Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?
Our app is designed to be used across the Asia Pacific.
We have members who follow western naming conventions as well as members following common asian naming conventions.
Turns out there can be alot of variation on what is the convention.
https://www.asiamediacentre.org.nz/features/a-guide-to-using...
How would you handle different naming conventions, so users see their name in the order they would like?
Family, Given
Given, Family
525 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 329 ms ] threadWhich might be an upside, because there are cultures and contexts where it’s incredibly rude. You’re a glorified ledger, not a family member or life-long friend.
I get a lot of mail from foreign readers. Indians and Pakistanis are pretty formal, and most Africans even more so. On the other hand, some people from those same countries will write stream of consciousness emails that look like a text message to their dad.
The Western countries are a lot less formal, but and frequently drop the polite form which I was raised to use with all strangers.
Good luck designing your system! Sorry I don't have any advice.
I've seen lots of websites programmed exactly this way, so it's obviously good web design.
Names are hard hahahaha.
As an Asian person, don’t overthink this.
Just have fields for family name and given name to distinguish between the two.
Sure, when there’s a text field saying hello “first name last name” it might be flipped but this shouldn’t be a deal breaker or offensive in any capacity.
Worst case is you can have a toggle they can click but from a developer standpoint, that might be over engineering for something that might cause headaches later.
It’s more complex than what it seems that I think a razor would work rather than going through all cases.
For instance in China, most names are single character family name followed by a two character given name. Some rare family names are two characters and usually they will have a single character given name. Some people have single character family name and single character given name.
Then you get people from different ethnic groups who put the family name at the end. Often these are characterised by a long given name and then an interpunct joining that with the family name, but that's not always done. For instance a popular singer at the moment has the Chinese name 希林娜依·高 where 高 is a fairly normal Chinese surname so it's easy to identify as such. A very popular actress is named 迪丽热巴·迪力木拉提 so it's not always the case you can easily tell which name is which.
Even for those with simple construction, so the characters are FAB (family name, and 2 characters for given name). You'll find that within a family, where you might expect pet names, it's common instead to call each other by AB, except when they're annoyed and use the full name FAB. In a business context, someone with a higher rank might be F先生 (Mr F), F总 (Manager F), F董 (Director F), but close colleagues might call you AA, BB, 小A, 小B etc - but typically they won't get to choose that, they'll be told by the person "you can call me ___" and they might allow different people to use different names or react with their official title if someone uses too informal a name with them.
I've got Chinese friends who exclusively use an English name at work in China. I've got a friend who later moved to the UK, and most people in the UK know her by her Chinese name, but except for a few close school friends, nobody in her working life in China even knew her real name because the company she worked for only used English names (this isn't very common though).
In other countries, many people don't use their first name much. In the UK, I've known quite a few people who've primarily used their middle name, and others (including me) are generally known by others with a name that isn't among any of their given names. Sometimes these are common transformations, e.g. David to Dave, David to Dai (in Wales), but other times people just use initials or nicknames (e.g. I've got a friend who pretty everybody calls Danger, it started as a joke with friends, but now even his parents sometimes use it!)
Anyway, that was a long diversion, but it's always safer I think to ask for the full name as one field that not try to change it, but use it exactly as provided for official purposes, and to also ask for a preferred name for your communication with them. In cases were you share the name to other people, e.g. an online community, you might want an additional display name which might well be different again.
It doesn’t matter if the ethnic group writes it last first or first last.
If you’re filling in Chinese documentation and writing it in Chinese it will be a single field in Chinese.
If you’re writing it in English it will be written in 2 fields as first name and last name as the English version of the Chinese name.
The spoken English name of “alice” or “David” are not used on official documentation.
Name cards will sometimes have English names and sometimes they will put the English name with Chinese last name. But also write the Chinese name in Chinese.
I can’t believe how much people are over thinking this stuff.
Either you live in China and fill in your name in Chinese.
Or you don’t live in China and you write your name in English.
Im considering having a select field next to the name something like
Name Order: "Western style", "Eastern style"
or
Name Order: "Given Name, Family Name", "Family name, Given Name"
With a bit of extra work I can detect the country set a default for this field, while allowing users in places like Pakistan to still get the display order they want.
