[Pkg-fonts-devel] OT: polite way to say japanese name

[Christian Perrier]

Quoting Hideki Yamane (henrich at debian.or.jp):

>  In many case, "family name"-san is used for Japanese people in the
>  polite way. For example, my family name is Yamane so I would called 
>  Yamane-san. And some people write their family name with capital 
>  letters, ttf-kochi maintainer gotom is GOTO masanori, so he would
>  called GOTO-san.
>  
>  If you were a salesperson and call the customer, use "-sama (様)" 
>  not "-san (さん)".
> 
>  And some people who has a great skill or knowledge (kind of guru/master)
>  (...or who they are simply teachers :) are called -sensei (先生). 
>  For example, some people call Kenshi Muto as Muto-sensei :)

OK, this is more or less what I finally figured out (Wikipedia has
nice pages about Japanese honorifics, actually).

What's also puzzling is that many Japanese FLOSS contributors (such as
you) have adopted the western way to write their name and are
therefore using their first name at first (in email From: fields of
changelog entries) while (correct me if I'm wrong) the "usual" way in
Real Life is more the opposite (just as Goto-san is doing).

Of course, that's probably not a very big deal for you as you have a
clear idea whether the first nbame is "Hideki" or "Yamane"....but, of
course, for ignorants such as me, it's more tricky.

BTW, I have the same problem with Indian contributors...and they
apparently have the same problem than me because I often receive mails
starting with "Hello Perrier,"..:-)

Anyway, thanks to your patience, I'm now less ignorant...but please
spread the word in the JP community: most of those ignorants people
from the so-called "western" countries ("western" of what, by the way?
:-)) need hints to figure out names.

.../... and I should indeed start writing my name as "Christian
PERRIER" even though that will go against over 20 years of habits..:-)


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