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 <[email protected]>

>  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
>

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