character sets and names

[alexr_rwx]

I just had an interesting conversation with one of my colleagues, who's Korean. When working with English, he likes to write his first name in BiCaps, because he wants to emphasize that it's a compound word. Korean names apparently usually correspond to Hanzi, and on some official documents, you're supposed to write your name with the Chinese characters (or maybe, more accurately, Hanja). They disambiguate more than the phonetic Korean characters, he explains, and have the meaning of your name written down right there.

So, his means like East + Patience/Endurance. (now you know which of my colleagues it is?) Also there's some meaning encoded in the number of strokes used to write your name with the Hanzi Hanja.

He was pretty surprised that I knew there was such a thing as Hangul, the Korean phonetic character set. ... maybe that's the sort of thing that people should learn in school, that there exists a native Korean character set, and it's called Hangul, and basically what it looks like?

What do you think?

Comments

[lindseykuper]

You asked me why I thought this post was hard to understand, so here goes. Warning: hair splitting ahead!

"Korean names apparently usually correspond to Hanzi"

What does it mean to say that a name corresponds to a writing system?

"and on some official documents, you're supposed to write your name with the Chinese characters"

You say "the" Chinese characters as if we're supposed to know which ones you're talking about, but this is the first time you've mentioned Chinese characters, unless we happen to have followed the link for Hanzi.

"Also there's apparently some meaning encoded in the number of strokes used to write your name with the Hanzi. And his means like East + Patience/Endurance."

So are you saying that "East + Patience/Endurance" is the meaning encoded in the number of strokes? Or is that the meaning of his name regardless of the number of strokes used? If so, why'd you bring it up right after talking about number of strokes?