusion.
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 a name that existed prior to English standardisation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex
EDIT: I guess there are better ones: metaphone [2] is a modern improvement on soundex.
But you're going to dreadfully confuse people looking for Mark McGwire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_McGwire), for example. (And possibly "MacGuiver". I'm kind of unconvinced that it's related.)
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 starting with W (either sorted at WAALS∅∅JD where ∅ is a symbol that evaluates less than any letter, or occasionally you will see them sorted at W∞VAN∅DER∅WAALS∅∅JD so that all of the tussenvoegsels end up at the end of their section, where ∞ is a symbol that evaluates greater than any letter).
It is considered formally incorrect to capitalize tussenvoegsels, except when they begin a sentence or when you precede them with an article like Mr. or Dr. You would probably want to write his name in this last-name-capitalized-first-no-commas convention as “van der KAMP Johannes Diderik;” writing ”VAN DER KAMP” looks wrong to me—but I am not sure what the French do.
Is there a Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Surnames yet? There’s famously one for names in general.
Turns out, capitalization depends on the grammatical construct. It's always capitalized at the beginning of a sentence, or to avoid ambiguity as in "Les mémoires de De Sèze". It's never capitalized when writing the full name (Jean de La Fontaine). In other constructs, it's complicated, and quite subjective...
Foreign names with particules follow the rules of the country of origin.
[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particule_(onomastique)#Majusc...?
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
Obviously, the correct answer is XML:
<name><family>Shinzo</family><given>Abe</given></name>Another interesting common practice is that, famous Chinese names are already last name first - e.g. Yao Ming.
Same thing in Germany.
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.
or
"Hello, I'm Xu Cheng. Please call me Cheng."
solves the problem either way.
Perhaps I would be talking to "Cheng", but later I would be talking about "Professor 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 nickname. For example, I know someone who goes by his nickname 哈哈; I've never heard his actual name.
3. The one-syllable name might be reduplicated; 袁璐 might be addressed as 璐璐.
4. The one-syllable name might be prefixed with 小; 李宁 might be addressed as 小宁.
Options 3 and 4 are diminutive constructions and may be too intimate for a strange man (or even a familiar man) to use to a woman.
Also reasonable:
"I am Doctor Xu."
"I'm Xu Cheng. I prefer my students to call me Doctor Xu."
"Hi, everybody calls me Frazz. Here's my card if you need to reach me."
"My name is something somethingElse, <whichever_is_family_name> is my family name, please call me <choice_to_be_called>"
Falsehoods programmers believe about names:
- Everyone has exactly one well-defined "family name". (In Latin America people have more than one, and some cultrues may go by a single name that isn't a family indicator.)
- In every formal context, the "family name" is how you should address someone. (You do not address the queen of England as "Mrs. Windsor", and Saddam Hussein preferred to be known as "Saddam", which is not a family name.)
(With that said, if it's understood that those assumptions hold, this is a great convention and I endorse it ... at least for the first mention in an article.)
Don't these "falsehoods" just become ridiculous at some point? Like, am I really supposed to carve out special cases in my shitty app's business logic for the Queen and Saddam Hussein?
/me wavesNot Asian, East Asian[0]. Asia is big.
I've seen that convention used in English-language sources more often than in French-language sources, which seem to usually use the pattern (also dominant in English) of initial caps for names with none of the name elements in all caps. Is that really a “French convention”?
This would also (I'd propose) hold true for non-Japanese names; if family-given is conventional when speaking Japanese, and my English name is John Johnson, it'd only be fair for my Japanese name to be ordered as Johnson John.