There is something I’ve been noticing recently about how some Koreans write their names in Roman alphabets. Some of them started writing Korean names with their family name first without a comma. This seems to be more common for the names of Koreans in Korea (as opposed to those in the U.S.A.).

The norm for most Western cultures is that you write your family name last (John S. Smith). However, in most East Asian Cultures, the family name comes first.

It used to be that when the Korean name needed to be written in Roman alphabets, the western rule would be followed and write the family name last (Younghong Cho). At least, in Korean names there is no such thing as a middle name, but sometimes people would put spaces between each syllable to make each sound clearer (Young Hong Cho [I hate it when someone calls me "Young"]).

Another western rule is that if you want to put the family name first (for sorting and indexing, I guess), you would put a comma after the family name (Cho, Younghong) to note which is which.

But these days, I’ve noticed that when a Korean in Korea writes names of Koreans, they just write as one would say in Korea (Cho Younghong [my family name is "Cho"]). I do see this in BusinessWeek articles by Moon Ilhwan [his family name is "Moon"] for example. He writes the name of the Korean president as Roh Moo Hyun ["Roh" is the family name].

Actually, I’ve been doing the same when I write quick reviews about the Korean music CDs I bought for a while.

I was leaning toward the idea that it’s better to write people’s names as they want them to be. But when I don’t know what they want, I was inclined to represent the names as they are most commonly used. So, for most musicians in Korean, I started to put the family name first with a comma following it (Cho, Younghong). However, it started to get too cumbersome and confusing (Cho, Younghong, Hong, GilDong, and Kim, Chul Soo [how many names are there?]).

So, I started dropping the commas. But without them, it’s difficult to know which is which (well, for most Koreans, it’s fairly easy to recognize the family name). So, I did something in the middle by capitalizing the family name (CHO Younghong). It looks a bit awkward sometimes, but at least you know which is which.

I think some Chinese also have been doing this as well. When I was reading about Leslie Cheung‘s death, I noticed that some of the news articles were writing his name as “Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing” ["Kwok-wing" is his Cantonese name]. To me, this was interesting because it kept the “right” order for the both systems.

Some may argue that this is pointless and ask why even bother. That might be true (there are much more grave and important issues in the world) and it might have been fine to do what was done before. But these days, a lot of people, in the world, are questioning the idea of the proverb, “When in Rome, do as Romans do” since increasingly many different cultures seem to get integrated even for “Romans”. I think being familiar with different cultures and respecting them might be a good idea for everyone.

Anyway, I am somewhat intrigued to see that some Korean reporters find it okay to assume that people will recognize a Korean name and know where the family name is.

[2004-02-09] Those interested might want to take a look at the Hangul romanization page that I created.

[2005-02-24] BTW, I normally do not put my replies in the comments below. When a valid email address is given (it is never posted on the site), I do try my best to reply to the comments and/or the questions, though.

Also, I do review the comments posted before allowing them to go on the site. So, don’t even try to channel some of your misguided ethnic anger either.

[2005-09-01] I just created a crude page to convert romanized korean pronunciation into Korean characters. Try it.

[2007-06-12] The site had some issues and all the comments are lost and the comments are disabled for now. If you have a question, please send it to “hangul at sori dot org” (without the quotation marks).

[2007-10-25] I’ve created a page to collect Korean spellings of non-Korean names. Take a look.