Why are so many asiatic names hyphenated?

Factual Questions
1

It recently struck me when typing up some chemistry papers - all the korean authors seemed to be hyphenated e.g. Hong-il etc. There is obviously a simple reason - is this common to chinese and japanese names too?

2

Not in japanese. I’ve seen it in Chinese, but then, Korean and Chinese are a lot more similar. Dunno why.

3

I’m going to hazard a guess here and make a comparison between Korean naming and Vietnamese naming.

Korean: Family name, two syllable (usually) personal name.

Vietnamese: Family name, middle name, personal name.

Now, when “converting” the Korean name to English, one would just move the family name to the “last name” position. When “converting” the Vietnamese name, one would go ahead and put the personal name in the “first name” position, leave the middle name in the middle, and switch the family name to the “last name” position.

So, then, why the hyphenation for Korean names? My guess (the one I’m hazarding) is that it’s to avoid misconstruing the 2nd syllable of the personal name as the individual’s surname. I heard last year someone refer to North Korea’s dicator as “Il.” I asked him who he was talking about and he said, “North Korea’s president. I thought you knew who that was.” I laughed, but not too loudly, and explained that the dude’s family name was Kim, not Il.

Another bit about Korean naming, although I’m only familiar with it from one particular family: 3 syllables for the name, in order: Family name (which you get by being born into the family), 1st syllable of the personal name (which is decided by your father), and 2nd syllable of your personal name (which is decided by the oldest person in the extended family {clan patriarch, if you will} and is the same for everyone born in your generation. I’ve no idea if any other Korean families follow this method.

4

I also tend to think it has to do with tipping people off about which is the surname, although many (most, even) people still don’t get it. I mean, the hyphens don’t really have anything to do with the original, non-romanized name.

5

I don’t know if there’s any standard convention when you transliterate words from one alphabet to another. I doubt that in the original Korean, Japanese, Chinese, etc. characters they use hyphens.

6

I thought that the word after the hyphen is a sign of respect, similar to the “al-” prefix in Atabic last names. Along the lines of Mr., or Sir. No cite, though. Relying on foggy recollections.

7

It is also to reduce some confusion in the romanization of Chinese.

For example, mingan could be either “min” + “gan” or “ming” + “an”. Hyphens are a way to make the romanization a little clearer.

8

Here’s an article devoted to Korean naming conventions:

http://genealogy.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http%3A%2F%2Fsoback.kornet.net%2F~pixeline%2Fheeyun%2Fkorea%2Fname.html

For links to practices of other cultures, check out this page:
http://genealogy.about.com/cs/namingpractices/

9

thanks sternvogel and monty for the links and info. It was quite illuminating -especially discussing the difficulty of finding someone with a different name to marry sometimes. The hyphen does seems arbitrary, but universal in the Korean academic literature.