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Their Chinese names are Zhāng Wěi (张伟), Yùn Zhīwěi (恽之玮), and Yuán Xīnyì (袁新意); I can’t find one for Zhu Xinwen. I wish English-language publications would tre

Their Chinese names are Zhāng Wěi (张伟), Yùn Zhīwěi (恽之玮), and Yuán Xīnyì (袁新意); I can’t find one for Zhu Xinwen. I wish English-language publications would treat Chinese names better. Without the Chinese characters, you can’t tell what their name actually is, and without accent marks on the transliteration, you can’t tell how to pronounce it. Granted, it doesn’t matter to most English-speaking readers, but it should matter, because those are their names. It’s no wonder so many Chinese feel the need to adopt an extra name when moving to the West.

nabla9 11y ago
Do English-language publications change the way authors write their names? I wonder if this is somehow related to Bibliography and Bibliographical software, indexes and references. If you have started your career with certain name in BibTeX without accent marks, changing it later may screw up references.
- schoen 11y ago
  I think the parent commenter's complaint is about this journalistic article (from Quanta), which isn't by any of these mathematicians, just about them. Although I sympathize with this concern, it looks like two of these mathematicians write their own names (solely) in Romanization without tone markings in their own academic publications, for example http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.02683 http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.02683 linked from the article. So it's not necessarily something that other people are unilaterally doing to them. (Although Prof. Yun has put his Chinese name at the top of his homepage, but seemingly not in any of his papers.) Maybe other people are pressuring academics with non-Latin names indirectly not to use their names in native scripts in their publications because of editorial policies in journals that would discourage or forbid it, or, as you suggested, because of journals' software tools that would have compatibility problems.
- yen223 11y ago
  The biggest source of confusion is with the surname/given-name ordering. Chinese folks put their surname first and their given name last. E.g. Wei Zhang in the story should be Zhang Wei - his surname is Zhang. I won't be surprised if he goes by Wei Zhang because that's how his name appears on official documents.
  - schoen 11y ago
    That's definitely a big source of confusion, but in the case of Wei Zhang, he uses the Western name order on his own homepage and for his e-mail address. https://www.math.columbia.edu/~wzhang/ https://www.math.columbia.edu/~wzhang/ (Yes, it's possible that someone else originally chose this order for him.)
towlejunior 11y ago
I did not know that. I always assumed the Romanizations mapped over one-to-one. I can't believe I'm saying this, but: it seems like the sort of thing an awareness campaign could solve, no? a) It can't just be me. b) There's no good argument against it. Not for a formal publication.
- gajomi 11y ago
  The pinyin given by op has a one to one mapping to the pronunciation, and it seems a bit inconsistent that they fully Romanized their names while leaving Ngô Bảo Châu in the Vietnamese alphabet. But even if they did (and I believe this was what op was getting at) afaik there wouldn't be a one to one correspondence between surname pinyin and character. Incidentally, my sense is that their is broad awareness of these problems, at least in academic circles, which have a kind of "your name is your brand" attitude, and its common to see both short and full names in publications.
  - schoen 11y ago
    Definitely still not one-to-one, as you pointed out. A pinyin string with tone will map to lots of characters. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ch%C4%81o#Mandarin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ch%C4%81o#Mandarin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/zh%C4%81o#Mandarin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/zh%C4%81o#Mandarin The places that I've seen names printed in native scripts are Donald Knuth's books (look at the TAOCP bibliography, with native script names all over the place), and, very recently, the Rakudo Perl 6 release notes. https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/ https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/ I thought Knuth regarded it more as a matter of respect than of academic career benefit or scholarliness, but it has all of those virtues, although at least the Cyrillic and Hebrew ones have fairly low transliteration ambiguity.
    - GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
      > at least the Cyrillic ... ones have fairly low transliteration ambiguity. Tell it to Chebyshev, Chebychev, Chebysheff, Chebyshov, Tchebychev, Tchebycheff, Tschebyschev, Tschebyschef, and Tschebyscheff.
coliveira 11y ago
I don't think this is fault of the journalist, Chinese people in the US use their own transliterated names. The journalist is most certainly just using the name that was given by the Chinese themselves.
gone35 11y ago
I can't find one for Zhu Xinwen. 朱歆文.
thaumasiotes 11y ago
> Without the Chinese characters, you can’t tell what their name actually is, and without accent marks on the transliteration, you can’t tell how to pronounce it. You certainly can in the case of 张 zhāng, and you'd be more than justified in assuming a Mr. Yuan was surnamed 袁 yuán. On the other hand, no one who isn't already familiar with Chinese will be able to pronounce Chinese names even if tone marks are provided. Accurate pronunciation is not a goal of foreign name representation, because it's impossible. And of course, an English-speaking audience wouldn't even be able to recognize the same name twice in two publications if it was given in characters. The only people who can benefit at all from more detailed name information are people who are interested in the foreign language in question. Those people are very rare; magazines tend to be written for their readers. Chinese sources say 薛定谔 rather than Schrödinger, and 奥巴马 rather than Obama, because that's what their audience is able to read.
- sandworm101 11y ago
  >> no one who isn't already familiar with Chinese will be able to pronounce Chinese names even if tone marks are provided. That goes for most any language. Take a simple and common names like 'Abbott" ... pronounced more like abbit.
  - schoen 11y ago
    You can sort of rank orthographies on this score, or at least compare them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_orthography#Comparison_between_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_orthography#Compariso... > Languages with highly phonemic orthographies often lack or rarely use a word corresponding to the English verb "to spell" because the act of spelling out words is rarely needed (careful pronunciation of a word is generally sufficient to convey its spelling).
    - thaumasiotes 11y ago
      Pinyin with tone marks is a perfectly phonemic orthography (at least as to standard Mandarin). That's a completely unrelated idea. Nobody who doesn't know Chinese will be able to pronounce Chinese names because (1) they don't know how to read them, and (2) the sounds of the language are different. Spanish also has a perfectly representative orthography, but you should see what's happened to Spanish place names in the US. (I originally wrote that Spanish also had a "perfectly phonemic orthography". That's not true; some sounds may be represented in more than one written form. But the written form of a Spanish word gives sufficient information to pronounce it.)
Terr_ 11y ago
Oddly enough, the last time I visited Beijing some roads with bilingual street-signs didn't have any pinyin accent marks either.

