Personal Names Around the World (2011)
w3.org
w3.org
1. Names are identifiers.
2. Names can be used to correlate the same person between two systems.
These assumptions are not universally correct, and so programmers and designers and product managers try to restrict names in order to minimize edge cases and maximize the cases in which their assumptions hold.
And these same folks make the same mistakes about names of things as they do about names of people. If a human provides the name, then you are taking on a huge pile of problems using the name as an identifier. Take DNS domain names or AWS S3 bucket names or NetBIOS names in Windows networks or (pick your favorite flat namespace ).
The solution?
Always use system-assigned (preferably random) identifiers for things that need identification. Think UUIDs. Make the name a descriptive text property of the person/thing that they can change at any time. Consider not having names for humans, but rather just asking the user for the strings that you would like to use in certain places, eg:
“When we validate your provided credit card, what is the name that the bank expects?”
“What should we put in the ‘name’ spot on packages or letters that we send to you?”
“To make this app more friendly, we would like to address you by name. If that is ok, type the name that you would like us to use in this situation:”
[ Foo ]
Here’s what it will look like:
Hello, Foo
(No thanks) (OK)
Etc etc.
https://web.archive.org/web/20181113135727/http://nymag.com/...
Some peoples use 3 identifiers as a full name but there are peoples with only 2 living with them.
Yes, please! For eg., in my part of south India, people's last names used to be the name of their caste. When caste discrimination became somewhat uncool, most people stopped using those caste-based last names and being mononymous (having just the "given name") became the norm.
Now, because most US-based services make entering a last name a necessity, there's a resurgence of caste identity in names here. A lot of others use their father's name or the name of their home city, and end up being addressed as "Mr. <City name>" or "Ms. <Father's name>" in communication.
In general, a lot of people here find the whole firstname-lastname business just confusing.
This pisses my Singaporean-Tamil wife off more than anything I've ever seen. Emails beginning "Dear Ms. (or worse, Mrs.) Father's-given-name" have been the end of a few business relationships with service companies.
Even years after his death, his philosophy of "If you see a cobra and a brahmin, kill the brahmin" still has a large foothold in Tamil Nadu.
* The US habit of addressing all people, eg even the CEO, by first name in business setting would be unthinkable in most other cultures. This is one aspect that many foreigners stumble at (email heading using “Dear Sir” is typical).
* Some languages/cultures heavily use shortened names (eg Mike, Herb, Liz), even in formal settings. Again this would be a huge faux pas in other cultures. Even if people have and use such names, it would be unthinkable to address them if you are not close friends (eg Memo is an informal shortened form of the Turkish Mehmet)
* Commonly, names are chosen from a culture specific fixed set, which evolves on the order of a decade or so (not exactly true, eg the name Apple and many others) but a good approximation. In other countries names are generally made up from words, with desirable meanings, AFAIK names in Chinese are of this kind. Of course all names started this way, eg Peter=stone but I’d guess most people don’t know the meaning of their names in this sense, ie what does Elisabeth mean?
* Related to the above, one thing I was surprised to learn about Chinese names is that it is hard/impossible? to know the gender of the person from just the name. Sure, English has un-gendered names, too, but they are really small minority.
Totally unrelated, but how proper names work (ie, how they refer) is a big area of discussion in Phil of Language. Check out this entry if you want to go down that rabbit hole: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/names/#:~:text=Proper%20n...
I mean, consider you see Bill Gates (i.e. somebody well respected and quite older than you) in the airport, and you want to address him for some reason. Do you yell "Hey, Bill!", or would it rather be "Mr. Gates"? Is the former actually fully appropriate?
If you are also called Bill at Microsoft, this might have been confusing.
There was a time when I was leading an engineering department for an American startup. The company had emails in the form of firstname@company.com. We had a guy named Piotr (Polish version of Peter) working for us. A new person joined the team and HR decided to give him the name Piotrek. The problem is that Piotr and Piotrek are two forms of the same name and are practically interchangeable. Since a big part of the engineering team was polish it was hard to remember who had which address. I asked HR to add last names but they would not have it. One had Piotr in his resume, the other Piotrek, hence different names, hence it stays.
They demonstrated cultural insensitivity at its finest. The real problem though is that they did not listen to feedback from someone in that culture and applied their understanding of what is normal and proper.
If you are managing an international team do take time to ask people about their names. How to pronounce them. If there is a nickname they like to use when working with American teams. If the accent marks matter or not. Names are very personal and applying norms from one culture to another can cause friction.
Personally I would be angry if HR just assumed that they could rename me to a close variant of my name.
They should have listened when a Polish person told them the names are the same and should be treated as such.
It's perfectly OK to "flatten" Piotrek to Piotr in Polish. It's not like that in other languages, and I get it. But here's its fine.
They don't have to solve the problem of every similar name.
They just have to be humane to the people that are actually there.
It does seem a little inflexible and not forward-thinking, though. If you insist on everyone being firstname@company.com you are going to have a clash within your first 30 hires.
