Names

A few thoughts about names. Many of our readers in America probably know, or are related to, some Steve Lees or John Kims or Helen Parks. We're accustomed to the idea of immigrants, typically Asian immigrants, taking on "normal" sounding first names when coming to the States (or Canada or the UK), or giving such names to their children. (I have to admit, though, that very ethnic first names mixed with Asian last names, such as Shaniqua Wong or Luigi Choi, still don't sound quite normal to me.)

It seems that this happens in non-English speaking countries as well. When we were in Greece we negotiated what would turn out to be a long and somewhat harrowing taxi ride with driver named Kostas. Since he had such a prototypically Greek name, I was surprised to learn that he was in fact an Albanian immigrant. It turned out, of course, that Kostas was not his real name, but his Albanian name was much harder for me, and probably for most of his Greek customers, to remember.

Before coming to study at the Language Institute, I thought that in Korea, foreigners generally did not adopt Korean names. As you know by now, Korean uses an alphabet, which makes it possible to phonetically represent a person's name in hangeul. For instance, Lance's name can be written in Korean as 랜스, or raenseu, which is pretty close. But I have encountered some people at the Language Institute who have unofficially adopted Korean names. One is a Mongolian woman whose Mongolian given name ends in a lateral fricative (!)*. Perhaps she, like our Albanian taxi driver, found it easiest to have people call her something more familiar.

Interestingly, a number of Chinese people also adopt Korean names as well. One might not expect this, since Chinese people have a couple of other options when choosing what to be called in Korean. You have to understand that most Koreans have names that use Chinese characters, just as Chinese people do, so Korean names and Chinese names are similar in many respects. So Chinese people in Korea could choose to transliterate their names into Hangeul according to the Chinese pronunciation, or they could use the Korean pronunciation of the Chinese characters in their names. For example, suppose that Chow Yun-Fat were coming to study at the Language Institute. He could either transliterate his name into 차우 윤팟 (Cha-u Yunpat), or he could use the Korean pronunciation of his characters, 주윤발 (Ju Yunbal).

By the way, Westerners who study Chinese typically adopt Chinese names, probably because it is difficult to transliterate foreign words into written Chinese. Lance, for instance, took the Chinese name 蘇懶思 Sū Lǎnsī. As I said, he doesn't have to make himself a Korean name, but if he wanted to, he could make one based on his Chinese name. Using the Korean pronunciation of his Chinese name would result in the name 소나사 (So Nasa), which is perfectly pronounceable to Koreans, but doesn't really sound like a name. The surname is fine (So is a Korean surname) but the Nasa is not a typical name. This sometimes happens to actual Chinese people when they use the Korean pronunciation of their characters. So I've found that there are some Chinese people who skip the two options discussed above for transforming their Chinese names into Korean names, and actually choose a different Korean given name altogether.

Finally, perhaps I can illustrate with a somewhat analogous Western example. One might imagine that a Spanish speaker in the States named Jesus might want people to pronounce his name as hay-SOOS, as it is in Spanish. Or that he might have people pronounce his name as they normally read that word in English, JEE-zuhs. Or he might decide that "Jesus" is not really a normal first name for English speakers, and decide to go by "Justin" instead. Of course this is a fake example, since there are enough Spanish speakers in the US that we have mostly accepted hay-SOOS, if not JEE-zuhs, as a perfectly normal name. For Spanish speakers, that is. Jesus Kim still seems kind of strange.

[Footnote added October 27, 2007 at 8:24 pm]

* A lateral fricative is like an "l" sound, but with more friction.  It's like a cross between a "l" and a French "j" (we sometimes spell it "zh").  The IPA symbol is ɮ.  You can hear what that sounds like by going to this site and clicking on the ɮ symbol (sixth row down, third big column over).  I don't really know what sound is at the end of the Mongolian student's name, not actually knowing anything about Mongolian.  But I do know that her romanized name ends with an "l", and that when Lance (who didn't know how her name was spelled) heard her say her name in a noisy cafeteria, he thought it ended in an "s", and that Wikipedia says that Mongolian has a lateral fricative (two actually, but for our purposes let's say they sound pretty similar).