But I've never seen it done this way before, hence my curiosity to ask everyone.
Seriously, just avoid splitting name fields if you can help it. Do you absolutely have to have split names? Begrudgingly do so and acknowledge things will never be right for everyone. But if not, just don’t (and don’t make the mistake of assuming a format in order to do things like surname sorting—with a unified field you simply can’t do surname sorting).
There are plenty of Asian countries that don’t follow last name - first name so it’s not necessarily an “eastern” thing.
another opinion from me about automating based on country. It’s a cool thing to implement but might not be worth the effort.
An example I have is in the Philippines, majority of people go First Name Last Name. However, there’s a Chinese sub population that has last name first name. But then most of this sub population also have “Christian” names that they use in Most official documents or websites. I’m pretty sure other countries will also have similar nuances.
Maybe a screen name or username will be the razor.
Example: in Malaysia and Singapore, Chinese people can have traditional Chinese names -- SAA for surname and 2 characters that's their "given name" so to speak. Some have an English name -- but it's written ESAA. Some only have one character names, so it's ESA. Some surnames have 2 characters, so ESSA/ESSAA.
When filling out US forms, ESAA usually turns into Englishname Surname, and SAA turns into Givenname Surname. So the display order for the first is firstlast, but the second is lastfirst. Same country, same culture, different display order depending on whether their parents gave them English names or they chose one later in life.
When there's a middle name field, often ESAA names turns into E AA S - first middle last. This display order is wrong. It should be first last middle.
As you can see, even within the same country, same culture, same neighbourhood, you still don't have a consistent order. It's simply not possible to do this in a consistent way.
Anyone ideas beyond throw everything together in one long field.
Part of what’s lost with this approach is you then don’t really know which part is which. Aka loss of semantic clarity.
In Vietnam names like Nguyen Thi Anh Mai are common.
The family name is "Nguyen" is the family name. "Anh Mai" is the "first name". But they should be called "Mai". And reversing the order "Mai Anh Thi Nguyen" is just wrong.
And Catholic families in Vietnam often have names "Nguyen Thi To but everybody calls me by my baptismal name of Mary". Or you have a "house name" (i.e. your real name) and an outside name (so that ghosts can't follow you home). Or you have your real name and an unofficial English name (for reasons both good & bad) that literally everyone at work calls you.
In the Philippines people have names Anna Katrina Gomez. But you don't call them Anna. You call them Katrina because that's how it often works in the Philippines.
The solution is simple:
One field is "what is your full name?"
One field is "what would you like to be called?"
You don't need to try to infer one from the other.
Everyone I've known there has their mother's maiden name as a middle name, and father's last as last name. Then on marriage sliding the original last name to the middle name.
But one thing I did notice is that very few go by any given name, usually a play on it or a nickname instead.
Which name is my "first name" or "last name" also depends on what identity document I'm using. I immigrated to Asia and switched to the family-name-first convention, but my birth certificate and so on are the opposite. So it's conceivable that a system requiring two forms of identification has both name orders, and both are correct.
Names are awful.
Does "last name" mean "family name" even though it is my first name?
And what counts as "middle name"? Is it "Thi"? But my "first name" isn't Anh Mai. It is just Mai. But "Thi Anh" isn't my middle name, either, that's just nonsense.
And, yes, we have the "multiple documents with different name order" depending on whether it is the Vietnamese birth certificate, the US Consular Record of Birth Abroad, the Vietnamese passport, or the Australian passport....
Naming is a tar pit and even Westerners might like to be called John when their name is Winstonshire. Let’s not even bother.
What is the downside? I’m not seeing it. I see people here recommending to implement logic to handle this fully and I’m not seeing why this would be preferable.
Why, as a system designer, would you force your user to see "Lawy'ryn" every day just because that's on some government document somewhere?
So you should make your system more cumbersome for 95%+ of users just for the sake of doing the right thing in occasional edge cases?
By all means make it possible to override, but you should absolutely default "what would you like to be called?" rather than making everyone enter their name twice.
