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Meta comment on cultural awareness: "Japan wants you to say its leader’s name correctly: Abe Shinzo [1]" Why authors are still messing this up almost 5 years l
by AndrewKemendo 3y ago
Meta comment on cultural awareness: "Japan wants you to say its leader’s name correctly: Abe Shinzo [1]"
Why authors are still messing this up almost 5 years later is bewildering
[1]https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/21/asia/japan-name-abe-shinzo-intl/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/21/asia/japan-name-abe-shinzo-in...
- jasode 3y ago>Why authors are still messing this up almost 5 years later is bewildering I don't have an opinion on it but Westerners unfamiliar with Asian naming conventions can get conflicting signals. Some famous Japanese names that are well-known to Western audiences are written "FirstName FamilyName" instead of "FamilyName FirstName": baseball star: Shohei Ohtani not Ohtani Shohei actor: Ken Watanabe not Watanabe Ken Maybe those 2 constantly try to correct every journalist but I'm assuming they don't.
- BonoboIO 3y agoSomebody should ask them. Would be interesting to hear if that’s an issue or nobody cares.
- spondylosaurus 3y agoQuite a few Japanese game developers style their names as <GivenName FamilyName> on social media when they're writing in English. Some examples that come to mind, going off of their Twitter accounts: * Masahiro Ito * Hideki Kamiya * Keita Takahashi
- stickfigure 3y agoThe article you linked explains exactly why the issue is complex/unsettled and "messing up" isn't really an appropriate term.
- nihonthrowaway 3y agoAs someone who speaks Japanese to be polite, and will dutifully follow all honorifics while in Japan: Japan doesn't get to change English naming conventions in English speaking cultures and civilizations.
- mrob 3y agoBut why do China and Korea get to change English naming conventions? What makes Japan an exception?
- nihonthrowaway 3y agoThey don't get to either. The English speaking world can't handle almost every Vietnamese person being Nguyen.
- jasode 3y ago>But why do China and Korea get to change English naming conventions? Americans are exposed to Chinese names in both orderings of "Familyname Firstname" and "Firstname Familyname": - "Familyname Firstname" ordering : actor Chow Yun-fat, and basketball player Yao Ming - "Firstname Familyname" ordering: actor Simu Liu, pianist Yuja Wang, and Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma.
- saltcured 3y agoNot only that, we might be exposed to them for years without really knowing which is the family name and which is the given name! In a vacuum, I might have guess "Chow Yun-fat" as starting with the family name because I know that the hyphenated, two-part names are usually given. But a name like "Yao Ming" I might not have had any idea, since I don't have the cultural exposure to know which single syllable words look more like family names versus given names. Imagine expecting a Chinese person to figure out "Larry David" with no other context.
- netsharc 3y agoLooking at Wikipedia, Jack isn't part of Ma's birth name, so I suppose his is a name like "Tom Cruise". Same with Jackie Chan.
- wrp 3y agoEvery Japanese and Korean person I work with presents their names with the family name last when operating in an English speaking context. Conversely, my (American) name is often written family name first (and in katakana) when I'm in Japan. Real cultural sensitivity is accepting the social conventions of the society you are operating in.
- vitus 3y agoEh. I've never seen any articles referring "Jinping Xi", "Jong-Un Kim", "Jae-in Moon", "Zedong Mao", Yat-sen Sun". Non-heads of state get similar treatment: Lee Sedol, Bong Joon-Ho, Yao Ming vs. Hayao Miyazaki, Akira Kurosawa. This seems to have originated in the Meiji era (in the 19th century), when the Japanese assimilated many aspects of Western culture and traditions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_name#In_English_and_other_Western_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_name#In_English_and_o...
- resolutebat 3y agoYup, that's the problem, the practice is inconsistent even in Japan and we do say Oda Nobunaga, Tokugawa Ieyasu etc for sufficiently historical figures. The Wikipedia guideline for this is quite the mess of exceptions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Japan-related_articles#Personal_names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Japa...
- sneed_chucker 3y agoCool, now anyone reading the name needs to be familiar with East Asian naming conventions to know which is the given and which is the family name. Should we just print it in katakana too, so that we're not "culturally unaware"?
- charcircuit 3y agoIt should be written as 安倍晋三.
- jksk61 3y agowell it could be useful in literature where there are way too many zhang...
- darkerside 3y agoWe also expect people to know the basics of geography etc. Seems fine not to always cater to the ignorant, although there are specific magazines where you might expect that.
- pretendscholar 3y agoOne of the most annoying things about speaking the dominant world language (obviously it is also great in many respects) is that there is some pressure to change your language rather than just adjusting the sounds and spelling to the pre-existing phonetics. Erdogan is pronounced closer to erdoyan and Türkiye insisting on the umlaut. Nguyen and Pho rather than wynn and pha. Gyro instead of hyro. Blonde vs blond (WHY would we just have adjective modification for that word and none other) and colonel. You have to know a lot about so many different culture when a language should be self contained. I don't tell the Chinese what name to use for my country (I think they call USA something like Beautiful Land) in their language or the Spanish or another group for any word.
- pretendscholar 3y agoI should say a lot of this is internal as a form of social signaling about worldliness. Also not against loan words its just that you should adjust loan words and concepts to fit the phonetics and grammar of the language.
- scyzoryk_xyz 3y agoDang, never thought about that. Must be really hard. That joke out of the way, as a dual-citizen and polyglot my observation is that it is usually Americans giving other Americans shit about pronunciation. It’s perhaps (like you say) a form of jostling around how virtuous you are. Perhaps layered on top of some insecurity around how much of the world you got to see.
- BobaFloutist 3y agoI mean part of it is we don't really have a central language authority so when immigrants try to transliterate a word from their language, they go with their best guess based on what letters they understand to be equivalent, and sometimes they get it a little wrong, but by the time anyone realizes a convention has been set and it's incredibly hard to shift conventions. It also feels very silly to change the spelling of a word or name when two languages share an alphabet, even if it makes it a little less phonetic.
- 3y ago
- nyolfen 3y agoi will be happy to accommodate this when speaking in japanese
- patrec 3y agoWhat is bewildering is that you expect that the world has turn around in the blink of an eye to humor the Japanese, who are now suddenly having second thoughts after telling everyone else to use Firstname Lastname for Japanese names in an international context for most of the last 150 years or so (as the article correctly notes). Given the amount of work and confusion entailed this is a completely unreasonable expectation.