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First, not all western names are "English", come on. Things are complicated: - A good chunk of Koreans are Christians (either Catholics or American style Protestants), and get a biblical name at baptism. - Many employees at those high-profile companies have studied or even lived abroad, and might have used another first name there. Some dual-citizens (which is a fairly new thing in Korea) even have different first names on their respective passports. - There are many reasons behind using nicknames for correspondence with foreigners, it's not necessarily to make your company look more global than it really is (even though yes, that's also one reason). It isn't specific to Korean, but a lot of "first names" (typically the middle and last character) are not clearly associated to a gender, especially to foreign ears. Also, the romanization of Korean is a pretty confusing mess overall, unlike with Japanese for instance. There have been several systems in use, and names show the biggest inconsistencies (for example Lee, I, Yi, Ri, Rhee are all the same family name). Does "Yuna" mean Yeona like the skater or Yoona like the K-pop singer? You cannot know. Now back to the policy discussed, I left Korea before it got introduced at my company, but I always found stupid to force people to pick another name. Lots of Koreans really don't want to. I called my VP by his real first name and he was fine with it. |
Indeed. But the thing that raised by hackles was:
>“Using an English name even though you are not American is a little bit strange. Your name is from your own mother and father.”
America is not where English comes from. I mean I understand that America's influence on South Korea probably can't be overstated.
But that sentence just pushed a button I wasn't aware I had, not least because while I'm British, I'm not English.