nabla9 11y ago

Do English-language publications change the way authors write their names? I wonder if this is somehow related to Bibliography and Bibliographical software, indexes and references. If you have started your career with certain name in BibTeX without accent marks, changing it later may screw up references.

schoen 11y ago
I think the parent commenter's complaint is about this journalistic article (from Quanta), which isn't by any of these mathematicians, just about them. Although I sympathize with this concern, it looks like two of these mathematicians write their own names (solely) in Romanization without tone markings in their own academic publications, for example http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.02683 http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.02683 linked from the article. So it's not necessarily something that other people are unilaterally doing to them. (Although Prof. Yun has put his Chinese name at the top of his homepage, but seemingly not in any of his papers.) Maybe other people are pressuring academics with non-Latin names indirectly not to use their names in native scripts in their publications because of editorial policies in journals that would discourage or forbid it, or, as you suggested, because of journals' software tools that would have compatibility problems.
yen223 11y ago
The biggest source of confusion is with the surname/given-name ordering. Chinese folks put their surname first and their given name last. E.g. Wei Zhang in the story should be Zhang Wei - his surname is Zhang. I won't be surprised if he goes by Wei Zhang because that's how his name appears on official documents.
- schoen 11y ago
  That's definitely a big source of confusion, but in the case of Wei Zhang, he uses the Western name order on his own homepage and for his e-mail address. https://www.math.columbia.edu/~wzhang/ https://www.math.columbia.edu/~wzhang/ (Yes, it's possible that someone else originally chose this order for him.)

