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Comment by contingencies | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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