Re: Draft for review: Personal names around the world

Hello Richard,

Sorry for the late response but several folks from the HTML5 Chinese IG
gave the following comments about the article:

== Hax ==
* Automatic name parsing is error-prone even for Chinese names. For
example, "欧阳锋" could be a name with "欧" or "欧阳" as the family name.
* The article doesn't mention that a few people, especially Japanese,
uppercase their family names and place it in front. Ambrose pointed out
that this practice has a French origin.

== Ambrose ==
* In Hong Kong, my name would be written as Kenny LU Kang-Hao. This is
because the first two words makes an English name in the right order and
the last two words also makes a Chinese name in the Chinese order. The
causes problems when people immigrate.
* In America, people use
1. Kenny Kang-Hao Lu / Kang-Hao Kenny Lu (the last name is always the
last, and in an official document this indicates "Kenny" as formal)
2. Kang-Hao (Kenny) Lu (this emphasizes that "Kenny" is informal)
(My comment: the example "Fred Yao Ming" in the document is probably
inaccurate. It should be "Ming Fred Yao" or "Ming (Fred) Yao" although I
am not sure about this.)

== Zi Bin ==
* There is no standard for the separator of the second and third
ideographs of a Chinese name. All the following are in use:
Zi  Yi  Zhang
ZiYi Zhang
Zi-Yi Zhang

== Kenny (me) ==
* Perhap there should a section about romanizatation and mention that
there are two orderings for romanized names: "Mao Zedong" or "Zedong
Mao" for "毛泽东". You might want to mention the practice of uppercasing
family name here as well.
* In general, I think mentioning generational name in the "Different
order of parts" section is a bit complex and unnecessary. As you
mentioned, not everyone has a generational name these days and even if "
毛泽东" has a generational part, I still expect the given name of "毛泽
东" to be "泽东", not "东" (or at least in a database that has a "given
name" field, this is more likely to be "泽东" for reasons you mentioned
later in the same section). This also matches what is described in
Wikipedia[1], although we might be wrong in some definition of "given name".

Anyway, my point is that I haven't seen any system, in Chinese or in
English, that asks for or makes use of generational names, and hence it
might be easier for the reader to just learn "毛泽东" as the family name
"毛" + the given name "泽东".  The mention of "generational name" could
be moved into the wiki for cultural interest.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_name#Family_names

* It is not 100% accurate to say that Chinese names are not separated by
spaces. For example, [2] has several examples for Chinese and Japanese
names:
呂 康豪
清水 昇
加藤 文彦
I don't have a figure on how common this practice is. Perhaps the
sentence could be modified into "Note also that the names are
<ins>normally</ins> not separated by spaces."

[2] http://s-web.sfc.keio.ac.jp/conference2011/


Thanks for this nice article. It stirred interesting discussion in the
Chinese IG.


Cheers,
Kenny

Received on Saturday, 27 August 2011 20:35:03 UTC