April 25, 2006
First name first?
Our use of first and last names has been an issue since we published the Encyclopedia of Modern Asia in 2002. Many Asian people use their family name before their personal name, so we stopped using "first" and "last" to describe parts of an individual's name. In the U.K., my friends often said "Christian name" and "surname," but that wouldn't work either. We wanted to stick to the arrangement people use themselves, not to westernize it, but we also wanted to ensure that we got the indexing right.
Indexing is done based on what we now call the "family" name--in my case, Christensen. In developing our new newsletter, Guanxi: The China Letter, we decided to use all-caps for family names, whether the name is Asian or Western. Thus I am Karen CHRISTENSEN, and my friend in Beijing is WU Shaoping. I've seen this done by our Asian contributors in emails, all the way back to days when we were working on the Encyclopedia of Modern Asia, so this method of clarifying the parts of a name might well be Asian itself.
Posted by Karen Christensen at 2:02 PM | Comments (0)