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Latin alphabet transcription of East Asian languages tend to be incredibly lossy and there tends to be a lot of ambiguities. That Vietnamese surname of Nguyen

by numpad0 2mo ago

Latin alphabet transcription of East Asian languages tend to be incredibly lossy and there tends to be a lot of ambiguities. That Vietnamese surname of Nguyen is formally written as Nguyễn in the current script, or as 阮 in the old adapted Hanzi script, and practically pronounced somewhere around "gwen". Most other EA countries tend to do equivalents of "阮" -> "gwen", and East Asian cultures generally prefer Last-First ordering, which tend to put more information in the first name, and so there are going to be tons of last names in Latin that end up being barely unambiguous to be a form of identification. These can be a problem if email addresses are going to be formulated as e.g. "阮必成" -> "Nguyễn Tất Thành" -> "Gwen Tat Than" -> "t.gwen@example.net", even if the surname is going to be that much long(although Nguyen in particular is just identical even in Vietnamese). (Japan may be less affected thanks to having default 2+ char random surnames farmers made up in modernization efforts, but there are still the 灘(nada) highscool, the 津(tsu) city, etc etc that can be NLP problems)

dgellow 2mo ago
Yes, but why specify it? Why not just say „they confused 2 people with the same name“? Adding „Asian“ doesn’t add anything to the story other than flagging Apple as casually racist
- spongebobstoes 2mo ago
  they don't have the same name, the email confusion was between Wang and Chang
tmp10423288442 2mo ago
Even if Westerners maintained the characters for the names rather than transliterate them, there's still the problem that common surnames are used by literally hundreds of millions of people of Chinese descent, and there are a lot of commonly-used given names as well. I think in all of Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese almost all given names are 1-2 syllables in length, so there's even less space for disambiguation, even before you get to the additionally ambiguities introduced by transliteration and dropping of diacritics. Japanese has several advantages: 1. Both given names and surnames often use more than 2 syllables. This makes it more familiar to speakers of European languages, where multi-syllable words are no big deal. 2. English speakers find Japanese easier to pronounce and remember due to its simpler syllable structure and use of globally more common sounds compared to the other languages. 3. Unlike the other languages, Japanese names are always given in Given Name, Surname order in English media, while names from the other languages are inconsistently transcribed in either order. 4. Japanese is the "default" East Asian culture for the West in many ways, since it's the one that at least the US has most deeply engaged for the longest time. Many, many cultural exports that actually originated in China were introduced to the West via Japan with Japanese names. Also, Japan has been an advanced industrial economy since the late 1800s, while China only achieved that status a few decades ago. 5. Japanese transcription into Roman characters has remained consistent for a long time (helped by the simpler phonology). Chinese and Korean have been cursed with several incompatible transcription systems over the years - although Pinyin has been winning out for Chinese, there are still many names with legacy transcriptions, not to mention the other Chinese languages needing their own transcriptions. Vietnamese does exclusively use Latin characters, but the diacritics and unfamiliar pronunciation makes them harder to remember.

by numpad0 2mo ago

dgellow 2mo ago

Yes, but why specify it? Why not just say „they confused 2 people with the same name“? Adding „Asian“ doesn’t add anything to the story other than flagging Apple as casually racist

spongebobstoes 2mo ago
they don't have the same name, the email confusion was between Wang and Chang

tmp10423288442 2mo ago

Even if Westerners maintained the characters for the names rather than transliterate them, there's still the problem that common surnames are used by literally hundreds of millions of people of Chinese descent, and there are a lot of commonly-used given names as well. I think in all of Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese almost all given names are 1-2 syllables in length, so there's even less space for disambiguation, even before you get to the additionally ambiguities introduced by transliteration and dropping of diacritics. Japanese has several advantages: 1. Both given names and surnames often use more than 2 syllables. This makes it more familiar to speakers of European languages, where multi-syllable words are no big deal. 2. English speakers find Japanese easier to pronounce and remember due to its simpler syllable structure and use of globally more common sounds compared to the other languages. 3. Unlike the other languages, Japanese names are always given in Given Name, Surname order in English media, while names from the other languages are inconsistently transcribed in either order. 4. Japanese is the "default" East Asian culture for the West in many ways, since it's the one that at least the US has most deeply engaged for the longest time. Many, many cultural exports that actually originated in China were introduced to the West via Japan with Japanese names. Also, Japan has been an advanced industrial economy since the late 1800s, while China only achieved that status a few decades ago. 5. Japanese transcription into Roman characters has remained consistent for a long time (helped by the simpler phonology). Chinese and Korean have been cursed with several incompatible transcription systems over the years - although Pinyin has been winning out for Chinese, there are still many names with legacy transcriptions, not to mention the other Chinese languages needing their own transcriptions. Vietnamese does exclusively use Latin characters, but the diacritics and unfamiliar pronunciation makes them harder to remember.