Hi Stephen,
all caps should be included, thanks for your pointint out.
for your 85% is one syllable, I guess that normally has two characters for
family name, then they will have two syllables?
thanks,
-Hui
2013/7/11 Stephen Sprunk <stephen(_at_)sprunk(_dot_)org>
On 11-Jul-13 08:58, Simon Perreault wrote:
I have a question: 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? What is the most common order? 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.
It is more common for the given name to come first when written in Pinyin,
following the rule for other languages written in Latin characters, but
exceptions are frequent enough that one can't rely on it. A useful and
growing convention is to write the family name in all caps. Using the
above example, if "Deng" were the family name, you might see:
Hui DENG
or
DENG Hui
whereas if "Hui" were the family name, you might see:
Deng HUI
or
HUI Deng
Also, most family names have a single syllable; all of the top 100 are,
which accounts for 85% of the population of China. So, if exactly one of
the names has multiple syllables, it is reasonably safe to assume that is
the given name, absent a more definitive clue.
S
--
Stephen Sprunk "God does not play dice." --Albert Einstein
CCIE #3723 "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the
K5SSS dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking