From: Dido Sevilla Date: 2006-11-10T14:30:49+09:00 Subject: Re: [OT] the name of Matz On 11/10/06, Byung-Hee HWANG wrote: > Of course I know that almost all speakers using English as mother > language do not use all capital letters for their family names as above > you mentioned. Also I agree about your way, using just nick name. > However, Akinori [3], a developer of FreeBSD Project, use all capital > letters for family name. Why do Akinori do so? Actually, it seems to be a fairly common convention used by many Japanese (Matz excluded, of course) and Chinese (you included apparently), as it isn't always clear, especially to gaijin folks, which part of their name is the surname and which part is the given name. The fact that Japanese and Chinese generally write their surnames before their given names in their normal convention, and occasionally reverse it to follow the Western convention of given name first, adds to this confusion. Most of the Japanese people I've met seem to follow this convention on the English side of their business cards.