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Comment by dhosek | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if this is the last country to not use family names. Thailand’s use of family names began in the 20th century, if I recall correctly.

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Many Ugandans have two given names and no family name. And I know at least two Indonesians who only have a single name.

Iceland comes to mind, where patronyms and matronyms are still the standard.

I would consider all of surnames, patronyms, and matronyms, to be "family names" in the broad sense. They're based on who your family is, after all.

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

That isn’t how names work.

Can you be more specific, please?

Also, I hate these kinds of lists. Are we just supposed to take the author by his word? He says:

> If you need examples of real names which disprove any of the above commonly held misconceptions, I will happily introduce you to several.

Then why doesn't he? I'm really curious about that last one: "People have names."

A newborn baby doesn't have a name, and depending on the culture and country there could be days, months or even years before they get one.

That's already covered by points 32–36. I really want to see a counter-example to "People have names" that doesn't fall under "toddler who has yet to survive their first winter". When you're old enough that members of your community talk about you, they'll find some way to refer to you – maybe by an informal nickname, maybe by a description of kinship ("Dave's second son") – and that would be considered a name by the standards of that "falsehoods" list.

While I was reading about Burmese names, I also learned that people in Burma can change their names pretty much at will, so even the idea that a name is a stable identifier for a person is not necessarily true, not to mention the whole legal name change thing or the common practice in many Western countries of women taking there husband’s name at marriage. I remember as a kid seeing occasional pieces of mail addressed to my mom under her maiden name even though she had been married for 15 or so years at that point. (Then there was the mail that I occasionally got addressed to “Donald Lopez” thanks to badly written code misparsing the joint ownership of the home I owned with my wife before the divorce.)

> > If you need examples of real names which disprove any of the above commonly held misconceptions, I will happily introduce you to several.

> Then why doesn't he? I'm really curious about that last one: "People have names."

Indeed, I dare to suggest that, while there are people who don't have names, there is definitionally no real name that can disprove the misconception.

Not sure if this exactly works, but how about ‘John Doe’?

A "John Doe" [1] presumably still has a name, even if it's unknown to you specifically. That would be a counter-example to "You always know a person's name", not to "People have names".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Doe

Your IT system may need to handle entries linked to people who don't have names, for example, recording that some treatment was given to a baby who died soon after birth before being given a name.

That's a good point.

I had a neighbour without a name. He was Tiwi. When a member of the tribe, higher on the totem pole than you, dies, then you lose that name for an appropriate mourning period.

An elder of reknown, with the name, died. The tribe decided that the name would never be taken again, as a matter of respect.

So, as a sign of respect, my neighbour gave up his name, permanently. His license and passport have a number, not a name.

The Icelandic surnames are not constant through generations. You can have 10 grandkids, all with different surnames.

Erik's son Leif is Leif Eriksson, Leifs kids Björn and Gudrun are Björn Leifsson and Gudrun Leifsdóttir.

Yes, this is the difference between more typically Western European surnames and patro/matronyms. Russians typically have both, many Americans of Scandinavian descent have whatever patronym their paternal n-th grandfather had when they switched customs. I believe that's become the case for many Scandinavians of Scandinavian descent as well.

But in any case, these are names which come from the family. By Appeal to Wikipedia, "family name" redirects here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surname

> A surname, family name, or last name is the mostly hereditary portion of one's personal name that indicates one's family.

Which links to this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronymic_surname

Having this sentence:

> Nearly all [[Icelandic surnames]] are strictly patronymic

Linking to this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_name

Where these are also described as a surname.

Note that this is different from having one, two, or several given names, as the whole of someone's name. That happens as well. Such a person has no family name, unlike someone with a surname, or surnames, be they patronymic, matronymic, or otherwise.

> I believe that's become the case for many Scandinavians of Scandinavian descent as well.

That's true. I'm Swedish, and Sweden shifted in mid/late 1800s. Some families just kept the name they had, and some made up a nice sounding family name, typically nature related.

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

Dealing with a defect right now in production where an external system had assumed that a person always has a first name and a last name whereas the person just has a name, which is neither the first name nor the family name – it is just a name.

Bali also doesn’t use family names. They have a birth order name and a given name.

we don't do that for burmese names but you can guess the day of the birthdate from the names most of the time

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