On Taiwanese Names or: Call me Cheng-Wei not Cheng, thank you

My name, Taiwanese names, and Cool naming rules

This guy with the name tag "Cheng-Wei Hu" just joined the virtual meeting. How will people greet him?

In a "scientific" study, 74% of the people called him Cheng and 21% called him Cheng-Wei.¹ I'm not a big fan of this result, so I am writing this article.

Call me by my name

My written name in English is Cheng-Wei Hu. Cheng-Wei is my given name, and Hu is my family name.

My preference for how to be called verbally is Cheng-Wei > Hu Cheng-Wei > Wei > Cheng-Wei Hu >> Cheng.² Unfortunately, so many people call me Cheng, which is not a world I wish I lived in.

Everyone in the world has those pieces of knowledge that we don't know we don't know yet, just like I don't know that Bill is a short form of the name William, and Ikea is pronounced Ikea.³

So I'm totally fine when you call me Cheng if you happen to haven't learned this critical piece of information in the world. You can still call me Cheng if that's your true calling, but I believe the world will be a better place if you call me Cheng-Wei.

And for the written format, my name should be, in descending order of preference, as

1. Cheng-Wei (10/10)

2. CW (If you want to skip some finger exercises)

3. Chengwei (Understandable when you cannot find the key for the hyphen)

4. Cheng (I'm sorry, but really please, no)

Addressing me as Cheng in written language is, again, unacceptable but forgivable. Putting all letters lowercase is fine, and I'd prefer Cheng-Wei over Chengwei because I like that little rebellious and nonsensical hyphen.

But why do my given name and most Taiwanese names have that symbol?

Understanding Taiwanese Names

Unlike most hyphenated Western names like Anya Taylor-Joy⁴ or Claude Lévi-Strauss, which combine different "self-standing" family names, the hyphens in Taiwanese names combine two syllables. For example, Cheng-Wei consists of two syllables, "Cheng" and "Wei," with that hyphen combining the two as one given name, "Cheng-Wei".

Because "Cheng" and "Wei" together are my given name, calling me Cheng will sound like calling Noah "No" or calling Marie "Ma" in my ear. Some Taiwanese can be more okay with this when it feels like William being called Will, but you probably won't greet someone with their short name when you first meet.

This usage of hyphens in the name originated from the Wade–Giles romanization system for Mandarin Chinese.⁵ And the hyphen in Taiwanese names serves two important functions.

Firstly, the hyphen helps non-Mandarin speakers identify syllable breaks. Imagine how an alien would pronounce the name "Obama" if they'd never heard it before. Would it be "O-BaMa" or "Ob-Ama"?

Because our given names often consist of two syllables, the hyphen in Taiwanese names helps prevent this kind of ambiguity by clearly marking syllable boundaries.

Secondly, the hyphenated format sometimes also serves as a marker of Taiwanese identity. Because the naming conventions in China (PRC) typically omit hyphens (e.g., Xi Jinping not Xi Jin-Ping), some people use this small punctuation mark to distinguish Taiwanese names from Chinese names.

So, having a stylish hyphen in our name is just like how Americans like to spell center as the center, color as color, or kilometers as miles. Next time, if you see some East Asian names with a hyphen in their name, there's a high chance they are from Taiwan.⁶

Other cool naming rules

If you want to know more fun facts about naming, there's a whole field of study called Onomastics. Here are some interesting rules that I've collected. If you have any rules you'd like to share, please send me a message via facebook, twitter or email so I can add them here.

1. In an Icelandic name, generally, a person's last name indicates the first name of their father or, in some cases, mother, followed by -son ("son"), -dóttir ("daughter"), or -bur ("child of"). For example, the female singer Björk Guðmundsdóttir's last name comes from her father Guðmundur Gunnarsson's first name. Also, since 1925, it has been illegal for Icelanders to adopt a family name unless they have a right to do so through inheritance.

2. In Spanish-speaking countries, people usually have two surnames, the first surname is the father's first surname, and the second is the mother's first surname. In Ecuador, a couple can choose the order of their children's two surnames.

3. Arabic names can consist of four names or more, identifying the name of the person, the father's name, the grandfather's name, and finally, the family name. They can also have an adjective surname indicating the person's place of origin (Nisba), or indicating their eldest son or daughter (Kunya)

A Simple Request

"Hey Cheng!"

Every time someone greets me this way, I question my self-identity for a millisecond.

Therefore, I hope if you have read this far, next time you encounter another East Asian-looking dude with a hyphen in their name, you know how to address them.

But of course, I believe most of us will not feel offended if you don't know our Taiwanese naming convention before. And it's also great if you ask anyone how to address them. We are all learning something about the world every day!

Love and peace.

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Thanks to Marie Friberger, Chris Wong, Kevin Hsu and Angelica Kosasih for reading the draft of this and giving feedback.

1. The rest 5% asked him first. Personally, I believe in "It never hurts to ask" unless it's "Hi teacher, are you going to collect the homework you assigned last week that you forgot to collect?"

2. I prefer Hu Cheng-Wei over Cheng-Wei Hu because Taiwanese family names are actually put before given names. So Hu is my "first name" in Mandarin, although it's also my family name. And I prefer Wei over Cheng for family reasons (which means I don't know why).

3. Follow me to learn more words I mispronounce. Also A poem about pronunciation.

4. It might be worth noting that, according to Wikipedia, her full name is actually Anya-Josephine Marie Taylor-Joy. Double the hyphens, double the fun.

5. Technically, most Taiwanese romanize our names using a variation of Wade–Giles, which is simplified to get rid of diacritics, tone marks, and apostrophes. Most importantly, most people don't follow the standard capitalization conventions of Wade–Giles where the first letter in the second character of the given names is generally lowercase. That said, our former presidents weirdly follow Wade–Giles's original capitalization rule: Tsai Ing-wen, Ma Ying-jeou, Chen Shui-bian. The reason remains a mystery to me.

6. If it were that simple. Some people in Hong Kong and Korea also have hyphenated names. Some people in Taiwan now opt to choose a name without the hyphen. And a lot of people in these places have anglicized names. I wish it could be simpler, just like I wish the past tense of "go" is "goed" not "went", the cooked pig is still pig not pork, everyone knew how to use turn signals, and every date format is YYYY:MM:DD.