As far as naming goes, my entirely unscientific, slightly stupid, and not to mention out of date, East/West division is where Abraham turns into Ibrihim. It more or less works for Greece/Turkey and Israel/Palestine & Jordan. It certainly doesn’t work for Africa, and I have no idea how it works for northwest Asia.
I’ve worked with Amit’s and Preeti’s and none of them had nicknames that I know of. For the other three, the most enunciated syllable would probably be the nickname they’d pick up. So Adhishesha, depending on pronunciation, might end up as Shesh. I don’t think this is some English/Indian cultural issue either. I’ve never worked in India, and my experiences are either with Indian immigrants or expats, or interacting with people over conference calls. But my general impression is that the use of nicknames is common within Indian culture. The one example I can quickly recall is that the Sri Lankan cricketer Muttiah Muralitharan had the nickname Murali and was called that by Sri Lankan sports commentators.
IME what annoys Indians are mistakes in pronunciation like mixing up “da” and “dha” (and “ḍa”…) One can imagine similar mistakes needling in Chinese and other languages, including misplaced tones. I have been rebuked for accidentally mispronouncing someone’s name, but never had someone say to me, “My name is Chayiaanunt… Chayiaanunt… fuck it, call me Bob.”
I don’t know any Indians who expect Anglophones to be able to pronounce phonemes that they can’t pronounce. Of course, they might make fun of bad pronunciation, but that’s in line with the stereotype-based humor that common in Indian society.
HALF the population speaks it??? Are you joking? I doubt even half the students at the top universities in Hong Kong “speak” English. Students began learning English at a very young age, but for the most part they are taught reading and writing, not “speaking” (conversation). The schools simply don’t have the number of English teachers needed who speak English well enough to help students with pronunciation and other speaking skills. It would be the blind leading the blind. I lived in Hong Kong. The students I taught in the private English tutoring school all had studied English for years, but most had trouble putting a spoken English sentence together.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Hong Kong and the people who live there, but if you are walking down Nathan Road in the heart of Tsim Sha Tsui (Kowloon) and you ask a passer by a question in English, there is a very little chance you will be understood and even a smaller chance the person will reply to you in English.
Possibly they are exaggerating, and counting ‘hey, I can buy groceries and give change!’ as ‘proficient’ - I haven’t lived in Hong Kong myself, just visited.
Of all the posts since my last, this comes closest to actually addressing what I’m wondering about, and it’s just speculation :). Is there anyone here fluent in Chinese who can check a Chinese-language Hong Kong news story to see what name she uses there?
We were walking down the main shopping street in Shanghai in 2010. We were approached by a group of school kids about 10 or 12 whose assignment was to have a conversation with an English speaker. I had to tell them I worked for a fellow in Canada who had come over from Hong Kong 30 years earlier and these school kids spoke and pronounced far better than him. I got the impression the more elite schools are taking the accent issue(?) seriously.
One thing is names of people born in other countries. But if say ‘Chinese American’ means Americans born in the US perhaps to parents or even grandparent also born in the US it doesn’t seem strange the family would at some point adopt ‘American’ given names. My family doesn’t use very traditional Irish given names either, because we’ve been in the US several generations (though some people of distant Irish heritage do re-adopt that, you can do as you like in that regard, obviously).
As far as people born overseas or to parents who were, a high % of people of Korean descent in the US are Christians (v a relatively narrow plurality in South Korea). Korean Christians have Christian baptism names besides traditional Korean given names. People of Chinese descent in the US are also disproportionately Christian compared to China though both %'s are much lower than for Koreans.
Also note that Koreans are traditionally rarely orally addressed by their given names in Korean settings (I think this is also somewhat true in China). So even calling somebody by their ‘real name’ is foreign from a traditional Korean POV. How you address somebody varies widely by the situation and your and their relative age but in only a few cases is it traditionally Korean to call somebody by their full given name. Even husbands and wives traditionally don’t. Young close friends are most likely to. Friends old enough to have their own kids generally address one another as ‘mother of ’/father of ’ according to their oldest kid’s name. Parents and older siblings generally abbreviate the name to the last half plus ‘ah’ (IOW Jeong Hae-yeong* called ‘yeong ah’ by her parents and older siblings), younger family members use a title (like ‘older sister’). Acquaintances and work colleagues use a variety of forms of address but using a person’s given name is generally considered intrusive, or foreign. A Korean Christian person is called by their Christian name at church, and often by friends from church.
This is the context in which people may decide to use a name non-Koreans people are going to mispronounce less often. It’s not as if it makes a Korean person homesick or undermines their sense of being Korean not to be addressed by their Korean given name, since that’s not what they are used to at home anyway.
*by current ROK transliteration of 정해영, which probably some Westerners would say Jee-ung Hae-yee-ong, but the older transliteration Chung Hai-young would be closer on the first and last syllables…but more confusing on the second which many would say ‘high’, but it’s ‘hae’. A particular person might want to use their Korean given name, even though that’s not common back home, even though they have to go through a break in period to have people pronounce it right the way their family has chosen to transliterate it. But I find it more strange that some people are so puzzled when some Koreans use a Western name than it being strange that they do so.