As the app is apparently developed for use in Asia-Pacific, no, it isn't.
From the global point of view the exceptional case is the American one, Name Middle Family. It's about 330 M people vs 8 billions, 4%, which is less than 10%.
But then you add the exceptional cases for every country or culture. From the other comments we already know that even in Western Europe there are many differences. So if you sum all those exceptional cases you get the 100% of the world population.
Edit: 330 M, typo was 353 M.
That’s not really “American”. Most other Anglophone countries are mostly the same. Maybe it should be called “Anglophone” not “American”? To a certain extent, even “West European”
There are some subtle differences - my impression is the US is more accepting of generational suffixes (Jr, III, etc) than Australia is, for instance. But the overall structure “Given [Middle…] Surname” is shared
I don't have any French or German or Polish friends to verify but this is so demonstably false just by reading some of comments here. Name Middle Family is clearly at most American.
It isn't "at most American" because UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand also mostly use "Name Middle Family", just like the US does. There are still some differences in their naming practices, but those differences generally relate to subtler issues, not the big picture issue of name order.
There are a lot more Anglophone countries than just the US, Canada, UK, and Australia.
And don't limit it to Asia either, it's relevant everywhere.
My name is Ritobrata Ghosh (Given Family). But my friends, teachers, colleagues always called me Rito. I have a different short name that is used by immediate family and close relatives.
Rito is also easier for western people's tongues. So, that is what I almost always use. I use my full name only in legal and financial documents. In every other place, I am just Rito. I like to be addressed as "Rito" and appear as "Rito Ghosh" in badges, documentation, slack, any non-legal/non-financial documents.
So, the best way to go, in my opinion, is having two fields- one for full name, another for preferred name. Do not _assume_ anything.
This is also consistent with western names, like: William Henry Gates III as Bill Gates.
There is also another field in many places where there are badges and such. "This field will appear as is in your badge" is wise in such cases.
Either the name serves some legal purpose and they need to write it in full and 2 fields supports that.
Or the name serves no purpose and they can write what they want in those 2 fields.
Which reminds me of this problem: she might have sisters called, say, Nguyen Thi Anh May and Nguyen Thi Anh Minh, and in quite a few countries this will result in them having identical names on their identity cards and most communication, either "Nguyen Thi", "Nguyen Thi Anh" or even "Nguyen Thi Anh M."
Like, my name still doesn't work in a lot of systems that expect ascii characters only. Like, thanks for deciding that names æøåü or similar isn't a valid name.
Addressing a person by their full name can come across as rude (I personally find it rude too, e.g. "Hey John R. Brown, this is your order"), so it's useful to split up "given name" and "family name" into 2 fields so that you don't have to depend on name ordering which varies by culture.
If they only have one name, like many people in Myanmar, then it's just the given name. If they don't have family names (some cultures use patronymics) then it's just a long given name. If they have double-barreled last names like Hispanic names, then it's just a long family name.
Most people in the world have filled out forms on U.S. sites. They'll know what to do.
Just add a field for the desired form of address, or a nickname.
> Addressing a person by their full name can come across as rude
Stuffy, Maybe, but rude? Calling people by their first name is rude. Calling people by forms of address which don’t exist is rude.
Full names, at least in the USA, are sometimes used by parents to address their children when they are in trouble. Rude might not be the right word but potentially at least jarring. I have never experienced it or seen someone react that way from text but I have with verbal addresses.
edit some conversations about the topic for reference since it is harder to google for than I initially thought it would be.
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-parents-address-their-unruly-ch...
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskParents/comments/pj6aqw/why_do_y...
For me and my people, it's perceived as rude (it sounds infantilizing). Just because you don't perceive it that way doesn't mean it is not.
> Calling people by their first name is rude
Yes, it can be. That's why it's useful to have their last names disambiguated so a proper title can be appended. When you have the full name in a single string, you can't do that -- you don't have enough information to decompose the name into its parts. When you have both given name and family names, you don't have to guess which is which.
There are forms of address that sound rude if appended to full names.
(of course it can be argued that even with 2 fields one might get it wrong, so I fully agree that adding a field indicating how one prefers to be addressed is the best solution of all)
Are you or your people Asian?
