[HN Gopher] Personal Names Around the World (2011)
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Personal Names Around the World (2011)
Author : paulmooreparks
Score : 72 points
Date : 2024-10-02 11:19 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.w3.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.w3.org)
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _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)
| kmoser wrote:
| Also: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-
| programmers-...
| irrational wrote:
| I have a coworker who comes from a culture where they only have
| one name. The solution the Fortune 500 company we work for came
| up with was to put her one name into both the first and last name
| fields. She seems to be okay with that solution.
| bigbacaloa wrote:
| But it's a bad nonsolution. The problem persists. It can be
| fixed by decent form design.
| gsich wrote:
| Or by chosing a name.
| mrweasel wrote:
| A company I worked for used three letters for username, so
| first character of your first, middle and last-name. I don't
| have a middle name, it's not unheard of, but it's also not as
| common as it used to be. Another colleague had no options, all
| relevant combinations you could make from his name was already
| in use, so they slapped a P in front, because he as a project
| manager.
|
| 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.
| netsharc wrote:
| A friend's foreign passport has "Full name" with his 2 word
| name. German bureaucracy requires first name, last name, but
| from that field it isn't clear which is which. So his first
| name according to bureaucracy was "-", and his complete name is
| in the "last name" field.
|
| 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.
| watwut wrote:
| I think the reason for sorting by last name is that there are
| many more common last names then common first names. There is
| huge number of Toms, Marias etc.
|
| You will find target person faster if searching manually and
| they are sorted by the last name.
| bux93 wrote:
| We used to use phone books. How quickly knowledge
| vanishes..
| jerf wrote:
| "The separation is odd anyway, what is the reasoning for
| wanting to sort by last/family 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").
| tdeck wrote:
| This is a wonderful article! I've noticed that India in
| particular seems to have a lot of different naming traditions in
| one country. Do folks from India have trouble keeping this
| straight?
| diveintothe9 wrote:
| I'm from South India, and in general, people's names fall into
| sets of common given names and common family names, but it can
| get tricky. Things vary state-to-state, and even within states,
| across castes and subcultures. However, this also makes it
| somewhat easier to gauge where someone is from. Over time, you
| recognize some name patterns and you can guess that they're
| from a specific place, speak a specific language, etc.
|
| 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).
| HelloNurse wrote:
| Regarding "Singh", generic Sikh surnames aren't discussed in
| the article but they are particularly useless and
| challenging.
| delta_p_delta_x wrote:
| Until the early 1900s or so there was never a unified polity
| ruling over the entirety of the Indian subcontinent, and modern
| India was assembled from a set of disjointed kingdoms and
| 'princely states', each with their own languages and cultures.
|
| 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.
| Jun8 wrote:
| Other random information about names that I find interesting:
|
| * 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...
| elric wrote:
| I have a Chinese friend whose name is Hei ("hei", black).
| Whenever they give their name to other Chinese folks, they are
| met with disbelief and often suspected of using a fake name.
| HelloNurse wrote:
| Could it be a homophone of some other more name-worthy word?
| It seems to be a common occurrence in Japanese.
| krick wrote:
| About the first point, is this really universal in USA?
|
| 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?
| Jun8 wrote:
| In a meeting or email within Microsoft it would be weird to
| refer to him as Mr Gates.
| rootbear wrote:
| At Pixar, Steve Jobs was always just Steve, never Mr. Jobs.
| That was also true of his other companies I believe. After
| I left Pixar, I was accused of named dropping when I kept
| referring to him as Steve and I had to change to calling
| him Mr. Jobs or just Jobs.
| efitz wrote:
| Almost all problems with name handling come from two assumptions:
|
| 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.
| elric wrote:
| Couldn't agree more. In fact, I've ranted about this before
| [1]. Names can change, names can be as short as zero or one
| characters, or ridiculously long. Applying ones own cultural
| assumptions to what makes a valid name is not a good idea.
|
| [1] https://blog.melnib.one/2021/06/23/on-names/
| aardshark wrote:
| As short as zero characters? Not the full name, surely.
| buildsjets wrote:
| What if one's name is represented by a non-printable
| character or logo? Perhaps your form provides a way to
| upload a glyph, or you need to enable name submittal via
| floppy disk.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20181113135727/http://nymag.com
| /...