As a person of Chinese heritage (though extremely westernized myself), reading this thread is kind of amusing as I didn’t realize the concept of Chinese vs. Western names isn’t common knowledge among non-Chinese people. It never occurred to me that it could be considered odd to have two sets of names - but yes as others have mentioned, when talking in Chinese, just the Chinese name would be used. When speaking in English, generally just the Western name would be used - it seems to be a peculiarity of media to tag on the anglacized Chinese name sometimes (eg. Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet ngor). Likewise, a quick Google shows that sometimes the western name will be referenced in Chinese-language articles, but just in parentheses after the Chinese name and written out with romanized alphabet.
Using the people I know as reference, it is pretty common for women to take on their husband’s last name for the Western name but just keep their maiden family name when speaking Chinese, though when written they may have the husband’s family name first.
She is known by her Chinese name in the local media. Here is an example.
Her name in Chinese is bolded.
This speculation completely and utterly fails. Why would you speculate about something you have zero experience about?
I’m in an office of half foreigner English teachers and half Taiwanese English teachers who speach Mandarin amoung themselves. Their conversations go “blah blach blach (in Chinese) Jessica (in perfect English pronunication) blah blach blach (in Chinese).”
It is quite common for Taiwanese to use (mostly) English names. One of our family friends exclusively uses her English name with her friends. My wife doesn’t actually know her Chinese name.
People write English names in English, even when it’s in the middle of a Chinese sentence. Why is so difficult to imagine?
It’s not just a Hong Kong thing, it’s an all-of-China thing (or at least all of China that has contact with the Western world).
I’ve worked for the last nine years for a company that has offices in the major Chinese cities, and Chinese-adjacent cities with significant Chinese populations (like Kuala Lumpur or Singapore).
It is universal that Chinese people in those offices have an English name, and go by that name in their dealings with their colleagues in the European and American offices.
Sometimes it’s a bit of a problem. Not infrequently, I’ll have to email someone I don’t know and have never dealt with before. Someone will say to me “check with Michael Choy. He knows everything about this.” I’ll check the firm directory, and there is no Michael Choy listed. There will be several Choys, all with Chinese given names, because that’s their official name, the name on documents. So I can’t find him.
Also, I’m not making fun of anyone, but some of our Chinese colleagues really ought to get some advice from someone familiar with western culture before choosing a name. There seems to be some love of baby-ish, cutesy names (Candy, Bambi, Brandy), and some that are, well, a bit strange. Ophelia? Engelbert?
Also, I’ve noticed over the years (not just at this job) that first-generation Americans with immigrant Chinese parents never do this. They always (in my experience) quite happily go by the Chinese names given to them by their parents. Of course, there are those parents who gave their kids English names. But if a Chinese name was given, the kids use it.
Working in the academic world most of my life I’ve encountered quite a few people from all over. I’m perfectly okay with people keeping their original names when moving to the US and I try to do my best, pronunciation-wise.
In the shoe-on-the-other-foot category, I’ve also had people who mispronounce my name. E.g., Eastern Europeans do this weird thing with the first vowel, for example. Never felt any need to correct that.
(OTOH, a guy once pronounced my last name wrong thru an entire research presentation. I didn’t care if he was famous and all. I corrected him. Of course, that person was a well known jerk and people tended to react like this to him.)
So… not to really hijack too much, but if I, as a westerner was to go live in China and learn Chinese, would it be expected or acceptable for me to choose a Chinese name, or is the expectation that my existing first name would be fine?
This is awesome, and just what I was wondering! Thanks. This specific phenomenon (politicians having two different names) does seem to be more of a Hong Kong thing than a Chinese thing; I’ve never heard of Xi Jinping or any other Chinese politician commonly going by a Westernized name in English media. Am I wrong on this?
Anyway, my question is pretty well answered now: Lam goes by one name in English media and another in Chinese media. Thanks again, folks!
One aspect of the Jussie Smollett case which confused many people (including many in the media) was the widely reported notion that the two brothers who conspired with him were “Nigerians”. This figured into a lot of speculation as to what the motivations of Nigerians might be in an incident of this sort (e.g. what if anything Nigerians might think of MAGA, gays, Empire, etc.)
The reality is that the brothers are of Nigerian origin, but were born and bred in Chicago, and are essentially full Americans. And I strongly suspect that what confused people was that their names - Abimbola and Olabinjo Osundairo - sound like names that you would associate with Nigerians rather than with Americans of Nigerian origin. But the facts were otherwise.
Yes. In my office, we were all expect to choose Chinese names, although, honestly, no one ever used them, local national or not. My niece accompanied us early on to study Chinese at the Nanjing University. She and her classmates were absolutely required to choose a Chinese name.
