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One interesting phenomenon re: romanization of Chinese names is sometimes it's very difficult to tell what the original character of the family name is. Especially with SE Asians who trace their ancestry back to China. 1/14
If you were to look at the romanized names of people from China and Taiwan, it's really easy to figure out the original character. All it takes is knowing Mandarin and either Hanyu Pinyin (for people from China) and Wade-Giles (for people from Taiwan. 2/14
But to deduce the original character for family names among SE Asians of Chinese descent, this requires knowing 4-6 different Sinitic languages, and even then it can be confusing. 3/14
If you only knew Pinyin, what would you think would be the character for Tan, Heng, Kwok, or Hioe? Stumped right? That's because none of those names are derived from Mandarin. They're derived from other Sinitic languages like Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, and Hakka. 4/14
Even knowledge of all of those four languages + Mandarin isn't enough to deduce the characters for the names, bc some of them are spelled exactly the same despite being from different languages and deriving from different characters. 5/14
Take Wu, for example. Pretty straightforward right? It's just 吳，duh. Actually not necessarily. Wu is also the pronunciation of 胡 in Cantonese. 6/14
How about Ng? Canto speakers will immediately think of 吳 bc that name is pronounced like Ng. But Ng could also be 黃，which is its pronunciation in Teochew and some dialects of Hokkien. 7/
Chan is also obvious, right? That's clearly 陳 in Canto. But it could also be 曾 in Hokkien. 8/14
Something as simple as how one's Chinese name is romanized can tell you a lot about their background. In SE Asia, it can give you a very good idea of what non-Mandarin Sinitic language one's family speaks. 9/14
Even growing up in the US, I've gotten very good at being able to tell if someone is PRC, Taiwanese, HKer, SE Asian Chinese, and even Korean, or Vietnamese simply based on how their last name is spelled. 10/14
Sadly, as Mandarin continues to gain more and more stature in the "Sinosphere", and people start romanizing their names with Mandarin pronunciation, all of this background of different languages is completely obscured and erased. This is already happening in SE Asia. 11/14
Among younger SE Asians you'll sometimes see their family names still using the spelling based on the Sinitic language their family speaks, and their personal name using Pinyin. To use my name as an example, it would look like Tan Jun Jie. 12/14
Fortunately, there has been some pushback to this in Taiwan, as some people are adopting Hokkien or Hakka romanizations for their names ever since a law was passed a few years ago allowing non-Mandarin romanization on passports. One high-profile example is @bikhim. 13/14
The quirks of the romanization of Chinese names is just one way the group of people that we now refer to as the singular "Han Chinese" is in fact extremely linguistically and culturally diverse. Despite what the CCP and Chinese nationalists would have you think. 14/14