| NeoTar wrote:
| I mostly agree, just one needs to be careful, especially when
| dealing with people whose first language may not be English,
| when asking these more complicated questions since they may be
| misunderstood. I like the final example a lot.
| skzv wrote:
| I exploited one of these regional naming conventions so that I
| only have a first name on Facebook.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| > Similarly, don't require that people supply a family name. In
| cultures such as parts of Southern India, Malaysia and Indonesia,
| a large number of people have names that consist of a given name
| only, with no patronym.
|
| 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.
| paulmooreparks wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| pif wrote:
| As a service company in the Western world, does it make
| financial sense to even start wondering what changes could
| retain a couple customers more? I suppose it doesn't!
| paulmooreparks wrote:
| When it's a Western company, she swears a bit and rolls her
| eyes and moves on. What really pisses her off is when it's
| a local company that ought to know better.
| samarthr1 wrote:
| Or, to put it a bit more bluntly, when the supporters of EV
| Ramaswamy Naicker started becoming violent with people who had
| surnames that were traditionally used by the brahmins, people
| out of fear started to not use their family names.
|
| 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.
| koliber wrote:
| There are many subtle pitfalls with names that are not obvious.
| It's best to ask a person from a given country and culture and
| have them explain them.
|
| 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.
| tokai wrote:
| I don't get this. So many names in so many languages are the
| 'same' name while being spelled and pronounced slightly
| different. To me your HR did it right. How should they ever
| catch every similar name and flatten them together? Did the
| piotr(ek)s have a problem with it? Cause your story makes it
| seems like it was other people just being annoyed at having to
| remember which person had with mail.
|
| Personally I would be angry if HR just assumed that they could
| rename me to a close variant of my name.
| koliber wrote:
| They should not try to catch them and "flatten" them. That
| would be unreasonable.
|
| 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > How should they ever catch every similar name and flatten
| them together?
|
| 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.
| dmurray wrote:
| This doesn't sound culturally insensitive. Sounds like they
| would have done the same with two Americans who preferred to be
| called Mike and Michael - to the extent that they put those
| names on their resumes.
|
| 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.
| koliber wrote:
| Yeah. The inflexibility is the problem. We told them and they
| ignored it.
| watwut wrote:
| Piotrek is diminutive of Piotr - it was grammatically correct
| to call both guys both names in Polish.
|
| 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.
| NeoTar wrote:
| One very ,into point which I would add - if initials are
| important to your use-case, allow people to specify them. A
| previous company used initials as identification in our bug tool,
| and I always resented being (something like) AC1 when my full
| initials (ABC) were available.
| djoldman wrote:
| Does anyone have an example situation where one MUST separate a
| user's full name?
|
| Or in other words, is there ever a situation where storing a
| user's full name is insufficient to accomplish a business
| critical task?
| krick wrote:
| There is countless number of such situations. For example,
| airline tickets. You cannot just enter "Jack Daniels" into the
| GDS, both first name and last name are obligatory, and they are
| separated by slash. That's just the format these systems use
| for the last 50 years, you cannot do anything about it, you can
| only pass the problem onto the end user. Then, as you are
| surely aware, he will have to prove that's really him in the
| airport, using a document of some sort.
| petesergeant wrote:
| I used to think it was weird that the French wrote Firstname
| LASTNAME, but at the Olympics it was very useful for picking out
| personal/family from countries with non-English name order
| amelius wrote:
| Is there any website where I can type a person's name and
| nationality and the website will turn it into speech so I know
| how to pronounce it?
| agent327 wrote:
| I don't know how well it works across all languages, but Google
| Translate has a text to speech option that seems to do a good
| job for my language. So you don't ask it to translate, just
| enter the name and the language and click the 'speech' button.
| Thiez wrote:
| No, because sometimes there are multiple correct ways to
| pronounce it in the same language / culture.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| I wish they didn't pick the equivalent of Stalin/Hitler as their
| example of Chinese name.
| krick wrote:
| In case if here is somebody Chinese, I wanted to ask: is it even
| possible to distinguish given name from family name by glance?
| Like, in the example of "Fred Yao Ming" or "Fred Ming Yao".
|
| 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.
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