I have long considered that we should do more to embrace and encourage use of native script person names rather than only using romanised person names. It seems to me, at times, that native script person names are being romanised out of existence.
Here are some real person names in both romanised and native script forms. I have written the romanised names in the conventional English ordering of given name followed by family name.
- Su-wei Hsieh 謝淑薇 zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/謝淑薇
- Jae-suk Yoo 유재석 ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/유재석
- Kyoko Fukada 深田恭子 ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/深田恭子
- Chinnawut Inthra-khusin ชินวุฒ อินทรคูสิน th.wikipedia.org/wiki/ชินวุฒ_อินทรคูสิน
Here are some considerations for embracing and encouraging use of native script names in an International English context.
🌎 Let people know you have a native script name. It is my (English) experience and observations that romanised names dominate and take precedence over native script names. I belong to a number of international email lists and forums and those members that do have native acript names usually only use their romanised names in communication. I suggest, instead, that you always use both your romanised and native script names eg at the end of your email or in an email signature. I encourage my students to, at every possible opportunity, use both romanised and native script names eg on the cover page of their project report. Think of your name as being complete when it is presented as a language pair, such as, Jae-suk Yoo 유재석 or Jae-suk 재석.
🌍 When communicating with someone, make an effort to learn and use their native script name. I am not expecting you to learn how to write a name in , say, Chinese, Thai, or Arabic. Rather, learn how best to address that person with their native script name. The person's preference may be for given name only or full name or some other convention. You have, of course, already saved that person's native script name and so all you need to do is a copy/paste.
Then there are Latin script names which have letters with diacritics. My given name has the acute accent over the letter e. So, my given name written correctly is André. How many people write my name correctly? Not many!! Most write my name as Andre!! It really is not very difficult to write my name correctly. All it takes is a tiny tiny amount of thought and effort. Many keyboards have a feature to make writing letters with diacritics easy. If I hold down the e key on my ABC - Extended OSX keyboard I am presented with a popup which gives me a choice of è or é or ê or ë or ē or ė or ę. Hold down the a key and I have a choice between à or á or â or ä or æ or ã or å or ā. Experiment with your keyboard. Press and hold some of the keys and see what happens. Many person names use letters with diacritics, not just mine. Ciarán, Órlaith and Ruairí are Irish Gaelic names which have the fada diacritic. Now that you know how easy it is to write Latin script letters with diacritics, I expect you to write such names correctly!
🌏 Store both the native script name and romanised name in your database. So, you have an online form for a person to enter their details. Your form may, for example, request entry of family name and given name and only allow the person to enter ASCII characters. I suggest then that you have an additional field which allows the person to enter their native script name. This field should accept Unicode characters as Unicode encompasses many human language scripts and will eventually cover all known human language scripts. Entering Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Arabic ...etc... names now becomes possible. Entering my name correctly now becomes possible. Currently, I am suggesting that this field would not be a primary key field but rather would complement the romanised name.
Think of university graduation certificates. In the UK, the name of the student to whom it is awarded will have their name printed in romanised form only. We now have the native script name in the database and so we can have a certificate with a student's romanised and native script names. That would be so cool and adds to the international credentials of the university. I wonder which UK university will be the first to do it?
🌎 Use romanised and native script name pairs in your social media posts. My informal observations indicate that the majority of social media posts use romanised names only. The native script name is now available in the database and so, at every opportunity, use the name pair in your social media posts. A simple user interface to the database could provide the name pair as a single click copy which then can then be pasted into social media posts.
🌎 How to write the possessive form of a name pair? Over the years I have tried various constructs for writing the possessive with a name pair and never being satisfied with any of the constructs I have devised, until recently. In my twitter thread twitter.com/andreschappo/status/1383516851854987273 I have devised name pair possessive constructs for English and Korean language contexts which I am happy with.
- English language context: (Subin Yang 양수빈)’s ...
- Korean language context: (양수빈 Subin Yang)의 ...
🌍 Romanised names can be much less accurate than native script names. There are many different romanisations standards. There are name romanisations which do not adhere to any standard. Thus there can be more than one romanisation of a native script name, thus making the romanised names non unique and inaccurate. Here is a fictious and exaggerated for humourous effect example.
There is also a crucial consideration with respect to Chinese names. The hanyu pinyin 汉语拼音 (the standard romanisation used in China, there are other romanisations) form is much less accurate than the native script form. Many different Chinese names can be written with the same pinyin. A pinyin syllable usually has several/many different Chinese characters. Hong, for example, could be the pinyin for the Chinese characters 红 or 虹. Imagine reading the following dialogue which features several Chinese people each with a different Chinese name but written in Hanyu Pinyin, all the names are the same.
Hi Hong Wang. Oh, Hi Hong Wang I did not notice you. These are my classmates Hong Wang, Hong Wang and Hong Wang. We are just going for a drink. Please do join us and bring your friend Hong Wang. Sorry, we cannot as we are going to a football match where we will be meeting with our work colleagues Hong Wang, Hong Wang, Hong Wang, Hong Wang, Hong Wang, Hong Wang, Hong Wang and Hong Wang ...etc...😀
🌏 If you teach Computer Science you can contribute to this endeavour and at the same time greatly enhance the skills of your students. If your teaching involves any aspect of text then go beyond ASCII text and incorporate Unicode text into your teaching. The Unicode code charts illustrate how extensive and inclusive Unicode is ➜ unicode.org/charts/
Letʼs assume you are teaching a module on databases. You will be teaching your students skills, such as, setting up database tables, defining text fields, storing text, sorting on text fields, searching text fields and so on. It is highly likely that one or more such text fields will be person names. Populate those name fields with non Latin script text or Latin script names with diacritics. Enrich your teaching by incorporating native script Thai, Japanese, Korean, Arabic ...etc... person names. Set an assignment that involves storing, sorting and searching native script Chinese names.
An added advantage of incorporating Unicode person names into your teaching is that you will be developing global skills in your students and encouraging global thinking.
🌏 Usernames and Passwords and Email Addresses do not need to be ASCII only. In additional to traditional person names there are internet person identifiers in the form of usernames and email addresses. Many Systems/Computer Scientists/Programmers/Sys Admins insist that these identifiers have to be ASCII. I can assure you that these identifiers can be Unicode rather than ASCII which means these identifiers can consist of characters from most any human language script. I setup my spotify.com with a Japanese Kana かな username and a Korean Hangul 한글 password.
Whilst thinking about this article, I remembered kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names So funny and so true🙂
