
Abe’s New Word Order - collate
http://www.petertasker.asia/articles/abes-new-word-order/
======
laurieg
As "a tall white foreigner with a big nose" it's a pretty random tossup
between someone introducing themselves in family name first order or family
name last order, even when speaking Japanese. This occasionally leads to the
awkward situation of not knowing how to refer to someone right after meeting
them.

I use "GivenName FamilyName" when speaking English and "FamilyName GivenName"
when speaking Japanese. I assumed this was the default. Of course, then I
discovered Korean names and Chinese names generally didn't follow this rule in
English.

~~~
spats1990
>it's a pretty random tossup between someone introducing themselves in family
name first order or family name last order, even when speaking Japanese.

Same in Korea, except in Korean it's fairly rare to use "you" as a mode of
address and everybody has a title or family term of some kind so you can often
get away with outright forgetting/never learning somebody's actual given name.
But if I fill out a form or something, even if I have to write my name in
Hangul, the chances are really high that somebody will assume I've used the
western system because I'm a foreigner and my FamilyName is actually my
GivenName. There are just way too many variables that can creep in.

-Name in Hangul with western order

-Name in Hangul with East Asian order

-Name in roman letters with western order

-Name in roman letters with East Asian order

-something else (mangled, middle name acting as family name, etc)

The other day, a bank didn't let me transfer money from an account I had with
them to an account I had at another bank because, they said, my name was
written differently in Hangul than in the receiving bank account details. I
said I didn't write my name in Hangul at any time while setting up either of
the bank accounts, otherwise there wouldn't be a discrepancy. Didn't work.
Also I know for a fact that bank systems here just cut off names that exceed
character limits in both English and Korean.

I think the Korean government could fix this if it automatically issued a
canonical hangul version of foreigners' names when they get ID cards here, but
it will never happen, I think, for reasons that go far beyond
immediate/large/practical concerns about updating systems etc.

I just grin and bear it while thinking of that patio11 post that often gets
shared here, where he says he has broken many name systems in Japan just by
putting his name into them.[1] That has been my exact experience in Korea.

Finally: regarding Abe's New Word Order, it seems like too much of a
coincidence that the summer olympics are in Japan next year and the Olympic
system, as far as I remember, capitalises family names.

edit: I may regret this, and it's kind of off-topic, but from what I
understand about Abe, it makes a certain kind of sense that he does not want
the Japanese to follow western naming orders in English anymore - he is an
ultranationalist and ethnonationalist and a member of Nippon Kaigi[2].

[1] [https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-
programmers-...](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-
believe-about-names/)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nippon_Kaigi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nippon_Kaigi)

~~~
Freak_NL
> […] canonical hangul version of foreigners' names […]

Like a list of names with their Hangul version? The problem is that you can't
know how someone's name is pronounced for sure.

In Japanese I provide the katakana reading for my name myself, because the
chance of meeting a native Japanese speaker who can correctly derive the
reading of my Dutch name in katakana is remote. Fortunately, in Japan it is
already customary to ask for a name's reading in kana, because kanji readings
too can be ambiguous.

Names are interesting in that their pronunciation for the same spelling can
vary even within a single language depending on where the person is from.

~~~
spats1990
>Like a list of names with their Hangul version? The problem is that you can't
know how someone's name is pronounced for sure.

Just how their name would be said if written in hangul. Ideal but unlikely:
let the person choose themselves, with assistance. Much more likely but
acceptable: some government clerk decides. The important/useful thing would be
to have a hangul version set officially and not have multiple versions at the
whims of bank clerks. I really meant canonical, I didn't say anything about
accurate pronunciation. It goes like this for Koreans writing their names in
English as well. Because there have been two official romanisation systems for
kor-eng, you get a lot of people preferring one or the other, and then you get
people who just prefer a certain English spelling.

edit: Just like in the opposite direction, English can't really properly
represent Korean sounds. hangul is actually more versatile here because there
are very few silent letters, etc, it's (with the usual exceptions) mostly
spelling=sound.

Do you find that the katakana approximates the native pronunciation of your
name well? The Korean government already has, if I recall, an official list of
hangul readings for words/names in a lot of different languages. The thing
that used to throw me off is French and Spanish words in Hangul that are
common in English, like "genre" which is a loanword in Korean too but
pronounced "장르" (like.. "jang-leu"). To me, the korean version weirdly sounds
more faithful (within confines of syllable blocks) to french "genre" than the
english version does. Am terrible at french though.

~~~
Freak_NL
> Do you find that the katakana approximates the native pronunciation of your
> name well?