That being said, HR giving people the name they put on CV is correct. It was not culturally insensitive at all. The naming policy that cant handle two Toms or three Janes in the same team is shortsighted at best.
For years I was trying to move a company from multiple fields for addresses to just one big text box. We didn't really do anything with the information, so we didn't need to know your postal code as such. We just need to be able to print a customers address on a label. The amount of systems that for some reason wanted to know every separate part of the address was just crazy, and again never really used for anything. One system would map the address fields into another, from there again mapped into a third system and then mapped into the label print system. Why not just have a text box, and parse that through? I never got that implemented.
The separation is odd anyway, what is the reasoning for wanting to sort by last/family name? I guess it makes it easy to identify clusters (e.g. of families) in a list, but nowadays the spouse keeping their last name wouldn't be grouped in the cluster. And to follow the site's example, if there's the 2 sisters Mao Anna and Mao Zsazsa, they won't be near each other in a list sorted by last name if they put in "Mao" as first name.
You will find target person faster if searching manually and they are sorted by the last name.
Cultural assumptions that date from before the world being as small as it is, more than anything else.
HN is in English, and there's a bias towards stories of people from non-English areas integrating into English-speaking locales (which does not have to be "the US", much broader than that) because that's what gets noticed and told around here. But it flows in all directions and all cultures. I've read plenty of tales of woe of non-Japanese trying to live in Japan and integrate with their legal system and having various woes in the process based around their names not fitting into the legal system. And just like the West slowly gets better about accommodating Eastern names, it slowly gets better the other way around too.
It's a generalized culture-mismatch problem. I'll cop to being sort of the opinion that the "Xty-Billion Things Programmers Don't Know About {Names/Time/Addresses}" can end up being overly harsh as they are generally written, but at their core, they do have a point, and while we may read it in English and the examples the articles write about are about our more Western sensibilities impacting a broader world, every culture has that problem and could have their own equivalent documents written in their own language with their own examples (e.g. "not everyone in the world lists their family name first").
Personal names around the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9449096 - April 2015 (5 comments)
Personal names around the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8003686 - July 2014 (114 comments)
The first is a formal greeting and the second informal greeting.
The first is what appears on any formal correspondence such as letters and invoices. The second is how you greet me in your application.
As a user I can choose whatever I want. So I can be “Mrs Junto” as a formal greeting and “Hot Stuff” as my informal greeting and I can chuckle every time your app says “Hi there Hot stuff”.
The problem comes that if you integrate with other systems, they nearly always have the idea of separate database / API fields for Title, Salutation, Firstnames, Surname, etc. then it’s non-trivial to work out how to map yours to theirs.
Human name parsers are possible of course but they are fallible.
I got assigned the bug when one of the only two Archbishops in Britain tried to open an account.
Luckily, Field Marshal has slipped from normal use in the British military, but he should have also noticed Brigadier, Commodore, Rear Admiral, Vice Admiral and perhaps Ambassador.
I guess Second Lieutenant or Sergeant Major aren't pompous enough to offer their titles to buy s***f on the internet.
Or in other words, is there ever a situation where storing a user's full name is insufficient to accomplish a business critical task?
For a very generic example, if I encounter someone with the surname "Singh", I'm reasonably sure they're from the northern states, and likely speak Hindi apart from their native tongue. Also in terms of identifying someone's given name, they're usually from a broadly known pool. As an analogue to western names, if someone says their name is James or Marie, you're mostly guessing that's their given name, even though it's possible to have those as last names as well (eg. LeBron).
The people in the southern five states of India speak an entirely unrelated language family—Dravidian, rather than Indo-European.
In many senses India is more like the EU than first meets the eye, which is why it is so hard to govern.
I mean, if you know Russian, you are pretty much always sure which one is the name, and which one is surname. In theory, it can be whatever, but it almost never really happens.
There is a bit more ambiguity in English (Scott Alexander or even having Jackson as the given name), but still I'd say in the majority of cases you know names from surnames.
Is there some common knowledge in Chinese that Ming is a common family name and Yao is a common given name, and the reverse would be unusual? Or can it be anything, and there's no way to know?
I am wondering this about all asian languages, where names tend to be so short, so it also applies to Korean, Vietnamese, etc.
for a 1-1 name like yao ming, it's a little more difficult. some characters are definitely more common as surnames than others - the chinese term for 'common people' (百姓) actually refers to an old classic text where they compiled all the surnames they knew of! so when i see the name yao ming, i immediately recognize that 'yao' is a fairly common surname and 'ming' is not, and thus it's more likely (but not guaranteed!) that 'yao' is the surname here.
there's also some cases that are ambiguous when romanized, but not ambiguous in chinese. for example, consider the name 'wang chen,' where both 'wang' and 'chen' are common chinese surnames. however, if i saw it written out as 王, i would be able to recognize that 王 'wang' is a character that's primarily used for surnames, while 晨 'chen' is not.