towlejunior 11y ago

I did not know that. I always assumed the Romanizations mapped over one-to-one. I can't believe I'm saying this, but: it seems like the sort of thing an awareness campaign could solve, no? a) It can't just be me. b) There's no good argument against it. Not for a formal publication.

gajomi 11y ago
The pinyin given by op has a one to one mapping to the pronunciation, and it seems a bit inconsistent that they fully Romanized their names while leaving Ngô Bảo Châu in the Vietnamese alphabet. But even if they did (and I believe this was what op was getting at) afaik there wouldn't be a one to one correspondence between surname pinyin and character. Incidentally, my sense is that their is broad awareness of these problems, at least in academic circles, which have a kind of "your name is your brand" attitude, and its common to see both short and full names in publications.
- schoen 11y ago
  Definitely still not one-to-one, as you pointed out. A pinyin string with tone will map to lots of characters. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ch%C4%81o#Mandarin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ch%C4%81o#Mandarin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/zh%C4%81o#Mandarin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/zh%C4%81o#Mandarin The places that I've seen names printed in native scripts are Donald Knuth's books (look at the TAOCP bibliography, with native script names all over the place), and, very recently, the Rakudo Perl 6 release notes. https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/ https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/ I thought Knuth regarded it more as a matter of respect than of academic career benefit or scholarliness, but it has all of those virtues, although at least the Cyrillic and Hebrew ones have fairly low transliteration ambiguity.
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
    > at least the Cyrillic ... ones have fairly low transliteration ambiguity. Tell it to Chebyshev, Chebychev, Chebysheff, Chebyshov, Tchebychev, Tchebycheff, Tschebyschev, Tschebyschef, and Tschebyscheff.

coliveira 11y ago

I don't think this is fault of the journalist, Chinese people in the US use their own transliterated names. The journalist is most certainly just using the name that was given by the Chinese themselves.

gone35 11y ago

I can't find one for Zhu Xinwen. 朱歆文.

thaumasiotes 11y ago

> Without the Chinese characters, you can’t tell what their name actually is, and without accent marks on the transliteration, you can’t tell how to pronounce it. You certainly can in the case of 张 zhāng, and you'd be more than justified in assuming a Mr. Yuan was surnamed 袁 yuán. On the other hand, no one who isn't already familiar with Chinese will be able to pronounce Chinese names even if tone marks are provided. Accurate pronunciation is not a goal of foreign name representation, because it's impossible. And of course, an English-speaking audience wouldn't even be able to recognize the same name twice in two publications if it was given in characters. The only people who can benefit at all from more detailed name information are people who are interested in the foreign language in question. Those people are very rare; magazines tend to be written for their readers. Chinese sources say 薛定谔 rather than Schrödinger, and 奥巴马 rather than Obama, because that's what their audience is able to read.

sandworm101 11y ago
>> no one who isn't already familiar with Chinese will be able to pronounce Chinese names even if tone marks are provided. That goes for most any language. Take a simple and common names like 'Abbott" ... pronounced more like abbit.
- schoen 11y ago
  You can sort of rank orthographies on this score, or at least compare them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_orthography#Comparison_between_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_orthography#Compariso... > Languages with highly phonemic orthographies often lack or rarely use a word corresponding to the English verb "to spell" because the act of spelling out words is rarely needed (careful pronunciation of a word is generally sufficient to convey its spelling).
  - thaumasiotes 11y ago
    Pinyin with tone marks is a perfectly phonemic orthography (at least as to standard Mandarin). That's a completely unrelated idea. Nobody who doesn't know Chinese will be able to pronounce Chinese names because (1) they don't know how to read them, and (2) the sounds of the language are different. Spanish also has a perfectly representative orthography, but you should see what's happened to Spanish place names in the US. (I originally wrote that Spanish also had a "perfectly phonemic orthography". That's not true; some sounds may be represented in more than one written form. But the written form of a Spanish word gives sufficient information to pronounce it.)

Terr_ 11y ago

Oddly enough, the last time I visited Beijing some roads with bilingual street-signs didn't have any pinyin accent marks either.