Though, even in Asia which names to call a person can differ wildly. I'm not sure how your personal ideas about rudeness are relevant here.
Yes.
> I'm not sure how your personal ideas about rudeness are relevant here.
Names matter.
So what you’re actually saying now is that any inferred form of address may come across as rude, which means you original suggestion is plain incorrect: splitting given name and family name does not allow generating a genetically never rude form of address, because you can’t know whether the user’s culture favours given names, family names, full names, or even none of the above.
And that’s before getting into honorifics and titles.
No, that is not it.
Yes, it very much is. You’re declaring that one form of address is rude to your culture, while acknowledging that it is proper to an other culture.
This means the two cultures are completely incompatible on that point, and thus no generic munging method can satisfy both.
And yet your original suggestion was to do exactly that, just in a form suited or at least compatible with your cultural sensibilities.
For westerners you might want sunny, good-news messages to say "Hi John" but for an apology for a problem (like a delay or cancellation) you might want to use the more respectful "Dear Mr Doe"
On the other hand, this discussion has plenty of examples of why separate 'first name' and 'last name' fields don't work in all cultures. And I think we can all agree that asking people for a name and two desired forms of address ready to e-mail them in two different tones would be a very unusual sign up process.
I'm not sure there's any universal, fully respectful way of doing this across cultures.
I'm just French (where we often use "FAMILY Given" in a formal setting, but "Given Family" is common otherwise) and I still need a moment to think every time I see "first name" "last name" fields instead of "family name" "given name", after decades of being online.
My parents just fill these forms in random order, basically.
The other problem is:
> For reasons of respect, you may need to address a person by either their first or last name (with a title).
This often doesn't translate well between cultures. American websites will often use the given name in any setting and this is weird. If they want to be friendly-informal they should address me with "Hello Given Family, this is your order".
It is really curious to hear that your decide to disrespect huge populations because you worry about respect.
> Most people in the world have filled out forms on U.S. sites. They'll know what to do.
Sure. People will mange. It is still communicating that the developers' head is stuck in their own context.
Will we manage? Sure. Is it respectful? Not at all.
Names are HARD.
Instead I would look at how the relevant governments handle it, if they have something like the UK's component catalog.
In fact, I don't want my full name to be addressed anywhere at all. Just call me by the alias I provided.
Of course if you don't need the legal name it's best not to ask for it.
Spammers and big corporations write "Dear John, Did you know ..."; your local sports club doesn't do that crap.
But:
https://github.com/kamranahmedse/design-patterns-for-humans#...
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/datatype-enum.html
I'd have multiple classes handling each one a use-case, and a enum on user's record in order to specify which class to use for each, so that you can compute it from the nationality, but you could also potentially give each user the chance to set it for themselves
Then think about what are the requirements your system needs when it comes to names.
Does the app need to know what a user's name is at all or is a username enough? Does it need to distinguish the family part of their name for anything?
A thing I think is the most general is to just have a Full Name field (min length 1 and either John Doe or something cute as default) And a Nickname or Display Name field if your app needs to show something on screen.
More people designing applications need to read it.
https://studyinthestates.dhs.gov/sevis-help-hub/sevis-basics...
But my passport and drivers license both show my middle names hyphenated :(
That made me laugh out loud. It's a great reminder why being conscious of the assumptions you make is an important part of development and one that LLMs can't really do.
* Full name (John Smith)
* Index name (Smith, John) - mostly for meatspace compatibility.
* Preferred name (John Smith) - used in lists with other people's names
* Personal name (John) - used in direct communications
Then there is the difference between the "full" name and the legal full name, with all names spelled out. The latter is sometimes necessary, but it can be awkward or inappropriate to use it in most places that expect a full name.
And maybe it's just me but
>because names are central to our identities, virtually by definition.
isn't true, my name is for the outside world, inside I'm just I, that's my identity.
Without others I would never use my name.
>isn't true, my name is for the outside world, inside I'm just I, that's my identity.
What happens in your head when someone calls your name? Surely that's a feeling of identity?
