Am I Ken, ケン, 剣, 劍, 劍󠄁, or 剑?
By Dr Ken Lunde, Janitor, Spirits of Christmas Past
The short answer: Yes!
The long answer: Continue reading…
From time to time, I am asked about my name when expressed in Japanese—using ideographs (aka Chinese characters, kanji, hànzì, or hanja)—so this particular article is intended to set the record straight once and for all.
Before I begin, however, I feel compelled to point out that 99% of those in the US who refer to themselves as “Ken” actually have “Kenneth”—or perhaps “Kendall”—as their official given name that is reflected on their birth certificate. My parents, on the other hand, named me “Ken,” which is what is reflected on my birth certificate. Little did they know at the time of my birth that I would eventually study Japanese, and that the given name that they chose for me works extraordinarily well for Japanese. (I am named after an old US Army friend of my father, Ken Lee, who passed away at an early age.) In fact, like “Kenneth” and “Kendall,” many people in Japan whose given names are “Kenichi” (“Ken-inchi” or “Ken’ichi”), “Kenji,” “Kentarō” (Kentaro), “Kennosuke” (“Ken-nosuke”), and so on, often abbreviate them as simply “Ken.” I guess the shortened form, “Ken,” just rolls off the tongue.
Before I explain my family and given names, I would like to share the following passage, which is the second paragraph of the “About the Author” page at the end of CJKV Information Processing Second Edition (O’Reilly Media, 2008):
Ken’s Japanese penname is 小林剣 (kobayashi ken). The surname Lunde is of Viking origin, and means “small woods” or “grove.” Perhaps by sheer coincidence — or rather by choice — the Japanese surname 小林 (kobayashi) conveys these same meanings. The Japanese given name 剣 (ken) was chosen phonemically, and from his fondness for cutlery and other tools with sharp edges. In retrospect, Ken is very pleased that he chose the kanji 剣 for his name because it is an excellent example of an ideograph that has many variant forms in Japan’s JIS X 0208:1997 character set standard, specifically 劍, 劔, 劒, 剱, and 釼. His wife even coined 劍󠄁, which is an unencoded variant. When Ken is in a nostalgic mood, he sometimes prefers to use the traditional form, specifically 劍 instead of 剣. And, when visiting China he could potentially use the simplified form 剑. The possibilities seem endless. That, after all, is the nature of ideographs.
Family Name
Kobayashi turned out to be a very fitting family name. I started my undergraduate studies at UW-Madison in January of 1985, immediately after completing the 47-week Russian Basic Course at DLI-FLC in Monterey, California. Contrary to my initial plan of declaring Russian as my major, I ended up going with linguistics. One of the graduation requirements was to take one year of a non–Indo-European language. Interestingly, I narrowed my choices down to Arabic and Japanese, and obviously decided to study the latter. Given that I was enlisted in the US Army Reserves at the time, my life would have turned out quite a bit different had I chosen Arabic instead. In any case, it was sometime during the latter half of 1985 that I decided to use 小林 (Kobayashi) as my family name, when expressed in Japanese. For those who are unaware, the surname “Lunde” is of Viking origin, and means small woods or grove. I also considered 小森 (Komori), but opted for the more common 小林 family name.
In retrospect, I am glad that I ended up choosing 小林, for two very specific reasons:
- The number of strokes of 小林, 11, is the same as when expressing “Lunde” using katakana, as ランディ (randi), which is also 11 strokes.
- 小林丸 (Kobayashi-maru).
Given Name
Every type of weapon intrigues me. It is the utilitarian and mechanical nature of weapons that has piqued my interest from a very early age. Knives, firearms, grenade launchers, flamethrowers, tanks, whatever. My father instilled in me a very strong respect for weapons for which I am grateful, and because of that, the chances of me harming another person—other than to defend myself or my loved ones from harm—is somewhere between zero and none. Everyone who knows me understands this. Somewhat related to this interest, I founded the Adobe Shooters League at the end of 2000, and managed it for a solid 19 years. Its 200th event took place in May of 2019, and its 204th and final event took place in September of the same year. The following is a description of this volunteer activity in my LinkedIn profile:
I founded and managed the Adobe Shooters League, which met once a month at a local shooting range for 19 solid years. This activity provided to Adobe employees and their guests an opportunity to practice and improve their firearm safety and marksmanship skills when they might not otherwise find the time in their busy work and family schedules to do so. While many of the league members were experienced shooters, new members with little or no firearm experience joined on a regular basis. This presented ongoing opportunities for me and other experienced shooters to teach and mentor, to instill safe firearm-handling habits, and to prevent poor ones from taking root.
Did I mention that I like weapons?
