Korean name
For full names, seongmyeong (Korean: 성명; Hanja: 姓名), seongham (성함; 姓銜), or ireum (이름) are commonly used.
[4] This is a compound word; seong (성; 姓) refers to the surname,[5] and myeong (명; 名) to the given name.
[9]Fewer than 300 (approximately 280)[11] Korean surnames were in use in 2000, and the three most common (Kim, Lee, and Park) account for nearly half of the population.
Clans are further subdivided into various pa (파; 派), or branches stemming from a more recent common ancestor, so that a full identification of a person's surname would be clan-surname-branch.
Korean women keep their surnames after marriage based on traditional reasoning that it is inherited from their parents and ancestors, and cannot be changed.
44.6% of South Koreans are still named Kim, Lee or Park, while the rest of the top 10 are made up of Choi, Jeong, Kang, Jo, Yoon, Jang and Lim.
[16] In South Korea, Article 37 of the Regulations on Registration of Family Relations (가족관계의 등록 등에 관한 규칙) requires that the Hanja in personal names be taken from a restricted list.
In March 1991, the Supreme Court of Korea published the List of Hanja for Use in Personal Names (인명용 한자표; 人名用漢字表)[a] which allowed a total of 2,854 Hanja in new South Korean given names (as well as 61 variant forms), and put it into effect starting April 1 of the same year.
[20] Despite this trend away from traditional practice, people's names are still recorded in both Hangul and Hanja (if available) on official documents, in family genealogies, and so on.
As a result, some people registered extremely long given names, such as the 16-syllable Haneulbyeolnimgureumhaetnimbodasarangseureouri (하늘별님구름햇님보다사랑스러우리; roughly, "more beloved than the sky, stars, clouds, and the sun").
It is acceptable among adults of similar status to address the other by their full name, with the suffix ssi (씨; 氏) added.
Among the common people, who have suffered from high child mortality, children were often given childhood names (아명; 兒名; amyeong), to wish them long lives by avoiding notice from the messenger of death.
[28] After marriage, women usually lost their amyeong, and were called by a taekho (택호; 宅號), referring to their town of origin.
It is most commonly used in referring to a mother by the name of her eldest child, as in "Cheolsu's mom" (철수 엄마).
This means that automated translation often misidentifies or fails to identify an individual's gender in Korean text and thus presents stilted or incorrect English output.
(Conversely, English source text is similarly missing information about social status and age critical to smooth Korean-language rendering.
[32] Under South Korean Civil Law effective January 1, 2008, though, children may be legally given the surname of either parent or even that of a step-parent.
[33] Many modern Koreans romanize their names in an ad hoc manner that often attempts to approximate conventions in English orthography.
[b] Eom Ik-sang [ko], a South Korean professor of the Chinese language and literature at Hanyang University, said the following with regard to the romanizations of Korean personal names and the adoption of South Korea's official romanization system in other countries:[43][c] In the case of the romanization of Chinese, the Hanyu Pinyin system established by the Chinese government in 1958 is being used worldwide today, displacing the Wade–Giles system that had been used in the West for nearly a hundred years.
The courtesy name system in particular arose from the Classic of Rites, a core text of the Confucian canon.
[46] During the Three Kingdoms period, native given names were sometimes composed of three syllables like Misaheun (미사흔) and Sadaham (사다함), which were later transcribed into Hanja (未斯欣 and 斯多含).
For example, the native Korean name of Yeon Gaesomun (연개소문; 淵蓋蘇文), the first Grand Prime Minister of Goguryeo, can linguistically be reconstructed as [*älkɑsum].
For example, in 33 CE, King Yuri gave the six headmen of Saro (later Silla) the names Lee (이), Bae (배), Choi (최), Jeong (정), Son (손) and Seol (설).
[50] Only a handful of figures from the Three Kingdoms period are recorded as having borne a courtesy name, such as Seol Chong.
[27] For men of the aristocratic yangban class, a complex system of alternate names emerged by the Joseon period.
[55] According to a census called the minjeokbu (민적부; 民籍簿) completed in 1910, more than half of the Korean population did not have a surname at the time.
[57] During the period of Japanese colonial rule of Korea (1910–1945), Koreans were forced to adopt Japanese-language names.
Also known as tsūshōmei (通称名) or tsūmei (通名), such an alternative name can be registered as a legal alias and used in many official contexts including bank accounts and health insurance.
[citation needed] In 1939, as part of Governor-General Jirō Minami's policy of cultural assimilation (同化政策, dōka seisaku), Ordinance No.
[60] After the liberation of Korea from Japanese rule, the Name Restoration Order (조선 성명 복구령; 朝鮮姓名復舊令) was issued on October 23, 1946, by the United States military administration south of the 38th parallel north, enabling Koreans to restore their original Korean names if they wished.
