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Agree. This is, actually, a regular (if not standard) practice in many domains of academic bibliography for Chinese authors (which is useful, as some individual
by HuShifang 7y ago
Agree. 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?
- jasonjei 7y agoOn the Uber app, they only provide the given name and not the full surname. I mistakenly thought my driver was surnamed LIU, when his actual surname is JIANG. Just pointing an anecdote when I was in Taiwan
- paulific 7y agoIf you only hear it spoken, or you don't understand the naming convention and start making guesses about what you think is going on. People in countries where middle names are normal also tend to make the assume that one of the syllables is a middle name.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago> People in countries where middle names are normal also tend to make the assume that one of the syllables is a middle name. Some Chinese do think of it that way.
- midhir 7y agoThat's interesting, I thought the given name in Chinese was almost always two characters. Is this not the case? 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!
- cbhl 7y agogiven name != surname surname = "last" name = family name
- headsupftw 7y ago"I thought the given name in Chinese was almost always two characters. Is this not the case?" 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.
- ksec 7y ago>I thought the given name in Chinese was almost always two characters. Is this not the case? Mostly in Old, Traditional or Southern part of China.
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoWhen was the last time mainland China had a leader with a one character given name? But ya, it is a matter of preference.
- dis-sys 7y ago> When was the last time mainland China had a leader with a one character given name? The person commonly known as Sun Yat-sen in the west. His given name is 文, he used it to sign all official documents.
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago