What’s in that name
A recent PC post on envelope-pushing names in China reminded me of the situation on names in Japan, where there is a government-sanctioned list of Chinese characters (kanji) that can be used in personal names. This doesn’t limit the possible sounds that can go into a name (beyond the phonology of the language), as you can just use hiragana (or katakana?) to indicate the appropriate pronunciation.
The approved list of kanji, the Jinmeiyoo Kanji (’Chinese characters for use in personal names’), consists of 983 kanji that do not appear in the standard 2000-odd standard kanji used in everyday writing, giving parents about 3000 characters to chose from. Excluded from the list are many characters that indicate culturally taboo or offensive concepts, like prostitution, cancer, and various emotional states (resentment, e.g.). Once, there were parents who attempt to give their child a name like ‘demon’ or something similar, and this name was rejected as a form of abuse of parental powers, due to the expected social difficulties that the child would be expected to experience (but, I haven’t heard anything about Japanese parents tying to put symbols in names, like in the Chinese story).
There is apparently also a list of approved Chinese characters for personal names in Korea (5151 characters). According to this article, offensive/etc. characters are included in the list, but cases like the ‘demon’ one haven’t come up. But, the article says that “there have been cases where a proposed name has been rejected due not simply to non-standard Chinese characters, but because the name was difficult to pronounce, or would cause serious harm to the child if s/he used it [as a primary name] in public life.” Also on the list of restrictions in Korea is that the name must be represented either completely in Chinese characters or completely in hangul, and also that in the latter case it cannot exceed five syllables (character-blocks).
These one seems like the least reasonable of the restrictions, as it seems the most aesthetic or technical. To be sure, a name written in both hanja and hangul would look weird, but probably because it just hasn’t been done yet. Hangul was designed to approximate the appearance of Chinese characters, so if good old King Sejong’s linguists did their job right, it should look just fine…no? As for the length restriction, I can’t imagine it comes up much at all, as most (all?) Korean names are three syllables long, but still: why continue to have the restriction?
I always wondered what would happen if one tried to use katakana in Japan, e.g. for アクマ akuma, `demon’。Is this still out? Surely it could have a positive meaning in some language(s)? What if the parents were both non-Japanese, or if one was? Etc.