Korean and Chinese Names

My wife, Yeongmi, is from Korea, so she has a Korean name, of course. I served an LDS mission there in 1980-81 and it was common for the missionaries then to take a Korean name. I got mine in the missionary training center in Provo from Sister Kim, one of the the Korean language teachers there. She liked to pick names that were similar to our English names, so I ended up as Go Pilip. Go Pilip is a pretty silly sounding Korean name, but we were foreigners and seemed pretty silly to most Koreans in a lot of other ways as well, so a silly name wasn't really a big deal

Korean names are almost always based on Chinese characters with a one-syllable family name coming first and a two-syllable given name coming second. For example, my wife's name is Jo Yeongmi, with Jo being her family name and Yeongmi being her given name. There are exceptions to this, of course. Some people have a single syllable given name. And there are a few rare a notable cases of two-syllable family names in Korea.

It is a common custom in Korea when naming children to pick one of the two charcters in the given name and use it in the names of all the children. My wife's siblings are Yeongae, Yeongsuk, Yeongheon & Yeongho, for example.

When we had our first child we decided to give him both an American and a Korean name. The Korean given name is what we used for each of our four children's middle names. We chose "Eun " (also Romanized as "Un") as the common character for each name. It means grace or gracious. It is shown below.

When I taught at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center in 2000-01, we were required to register as permanent residents using a Chinese name. I pulled out my old Korean name, which had corresponding Chinese characters, my wife already had a name based on Chinese characters, and we used my "Korean" family name with each of the kid's middle names to get their Chinese names.

So here are our family's Korean/Chinese names in Chinese characters, Korean phonetic characters, and the pronunciations in Mandarin and Korean.

I have been told by native Mandarin speakers that my name in Chinese sounds OK, which makes it a much better name in China than it is in Korea.