Fig. 1: Western names and East Asian names, despite differences in naming traditions, share a similar information structure.
From: Cross-cultural structures of personal name systems reflect general communicative principles
A Two forms of the same name, movie director Woo Yu-Sen / John Woo. In Mandarin, the (inherited) prefix-name Woo comes first in speech. However, in its conventional Westernized form, Woo becomes the byname. This convention aligns the given and fixed (inherited) parts of EACS and Western names (because Western prefix-names are given and bynames inherited, whereas EACS bynames are given and prefix-names inherited), however it misaligns their information structures. In both Western and EACS name-phrases, prefix-names are systematically less informative than bynames, thus in (B): Chinese pianist Fou Ts'ong’s inherited name is his prefix-name Fou, while Canadian pianist Glenn Gould’s inherited name is his byname Gould; Fou’s given name is his byname Ts'ong, whereas Gould’s given name is his prefix-name Glenn.
