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English should adopt the French convention of capitalizing the family (last) name. For example, this would make it ABE Shinzo, which would remove ambiguity. Wh
by xxpor 7y ago
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.
- bitwize 7y agoWhen Japanese people write out their names in English, they often use this convention anyway (esp. in papers and the like), since it may not be clear which name order the writer has chosen to use.
- ylyn 7y agoThis does happen in Singapore.
- GordonS 7y agoIs this common? We used to have an office in SG, and I don't recall ever seeing it.
- paulmooreparks 7y agoI've worked and lived in Singapore for two years and haven't encountered it yet.
- ylyn 7y agoMainly in the civil service, I guess. https://www.gov.sg/sgdi/ministries/pmo https://www.gov.sg/sgdi/ministries/pmo
- dragonwriter 7y ago> English should adopt the French convention of capitalizing the family (last) name. 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”?
- gumby 7y agoThat's not used in literature or journalism, but in most other cases (forms, etc) it is pretty standard.
- fmajid 7y agoI can confirm. Also, in many cases, French names are last name first, e.g. in the military, but there is a comma to separate, e.g. "Lacombe, Lucien"
- madcaptenor 7y agoThe "Last, First" convention exists in English as well. To me it reads as something you'd see in the index of a book, since indices are usually ordered by last name but they'll want to show the first names as well.
- madcaptenor 7y agoI've seen this convention used by English-speaking academic mathematicians (who perhaps picked it up from the French).
- umanwizard 7y agoYes, it is extremely common and standard in France.
- mrob 7y agoSome Japanese people do this already when writing their names in English, and Wikipedia's article "Japanese name" claims that it's recommended by the Ministry of Education. I'm usually against non-standard capitalization, but because it reduces the potential for confusion I support it here.
- firethief 7y agoHow is it non-standard?
- mrob 7y agoI've never seen it used in mainstream news or literature, only in software and scientific papers, and not always then. I just searched for '.jp' in the Linux kernel changelog and none of the Japanese contributors I found wrote their names like that.
- xxpor 7y agoINADA Naoki, a Python contributor, signs their emails at least in the style.
- PhasmaFelis 7y agoThis is the first I've heard of it. It's certainly not common in a general context.
- jlv2 7y agoMy last name is mixed case, so capitalizing it makes it wrong.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoWrong, 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 a name that existed prior to English standardisation.
- jcrawfordor 7y agoIn genealogical research it's typical to not only standardize capitalization of family names (typically to ALL CAPS) but to also standardize spelling to the most common or first used spelling. Otherwise searching becomes a very frustrating venture, and these things change surprisingly quickly through generations.
- mcguire 7y agoGood luck with mcguire. ;-)
- YawningAngel 7y agoWould this not render fairly unambiguously to MAGUIDHIR (?spelling, corrected in an edit as I got it wildly wrong)? It only seems confusing if you're not Irish, and I'm already completely at sea with names that aren't Western European so this seems like a fine tradeoff to make.
- mcguire 7y agoUnambiguously? Yep. (And wow, I'm impressed.) But you're going to dreadfully confuse people looking for Mark McGwire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_McGwire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_McGwire), for example. (And possibly "MacGuiver". I'm kind of unconvinced that it's related.)
- HuShifang 7y agoAgree. This is, actually, a regular (if not standard) practice in many domains of academic bibliography for Chinese authors (which is useful, as some individuals with Chinese personal and family names working in Anglophone contexts do follow the English convention of putting personal names first -- meaning that you often can't tell which is the personal and which is the family name in pinyin, e.g. "Li Jia") 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". [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_compound_surname https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_compound_surname
- jasonjei 7y agoI have seen emails from Japanese colleagues where the last name is capitalized for clarity. 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)
- thaumasiotes 7y ago> 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.
- jasonjei 7y ago「劉」is being used as part of a first name in this case.
- thaumasiotes 7y agoYes, but I don't see what the ambiguity is supposed to be. How would you interpret the name such that the 劉 wasn't part of the given name?
