> From: Simon Perreault <simon(_dot_)perreault(_at_)viagenie(_dot_)ca>
> I think I've seen Chinese names written in both orders. That is,
> sometimes "Hui Deng" will be written "Deng Hui". Am I right? Does this
> happen often?
I'm not certain about Chinese, but I know that with Japanese names, which
have the same issue (family name first in native language), both orders
happen a fair amount. (This also happens with Hungarian names, which also
use family-first - rare in the West, but it does happen.)
> Is there a way to guess what order a name is written in? Sometimes it's
> not easy for non-Sinophones to know which part is the given name and
> which part is the family name.
Unless you know a certain amount about the language, my guess would be 'no'.
Hence the common practise in some academic circles of giving the family name
in all capitals, to show which it is. So whether you see Junichiro KOIZUMI
or KOIZUMI Junichiro, you know what you're seeing.
Maybe the IETF should adopt that practise in, e.g., attendee lists?
I'm not sure what to do about e.g. RFC's - there's a pretty strict "X. Yyyy"
form for names, where X is the given initial, the Yyyy the family name. Do we
want to change that, or just say 'sorry, family-first people, you'll have to
mangle your name to fit the RFC format'?
(That happens already in other cases, BTW. I'm called by my _middle_ name -
which caused all sorts of issues for the I-D software when "J. Noel Chiappa"
tried to submit a draft listing "N. Chiappa". It Did Not Like.)
Do we want to encourage people to do the capitalization in their email
addresses (the full-name part, not the mailbox name part), so that people
know? That's obviously not under our control, but we might _suggest_ it.
Noel