Sometime in the mid-1980s—at the same time when I chose 小林 as my family name—while searching for an appropriate ideograph to use as my given name in Japanese, I found that “Ken” had a remarkably large number of choices, in terms of ideographs with that particular reading, ken. Given my fondness for weapons, to include ones with sharp edges, I decided to use 剣 (U+5263). At some point, I started to use the traditional form, 劍 (U+528D). Interestingly, the lower-left strokes can be difficult to discern at low resolution, which helps to explain why my wife, bless her soul, coined 劍󠄁 sometime in 1999, which I also use from time to time. This particular glyph was included as CID+14106 in Adobe-Japan1-4, which was published in early 2000, and its Adobe-Japan1 IVS (Ideographic Variation Sequence), <528D, E0101>, was registered in 2007. As a result, a non-trivial number of Japanese fonts now include this glyph. Furthermore, when I started to develop the open source Pan-CJK typefaces, Source Han and Noto CJK, nearly a decade ago, one of the requirements was to include all of the glyphs for ideographs in Adobe-Japan1-6, which naturally included 劍󠄁. Its Unicode-based working glyph name is uni528DuE0101-JP, which represents the IVS itself.
The JIS X 0208 standard—formerly and originally designated JIS C 6226—also includes a relatively rich set of variants for 剣, such as 剱 (U+5271), 劒 (U+5292), 劔 (U+5294), and 釼 (U+91FC), though I have never used them to express my given name. 釰 (U+91F0) and 𠝏 (U+2074F), which were introduced in the JIS X 0212 and JIS X 0213 standards, respectively, are additional variant forms. And, although not present in any JIS standard, two more variant forms, 劎 (U+528E) and 𠠆 (U+20806), are present in the Moji Jōhō Kiban (文字情報基盤) database as MJ007607 and MJ031472, respectively. That’s a lot of variants!
I also sprinkled the PRC simplified form of 劍, 剑 (U+5251), throughout CJKV Information Processing Second Edition, and quite prominently in Figure 7-1 on page 517, shown below:
In other words, I express my given name as Ken, ケン, 剣, 劍, 劍󠄁, or 剑, depending on the circumstance, and sometimes based on my mood. Below are 剣 (in red) and all of its variant forms that are referenced in this article, typeset using the Hanazono Mincho (花園明朝) typeface, which happens to support all of these glyphs:
In terms of the 28+ years that I worked at Adobe, my first (1991) and final (2019) business cards used “Ken” (English) and 剣 (Japanese), though some of the ones in between used 劍:
Also in retrospect, 剣 was a most excellent choice, mainly because it is an ideograph with a larger than usually large number of variants, which is a life-long interest. I also serve as Unicode’s IVD (Ideographic Variation Database) Registrar, which is completely about variants, and as the Chair of Unicode’s recently-formed CJK & Unihan Group.
My in-laws usually refer to me as ケン, perhaps because they feel it is odd for me to use ideographs to express my family and given names. I certainly don’t blame them.
Middle Name
Nuances in names can also be interesting. In closing this article, my middle name is “Roger,” which can be expressed as 了解 (ryōkai) in Japanese, but let’s not go there… …yet. 😉
About the Author
Dr Ken Lunde worked at Adobe for over twenty-eight years — from 1991-07-01 to 2019-10-18 — specializing in CJKV Type Development, meaning that he architected and developed fonts for East Asian typefaces, along with the standards and specifications on which they are based. He architected and developed the Adobe-branded “Source Han” (Source Han Sans, Source Han Serif, and Source Han Mono) and Google-branded “Noto CJK” (Noto Sans CJK and Noto Serif CJK) open source Pan-CJK typeface families that were released in 2014, 2017, and 2019, is the author of CJKV Information Processing Second Edition (O’Reilly Media, 2009), and published over 300 articles on Adobe’s now-static CJK Type Blog. Ken earned BA (1987), MA (1988), and PhD (1994) degrees in linguistics from The University of Wisconsin-Madison, served as Adobe’s representative to the Unicode Consortium since 2006, was Adobe’s primary representative from 2015 until 2019, serves as Unicode’s IVD (Ideographic Variation Database) Registrar, attends UTC and IRG meetings, participates in the Unicode Editorial Committee, became an individual Unicode Life Member in 2018, received the 2018 Unicode Bulldog Award, was a Unicode Technical Director from 2018 to 2020, became a Vice-Chair of the Emoji Subcommittee in 2019, published UTN #43 (Unihan Database Property “kStrange”) in 2020, and became the Chair of the CJK & Unihan Group in 2021. He and his wife, Hitomi, are proud owners of a His & Hers pair of acceleration-boosted 2018 LR AWD Tesla Model 3 EVs.