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y agoThe European Parliament uses this convention because not every EU country puts surnames last, in particular Hungary doesn't.
- yumraj 7y ago> When encountering Asian Not Asian, East Asian[0]. Asia is big. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asia
- maxander 7y agoAs 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.
- NotPaidToPost 7y agoIt is not that commonly used, though. Mostly on official documents.
- astrobe_ 7y agoOur current prime minister is Edouard PHILIPPE: two first names. Out of the 20 most common family names, half are also used as first names.
- marshray 7y ago/me waves
- xucheng 7y agoYes, 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.
- dsr_ 7y ago"Hello, I'm Cheng Xu. Please call me Cheng." or "Hello, I'm Xu Cheng. Please call me Cheng." solves the problem either way.
- klodolph 7y agoWell, it doesn't solve the problem of communicating whether you are using the family name or given name, which is an important piece of information to know since it indicates the level of familiarity / intimacy / distance. This distinction is a bit less common for personal conversations in English-speaking countries but important in many parts of the world. Perhaps I would be talking to "Cheng", but later I would be talking about "Professor Cheng".
- thaumasiotes 7y ago> Perhaps I would be talking to "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.
- leptoniscool 7y agoI remember some mail always uses capitalized case [IRS and SSA?]..
- munificent 7y agoThis doesn't work in media that doesn't distinguish letters by case. That's still fairly common for things like forms and other official records that only use capital letters. Obviously, the correct answer is XML: <name><family>Shinzo</family><given>Abe</given></name>
- yorwba 7y agoExcept people are going to enter the name incorrectly anyway, as you demonstrated. (Abe is his family name.)
- loeg 7y agoThe comment is satire.
- munificent 7y agoUgh, actually I just got it wrong. Reading comprehension fail.
- smaller 7y agoWhich really just points to the need for the simple XML format you've proposed!
- gibolt 7y agoAny suggestions for surnames with only one letter? They exist, and would still be ambiguous :)
- devy 7y agoIn a lot of U.S Government Forms, "LastName, FirstName" format is prevalent, and there should be no ambiguity without messing with the cases. Another interesting common practice is that, famous Chinese names are already last name first - e.g. Yao Ming.
- lqet 7y ago> In a lot of U.S Government Forms, "LastName, FirstName" format is prevalent, and there should be no ambiguity without messing with the cases. Same thing in Germany.
- yellowapple 7y agoSticking to a consistent ordering of given and (middle and) (paternal and) (maternal and) family names would also remove ambiguity.
- yoz-y 7y agoIt would but then a good part of the world would have to change their convention. I don’t think they see any good reason to adopt our conventions.
- yellowapple 7y agoIt could be per-language, i.e. use family-given when speaking Japanese or given-family when speaking English. That's more what I'm getting at. 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.
- SilasX 7y agoYou know I have to do it... 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.)
- throwaway287391 7y ago> 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.) 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?
- gmueckl 7y agoFun fact: some German names (e.g. Strauß) change spelling when capitalized. The letter "ß" is a ligature that only exists as a lower case letter and has to be written as "SS" when capitalized. 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.
- souprock 7y agoThat mistake has been fixed: ẞ 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.
- kh_hk 7y ago> One of my coworkers was from Spain and had a last name consisting of two words separated by a space. 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.
- roberto 7y agoNot necessarily. My last name is Ferreira De Almeida. "Ferreira" comes from my mother, and "De Almeida", with space, comes from my father. I started spelling it "Dealmeida" to avoid confusion.
- jorams 7y agoNote that there is now an official capital "ß", after being adopted as official in 2017. It has been in Unicode for longer. The situation is fairly complicated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_%E1%BA%9E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_%E1%BA%9E
- dfrey 7y agoIt probably doesn't matter too much, but this is a lossy conversion. For example "Fred McIntosh" -> "MCINTOSH Fred". So the capitalization of the "I" is lost.