Peoples of Southeast Asia have naming conventions different from the Anglosphere | Hacker News Reader

Peoples of Southeast Asia have naming conventions different from the Anglosphere

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44 pointseatonphil23 comments

Are there legitimate instances where we actually need to break a name into parts? In my latest project I just have a single free-form text field for "name", and another for "nickname". The latter is always entered by humans, not something I attempt to generate automatically based on "name".

I was coming to the same conclusion too. Maybe the only people who need name in some format are people interacting with governments and/or with banks.

I can't think of any reason an app that isn't worried about payment details would need to store more than just a single text field for full name.

Well, there's the attempt to be "friendly" that some systems use where they want to greet you by your given name like "Hi, Bob! How can I help you today?". But this can be problematic because while in the West we are familiar with strangers being this informal, in other cultures it is insulting because only children are addressed that way by strangers.

I’ll just leave this here (from @patio11):

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

Such naming conventions even wildly differs within a country. My south indian name has no surname (Just like vishwanathan anand or sundar pichai). we technically have no last name. There is father's name and your own name at the end.

The naming convention is always father's name followed by your name. In North india my teachers would call me by my first name which was my father's name. In frustration I had to legally change my name and invert it to put my own name first followed by my father's name which I legally converted to last name.

This also caused an issue in US since my first cousin didnt have the same last name (as our father's are different) but we are the same family. I had issues transferring the car since the last names didn't match.

Beyond names, foreign addresses are often a major pain to use with US-centric websites. With an overseas address on a US credit card, I've often been unable to use it online (sometimes the fields also allow me to enter the necessary information, but don't transmit it to the bank correctly so the payment ends up failing anyway).

The worst are government websites (generally state or local) that assume US citizen = US resident. There are about 9 million US citizens who live abroad.

That drives me insane. At one point I ended up having to argue with many service reps over a toll pass that I was unable to pay. The online payment site wouldn't allow me to access it due to being in the Carribean, in Puerto Rico actually which is still part of the US.

I ended up in a loop talking to various CSRs over a few months as each time I called they wouldn't let me pay over the phone as my address was in Puerto Rico, and kept telling me to pay online, which I couldn't do. Kept getting passed from one rep to another, escalated to no effect. Had call-backs from "supervisors". Eventually I was back on the mainland for holidays and managed to call back and get someone to drop the late fees, then paid online.

This is a problem pretty much everywhere in the entire world, not just the US. A lot of systems are designed with domestic norms for things like addresses, phone numbers, etc. in mind only.

Names are such a culturally different thing, and it's interesting to see how software grows around the culture it's written in and how walking into it from a different culture can feel.

Anglo-centric view here (given that's where I'm from), but just living in Puerto Rico for a while was interesting. The culture there predominately has two surnames, one from each parent. When I was there, I was frequently asked for my mother's maiden name to be used on my paperwork, but I was quite resistant given I had a couple of accounts (banking primarily) that I could not change the security questions for and made use of "mother's maiden name" as a "secure answer".

I've lost track of the ways that broke peoples software, while I was over there, and started giving my middle name or asking them to double my surname. One place was unable to send me any mail for a while until they figured out that the software would silently skip "incomplete" accounts when generating monthly invoices. One place would inject "null" so I got mail to that was "null-Surname". One place just wouldn't allow them to create my records without a second surname.

>two surnames, one from each parent.

Which one, of each parent's two, is passed on to a child?

In Spain usually the father's name.

IIRC, the patriarchal surname (i.e. mother's father's name and father's father's name) is carried on.

I believe it's also tradition that a spouse doesn't change their name but adopts a qualifier, so they keep their paternal surname and append 'de SPOUSE_SURNAME' to signify marriage in general conversation, though they are still formally 'X Y de Z'.

But I'm only an outsider on this, so I could be totally wrong here or missing some semantics or subtleties. I love learning about other cultures but there's so much to them that's hard to grasp without living within the culture for a long time.

This also goes the other way when dealing with forms in Asian countries. I had to put my lastname first and so on when registering for my phone provider and bank in Korea.

I know people with long names have had issues because South Korean names are really short, so the programmers just assumed no one would have a 15+ char last name. Etc.

He didn't get to those of us whose names have multiple correct transliterations, which even happens in Europe (e.g. Müller <=> Mueller).

In my case I have two given names, one from each of my parents' languages and each written in a different alphabet. I have a "canonical" latinization I use, but it gets written all sorts of ways.

We might think about putting names in a technological context here. Theoretically they are identifiers. I would argue that in some modern contexts they are spectacularly bad at identifying people. The very strong cultural variation is one aspect of that.

Anyway, when I lived in Mexico and signed up for internet they seemed to want to combine my first and middle name in a way. Either that or the guy at the internet store just decided to do that.

But also if I remember Rappi kind of did that too. My (made-up) explanation was that it just came from a Spanish tradition or something where there are just so many people in close proximity with similar first names (Juan etc.) that you really need another name to differentiate.

In my case it also made sense because both my middle and first name, though more 'Anglo' than a lot of Mexican names, are also extremely common.

Strange this doesn't mention Arabic, Chinese, Hmong, Indian, or Tai. It also doesn't mention non-standard romanization (transliteration) systems, dialects, or different scripts. Cool tidbit: when Hmong (Miao) people from different places meet, they recite their lineage from memory until they find a common ancestor. They can do this over many tens of generations.

It isn't strange at all: it is just a guy saying a few things about the subject on Twitter based on his knowledge of his own culture and some other ones he knows about likely as they are nearby countries, not some attempt at a comprehensive article on things people should know about names.

He is either not broadly educated in the subject or is either consciously or subconsciously limiting discussion through a nationalist perspective, probably both. The guy's from Vietnam, which was previously substantially Indian/Hindu[0], significantly Muslim[1], and essentially much Vietnamese culture came from China, which was also the dominant script[2] until the French era, and he doesn't discuss any of those cultures. Chinese traditions of naming are the structure of Vietnamese (and Japanese, and Korean) names. Then he claims to discuss SEA, which is a huge area and in historic terms largely a metastory of India[3] vs China influences with a lot of Arabic impact thrown in, and none of these cultures are mentioned.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%E1%BB%B9_S%C6%A1n [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champa [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida#Indic_(Brahmic)

Dude, it’s just some tweets from a guy on an aspect of a topic he’s knowledgeable about. Not a comprehensive reference on every single naming scheme that has possibly been used by people in Vietnam.

Never underestimate the power of HN pedantry.

And he didn't even cover the Ancient Roman praenomen, nomen, and cognomenm naming scheme or the Culture's naming scheme of star name, plate name, given name, chosen name, family name, house name.

Why is he so focused on present-day Earth?

Nothing strange about people talking about what they know about ... not shutting up about stuff they are clueless in.

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