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A high school teacher called Michael Herbert Dengler, living in North Dakota in the United States, petitioned the state district court for permission to change his name to "1069" some decades ago.
He explained that 1069 expressed his individuality and personal philosophy. Each of its four digits, respectively, stood for his relationship with nature, time and movement, the universe and essence, he claimed. The case lasted for five years, giving rise to nationwide debates on people's names, showing how volatile naming is as a social and legal issue.
Americans don't need formal permission of a court to rename themselves. And yet, the judge in charge denied Dengler's petition. And the State Supreme Court subsequently upheld his ruling, saying "Symbols, signs, figures, marks… are simply not suited for use as names. If the Court indulges the present request of a philosophy enthusiast to use numerical symbols as a legal name, it could hardly deny use of other symbols to subsequent petitioners.
"A musician, for example, might seek an inimitable grouping of eighth notes as his name. A mathematician might want to particular equation, a financier the dollar sign, an astrologer the symbol for Sagittarius. It is easy to visualize the confusions and complexities such a system of personal identification would breed."
How much liberty do people have in choosing their own names? As far as in creating an English name for themselves, Koreans enjoy full freedom. They can use any style of Romanized names, both family and personal, without being punished by anyone.
Under the immigration laws of the United States, every applicant for citizenship has a common-law, free-speech and pursuit-of-happiness right to take and use a new name so long as it is not offensive, confusing, inciting to violence and racial hatred, or taken for some unlawful purpose such as fraud, evasion of debt or bankruptcy, or the commission of a crime. But this applies only when the new name is not a number, a hieroglyph or a visual symbol.
Going back to using the original names is not a big issue as there are hundreds of reasons: marital breakup, embarrassing mispronunciation and religious conversion; and just plain convenience as in the case of the Michigan man who in 1935 took the name Pappas in place of the original 37-letter Pappatheodorokomoundoronicolucopoulos.
These onomastic episodes of the U.S. remind me of the grave difference in various ethnic groups'concepts and systems of their names, and that in English in particular. The "name" discussed above particularly means a family name, which for most Koreans is an absolute asset inherited from their ancestors, which is solid like a rock.
When it comes to writing their names in English it is not a simple matter of changing the alphabet employed. I see two different common responses. Those who don't speak or read English, they just don't care how their names are Romanized. Those who think they understand English, however, would stake their lives to keep their own style of writing their names in the Roman alphabet.
Maybe we need to remember that Koreans did not begin to write their own names in English on their own. Around the end of the 19th Century, the early period of "enlightenment" of the nation, English-speaking missionaries and diplomats arrived. They began to name people, places and things in Roman characters, sometimes strangely; even Christening the first women's school by an odd name "Womans" school, obviously by mistake.
Use of English in the daily lives of the Koreans was by no means systematic or guided by any rules set up by the Koreans themselves. All the confusions we found in our system can be traced back to this lack of consistency in the historical periods.
Probably the most famous name of a political leader known abroad is the pioneer American Ph.D. holder, independence fighter, journalist and the first president of the newly established Republic of Korea, Dr. Syngman Rhee. His name makes a good example of exceptions to the Korean Romanization rules on names ― that already widely used and well-known names will be used as they have been.
The name should be Lee Seung-man by the current rules. In fact, an article on his departure to the U.S. in 1904 printed in the English version of the Korea Daily News (Daehan Maeil Sinbo) called him "Mr. Yi Sung-man", following the style which later became the McCune-Reischauer System.
Korean-Americans find it very inconvenient and embarrassing to follow the official Romanization rules, which require people to place family name first like Park Geun-hye. They usually just put their family name last as all Americans do. Rules are ignored when they are not applicable in reality.
The confusion causes problems in reality, such as an uncle called Mr. Chung cannot guarantee his niece named Jung at a bank because the bank doesn't think they belong to the same family. Or Interpol may find Korean criminals more difficult to arrest as they can travel under differing versions of their names.
The English name issue touches on an invisible cultural dimension, on top of the matters of placing surnames, hyphenation or spelling. The government institute in charge seems to think that it concerns national sovereignty and identity.
It is a realistic issue of whether to demand that the outside world learn and accept our rules, or to adapt ourselves to the rules of the Romans and do as the Romans do in English-speaking territories.
The writer is the chairwoman of the Korea Heritage Education Institute (K*Heritage). Her email address is Heritagekorea21@gmail.com.
