Korean Names

Abstract

The status of ‘name’ in Korea has been considered to preserve the historic origin. It symbolically indicates the prestige of a name in this country. In order to treat a person and his family with courtesy the name has to be honored carefully. In the case of the surnames they are from Chinese origin and are usually preceded by a place name designating the family lineage. The other part of a name - given name - also shows a unique feature by the way of containing a generation marker. Of disyllabic given names represented with two Sino-Korean characters, one is used to mark the generation according to the rules of hangnyol (行列), to be described immediately below. Also, a person could retain pseudonyms in addition to his own personal name, and he could hold at most 13 names, which shows the great interest of Koreans toward a name. Although, in the past, the naming practice has been concerned only with hangnyol and the semantic contents of the characters in the name, recently everyone is not just a member of his clan or state but also of the international community. He has to divert his own consciousness of the meaning of a name. When they compose names, they need to attend to the following aspects of a name: euphony of names, ambiguity accompanied by phonological alternation, pronounceability in Romanization and names in Hangul.