Nope. That is a linguistic impossibility; mostly due to the lack of the schwa
vowel (ə) in Japanese (Korean does have that, so my name is easier in hangul
as far as vowels are concerned).

The katakana do approach it tolerably, and it is in essence my name when
speaking Japanese.

With katakana and hangul it is always a matter of compromising in one
direction or another. If you have a very common name there will be common
transcriptions that most people will stick to, but you can't prepare a list of
all foreign names in the world, so inevitably two people will prefer different
compromises, especially if they are fluent in that language.

Personally, I would be very much miffed if someone forces a specific katakana
reading of my given and family name on me. That actually happened once when I
was in Japan as an exchange student at Rikkyō University. I don't normally use
my second given name, so on one of the numerous forms that inevitably end up
in front of you in Japan someone added their own interpretation of how that
would sound in katakana. Some college administrative worker took the katakana
provided in earlier communication for my first given name and family name and
made up their own attempt based on how my second given name might be read in
English (I'm Dutch). I was not amused.

------
bitwize
I think normalizing on big-endian name order might be a good thing. The "BE in
native language, LE sometimes in Western languages[0]" convention can lead to
confusion. Some web sites, such as PayPal, choose BE or LE depending on the
country of origin of the request; a Japanese name in a PayPal ledger can
appear in kanji but in little-endian order if you're viewing it from the USA,
making it look weird. Also, the "endianness" of a full name is hard to tell
sometimes in English because journalism, anime dubs, etc. tend to use BE while
casual conversation tends to use LE. So sometimes I'm like "uhhh, which is the
family name and which is the given name?"

I doubt this figured much into Abe's reasoning. It's Abe. Wouldn't be
surprised if he started wearing a topknot into the Diet.

[0] Some Western languages also have big-endian name order. Hungarian, for
instance; Paul Erdős is really Erdős Pál.

~~~
thatfrenchguy
> [0] Some Western languages also have big-endian name order. Hungarian, for
> instance; Paul Erdős is really Erdős Pál.

In French it depends on the context, informally you're "Jacques Dupont",
formally "M. DUPONT Jacques".

------
loriverkutya
When you are Hungarian, Japanese names gets really really complicated if you
want to figure out, which one is the surname:

"In Hungarian, the Eastern order of Japanese names is officially kept and
Hungarian transliteration is used (e.g. Mijazaki Hajao), but Western name
order is also sometimes used with English transliteration (e.g. Hayao
Miyazaki)." \-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_name#Name_order](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_name#Name_order)

------
TazeTSchnitzel
There's going to be a lot more Wikipedia articles with the explanatory note “
_In this Japanese name, the family name is_ [surname].”

If this catches on, maybe there will be three eras of Japanese name order in
English. Pre-Meiji, Post-Meiji, Post-Reiwa.

~~~
xiaq
All the articles on Chinese people already have this. For example, this one on
the writer Lu Xun:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lu_Xun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lu_Xun).

This convention is widely practiced in Western journalism, but unfortunately
it hasn't become common knowledge. As a Chinese person working in UK, I
frequently have to explain my name order, despite the fact that most people
have definitely seen "Eastern" names like Xi Jinping and Yao Ming in the news.
I guess most people never asked themselves whether "Xi" and "Yao" are given
names or family names.

Personally I welcome this change by the Japanese government. My hope is that
this will raise awareness of the "Eastern" name order.

------
thanatropism
I was slightly embarrassed in an open office by the image that starts the post
on a big screen.

------
myrandomcomment
So having spent the last 10+ years doing work in Japan I can say I am all in
favor of having a standard here. There are times that I am handed a business
card with the English names reversed (last, first) and since I have not
memorized every Japanese name it can be confusing. Luckily I can read enough
Kanji that I can look at the Kanji name that will always be last, first and
figure out most of the time the match to the English name.

------
ginko
Isn't this essentially telling other languages how they're supposed to work?

~~~
gumby
Well it's liker the German government saying that they will always write
München even in English; that doesn't say anything about how English speakers
(or German private citizens speaking English) might choose to refer to Munich.
In Malaysia "Datuk" is used as a combined honorific with a name when speaking
otherwise completely idiomatic English rather than being translated into "Sir
So-and-so"

It's not really different from the Maharashtran givernment deciding to write
Bombay as "Mumbai" in English (which is how my grandfather pronounced it even
when speaking English).

Unaddressed in the essay is how the construct SURNAME given_name (e.g. BREL
Jaques) is quite common in countries like France -- not used in social
conversation but in all official contexts including work and school. And let's
not forget "Bond, James Bond."

The "communitarian/individualist" split and even more so its onomastic
implication is overrated IMHO as you can see from my French example above.

