I have an opportunity to do business with a customer from Taiwan named 'Wei Keng Ho'. That is all the information that I have. Is the name male or female? And is it likely to be Chinese name ordering or Anglicized ordering? Is my best guess to start the letter with 'Dear Mr. Wei' or 'Dear Mr Ho' ? Or is there some ambiguous but polite way of writing the salutation?

I really need to do this today, so a quick answer would be much appreciated.

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My guess is Mr. Ho. Don't feel too hung up about this, I am sure he is aware of this sort of confusion and will not be offended if you mess it up - any more than you would be if you got "Mr. or Mrs. Banbeck".

My dad once got a letter from one of his German relatives addressed to "Mister and Misses [his name]".

At least it wasn't "Mister and Mistress".

Would it be rude to begin with "Dear Wei Keng Ho"?

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Poka King of the south east.

This is how I was taught to address letters. The man is Mr. John Smith, his wife is Mrs. John Smith, and the couple is Mr. & Mrs. John Smith. (Or are we laughing at the spelling of "Mrs."?)

Really? I thought it was more dated than that. I'm 29 and growing up, my mom always remarked on how much she hated receiving those letters. I had assumed that the form was already in decline.

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Occupy Babel!

I'm guessing, because I am not that familiar with Chinese names. But I typed this name into the StartPage search engine and it came up with references to Wei Keng several times under circumstances which seemed to indicate that it was a male personal name. Which would make Ho the family name.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

I hope not, because that is exactly what I did.

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This. There's a difference between "Mrs." (there's a word "Missus" for a wife) and "Misses" which makes it sound like Dad's cavorting with multiple unmarried women.

According to WP:

Difficult case. I don't see anything wrong with asking him/her exactly what you're asking here.

I'm a little bit late to reply to Joaz Banbeck but chinese names are usually expressed [lastname (one character) - firstname (one or two character(s))].

Also late in here. But my thoughts are:
Do just like with any other names. If somebody signs with 'Joaz Banbeck' it cannot be wrong to address the letter to him 'Dear Joaz Banbeck' and I would certainly not take offense at anything like that. Same with 'Wei Keng Ho' or whatever. I mean - there might be cultural differences, sure, and there might be better ways of addressing - for example 'Dear Mr.Banbeck' might be slightly more polished than 'Dear Joaz Banbeck' - but both are acceptable, in my opinion, and certainly neither should cause offense. I am pretty sure the addressee should also be aware of all such issues, and be more lenient - especially when reaching accross cultural and linguistic boundaries.

PS>
By the way - I assume somebody here is Chinese or speaks Chinese. Out of curiosity - is it always hard to tell what is the first and what the last name of in that language? In all the other languages I have ever tried, in pretty much 100% of the cases it is quite obvious what is the first and what the last name. Take 'Joaz Banbeck' for example...

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

If the name is written in Chinese, then in most cases it is pretty clear.
The problem here is that it was written in English, and the name ordering
is different between English (Given name first, then Family name)
versus Chinese (Family name first, then Given name).
('Family name' and 'given name' are less ambiguous than 'first name' and 'last name'.)

Same problem in Japanese. For example, the cover of The 21st Century Dictionary of Basic Joseki
says "by Takao Shinji 9-dan", but the first page inside says "by Shinji Takao".
So someone not familiar with Japanese would not be able to tell based on these two pages which is which.

Another issue here is the Taiwanese anglicized convention is different from pinyin.

Joaz, it's been almost 2 weeks -- have you found out the actual name (in Chinese) yet ?

Oh, I understand. The translation adds to the problem.

However, what I wondered about was more if there are any other ways to tell first names from last names.
Like, to give you an example, the english first name Peter. If I say somebody is Peter Fink, or if I say somebody is Fink Peter, people would usually guess that Peter is the first name while Fink is the last name. Addressing this person as 'Mr.Fink' would be appropriate. In other words - you have a pool of first names, and most people have a first name from that pool...

Of course, with names like Peter John, or John Peter - you still cannot tell... but in vast majority of the cases, in the languages I know, it is pretty easy to tell first name from last name regardless which order they are written or if there is a semicolon between or not.

How does it work for Asian languages?
Are first names as random and personalized as last names - so you really cannot tell unless you follow specific conventions?

From what I know, looking at names of some Japanese pros, it is often also easy. For example: Kato Masao... since I know of a few 'Kato's I assume Kato is the first name. Same with Toshiro Kageyama, and so on. With many names I have no clue, but I always assumed this is because I am unfamiliar with the language, and for somebody speaking Japanese if would be immediately apparent which part of 'Otake Hideo' is the first name and which is the last name, regardless of which order it was written.

I really find that interesting.

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

@Bantari:
In the cases of Japanese and Korean (which has the same issue), you can usually tell. This is especially true in Korean, where there is a good chunk of the population with a last name of Kim, Lee, or Park (and also, in Korean, it's common for given names to have two syllables, with the family name having a single syllable).

But more to the issue, since all three languages (Japanese, Korean, and Chinese) use Chinese characters for the names, certain characters and combinations of characters give a certain feeling. For example, you can select a couple of Chinese characters for your kid's name, which form a sound that is somewhat unique for a given name. Even when this is the case, you can sometimes guess if the name is a guy's name or a girl's name, just because of the characters that were selected. So it's natural that native speakers of the language can not only sometimes have a good guess of the first vs. last name, but can even sometimes guess the gender of the name, even if it's a unique name.

This is probably due to the fact that the Chinese characters have associated meaning. And when there's a meaning to someone's name, you might be able to guess if it was intended as a masculine/feminine name - or as a given name, perhaps.

Aside from Chinese characters, though, we can revisit thinking of this from an English perspective. While it's true that Peter, as in your example, is likely to be a first name, is this always the case in English? Consider a name like "Jackson". Is it a first name? Is it a last name? What about "Spencer"? You might be able to guess some of the time, but you can find counter examples in any decently sized phone book.

The same is true in the languages of discussion. You can have a guess as to maybe the gender of a name, or whether it's a first or last name. But you can surely find exceptions now and then, with millions of people having different names.

Lastly, it's logical that family names will start to become familiar. When a name is passed on from generation to generation, you have more and more people sharing the name. While given names can also be reused, there is opportunity for diversity in names, which isn't present in an automatically passed-on family name.

tl/dr: I think native speakers of a particular language can have a good guess as to whether a name is a family name or given, but they might make mistakes now and then - just as in English.

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be immersed

Yes, it is quite interesting.
I wonder if there is a specific branch of linguistics where they study the etymology of names ? ...

From your list, Kato, Kageyama, and Otake are the family names.

In Japanese it is usually apparent what the family name is. Of course like English you can get weird cases 1% of the time.

In most of cases the last name contains only one character and it can be looked up in the list of common surnames. The rest two characters are the first name. So in the case of `Wei Keng Ho', the first name is Wei Keng, the last name is Ho.

There is Double-barrelled name, but not common as the example described above in Taiwan (Don't know the current situation in China.) With this case, the first few (usually two or three) characters generally be the last name, the rest are the first name.

The characters here indicate Chinese character.

But isn't Wei also a single character? Based on what you say why isn't Wei the family name and Keng Ho the given name?

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).