Читать книгу The Korean Mind - Boye Lafayette De Mente - Страница 10

A Note on Korean Names

Approximately half of all Koreans share only five family names, and distinguishing among them is a genuine challenge. The roman letters used to represent Korean sounds may also vary with the geographic region and with individuals, resulting in the same names often being spelled differently. Brothers and sisters in a family also usually share a second given name that distinguishes their generation and is known as their “generational” name.

Generational names usually come after the personal or “first” name—and therefore appear like “middle names” to Westerners—but some people may put them first, further complicating matters. Some names are written with the first name and the generational names separate and with the initial letters capitalized. Others connect the two names with a hyphen, sometimes with the initial letter of the generational name capitalized and other times with it in lower case. Some people run the two names together as if they were one. The same editions of English-language newspapers and magazines published in Korea and abroad often present Korean names in two or three different ways.

Not surprisingly, foreigners who are not familiar with Korean family names, with the last-name-first custom, and with the use of shared generational names often have difficulty recognizing which is which.

For this book I have chosen to present all Korean names in the Western style—first name, the generational name as the individual concerned writes it, and family name—because Westerners are used to this system and it reduces the possibility of confusing the names. The most famous example of Koreans who combined their first and generational names was probably Syngman Rhee (1875-1965), the controversial patriot and statesman who was president of the Republic of Korea from 1948 until 1960. His original name was Sung Man Yi.

For more very important details about Korean names, see “Irum/What’s in a Name?”