~~~
roenxi
> Well it's liker the German government saying that they will always write
> München even in English; that doesn't say anything about how English
> speakers (or German private citizens speaking English) might choose to refer
> to Munich.

I suppose this sort of thing instantly confuses me - why aren't we already
calling the city München if that is what the Germans are doing?

~~~
twic
Exonymy. Here's a lightweight survey of it in Europe:

[https://www.citymetric.com/horizons/which-european-cities-
ha...](https://www.citymetric.com/horizons/which-european-cities-have-most-
different-names-different-languages-4858)

One fun fact in there: there's a town in Bulgaria called Plovdiv, but the
Italians call it Philipoppoli - and they've been calling it that since long,
long before it was called Plovdiv!

~~~
205guy
Lightweight indeed. That article seemed so promising, and then it was just
arbitrarily limited by its data (as the author admits but doesn't do anything
to fix).

That topic has so much missed potential. He admits he left off Venice, but
what about Aachen/Aix-la-Chapelle, a historical town if there ever was one.
Most of his examples are just different languages changing spelling to fit
their conventions (eg Italian names ending in -o). But it totally overlooks
pronunciation (Paris is totally different in French and English). It would be
much more interesting to understand why cities sound different in different
languages, for example London in English and Londres in French--why did they
add they add the r sound to that word?

~~~
posterboy
I didn't know _Londres_.

I heard about Durres, Albania, for the first time today, too.

I had wondered about a connection between _door_ , Germanic \ _dorz, Latin_
forum* and _port_ , _porta, portal_ before (Latin f frequently corresponds to
English d, e.g. inferior, En under).

Suppose _-dres_ for Londres once meant port, which is always a good guess for
any bigger city's name. I can't confirm it though.

Durres derives from Dorian Greek Durrhakhion, but Greek has _thura_ for
"door"; so if I'm correct, they would have loaned the form with _d_.
Ironically, Albanian _dere_ "door" has a homophone "bitter; difficult,
tiresome" (from a different root if akin to Greek _due_ "misery") and one
traditional explanation of Albanias means _difficult coast_ (although there
was a historical kingdom Albania far off from the coast).

By the way: It's _Londer_ in Albanian, too, and _Londres_ in many Romance
languages.

tl;dr: nobody really knows, and the first address for French etymology doesn't
explain Londres either

------
saagarjha
Not completely on topic, but I found the images and their captions to be quite
humorous.

------
lonelappde
Excellent title.

~~~
205guy
Agreed, worthy of the Economist. I do appreciate a good pun in a title when it
is so relevant to the story.

------
stoicShell
As a programmer and nerd with an aesthetic sense for consistency, I move that
we all adopt an array of PascalCase strings as value for the "name" key.

    
    
        {"name": ["JohnSmith", "JohnEdwardSmith", "JohnESmith"]}
        {"name": ["AnneGauthier"]}
        {"name": ["ZoolisCartom", "CartomZolis"]}
    

Owner decides the array's content; others (people and systems) may then just
'match' based on reqs/prefs.

____

More on-topic, from a linguistic standpoint I believe natives should always
define their own namespace, others should merely conform (e.g. use as-literal-
as-possible transliteration following accepted standards).

A foreign name is an invitation to meet another culture.

~~~
theandrewbailey
No. You need to read: [https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-
programmers-...](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-
believe-about-names/)

~~~
stoicShell
I must not have made my idea clear.

The thought experiment is not about software, nor is it about programmers.

It's about writing e.g. "JohnSmith" on your freaking passport in the name
field. It's about people being free to have it written "John Smith" or "Smith
John" or "johnSMITH" or however they want. It's about your business card, your
mailbox, the name on your bank account.

I was just phrasing one example implementation of that idea.

Also, I appreciate the downvotes due my failure to convey my idea clearly, but
for a thought experiment it's pretty harsh — how is it not 100% on topic when
the article specifically talks about writing "Ryo Saeba" as "SAEBA Ryo"? I'm
just saying, 'fine', but make it unique and user-choice.

That said I'm resting this case, the best jokes are the shortest I suppose. I
was merely inviting comments to tell their own preferences. For instance, I
reduce my first name to a sound that matches a greek letter's name, so I like
to spell it e.g. "χLee" — and I'd love for it to be official spelling, I hate
with a passion that my country doesn't allow name changes unless major reason.
It's my name, isn't it? (if I read your linked blob correctly)