I realize that someone is talking to me, but that has nothing to do with my identity. I doubt that that person and I have the same perception of who I am.
I think the discrepancy here is just different definitions of the word 'identity'. If someone is talking 'to you' then you are identified by that. It's not about your unique internal world, but about your uniqueness among humans (like a primary key identifies a database row).
Nom d'usage technically has no legal value, it's just a last name you might want to be addressed as, normally that of your husband but it can be a pen name and whatever. It's optional, and technically only at the request of the relevant person. Men can have nom d'usage too (égalité, after all).
Still, immigration offices, banks, insurances... they often slap the husband's last name if that field is left empty, just because. Why would you want something else, right? She probably forgot!
We started crossing those fields to make it clear she doesn't want a nom d'usage.
We actually couldn't open a joint bank account with both names separated. They'd accept the papers signed in the official names, but the names on the cards and other communication needed to be unified for their system to accept it. They'd accept to reemit card with the correct names only as an exception by abusing the card renewal system apparently
Most people never need to think about the details of how names might work in a different culture across the world, let alone work that into any kind of a rule-based mechanism or a rigid information model. If some random person working at a construction site in Europe or the US has no idea that first names and last names aren't a universal thing, that has exactly zero direct effect on anything. In most cases that's probably even true of lawyers or other high-level white collar work.
I'm actually inclined to believe lots of programmers know more about e.g. time [1] than a non-programmer Joe Random does on average, exactly because software developers may actually end up coming across at least some of those issues.
[1] e.g. https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b...
>People have exactly one canonical full name.
What is on your passport then?
Also, a lot of people in the world don't have passports.
See my other comment on Vietnamese names, actually if you have a Belgian passport and a Vietnamese name, your actual given name (the third part for women with the "Thi" middle name) is not shown on your passport or identity card, only the first letter of it.
For French people who have three given names it's the same, although the two last ones are generally not used (you could say they're little endian compared to Vietnamese big endian names, I suppose) so it's not as important.
I have no idea why, and Belgium is the only country I know that does that, but it means your passport name is absolutely not your canonical full name.
In Ireland, it’s not entirely rare to use different forms of one’s name in Irish and English.
For example, in English our president would be called “ Michael Daniel Higgins”, but in Irish “Mícheál Dónal Ó hUigínn”, and while there’s obviously a correspondence between them, they are pronounced quite differently.
It’s possible to change the version of the name you use on your passport after six months of regular use (compared to two years for any other kind of name change), and in that situation both forms of your name will be listed on your passport.
Then I have a residence permit in a different country, where my full legal name is spelled in Latin characters based on what is written in my birth certificate (which you guessed -- is in Cyrillic). So the Latin rendering there is entirely based on what I asked the translator to write there.
In the end, out of three documents I can id myself with, no pair has the same combination of characters for my name.
add:
To make matters even worse, my original birth certificate (not the one I have now) was issued by the soviet union and uses russian cyrillic and the same name there is both spelled and pronounced differently.
But even I don't have one canonical full name. Even with just the government, the name on my birth certificate, passport, and tax documents is different.
Name 1: I was named by my parents after a friend of theirs. That friend commonly went by a short version of the name (think "Jessie" vs "Jessica", though that's not the real example). Anyway, since I was born in Ireland in the 90s, my parents had me baptised by the Catholic Church, which expected you to name your kids after saints. In the form which the saints used. This was less about any strong faith on their behalf, and more of the fact that it made it easier to get into any of the 90% of schools run by the Catholic Church. I think even then, it depended a little on which priest you were dealing with as to how strict they were with the name rules.
But anyway, the extended, "saint's" form of my name was needed for the baptism, so my parent's put it on the birth cert, plus a middle name. They (and consequently I) never used the extended version of my name, but my birth cert reads "ExtendedFirst Middle Last"
Name 2: Anyway, then my teenage years came and I went abroad and I filled out a passport application form to get one for that. It had fields for first name, middle name, and last name. So I put in the first name I actually use, dutifully filled out the middle name field even though I never use that, and then put in my last name. So my passport has "First Middle Last".
Name 3: Then when I came to actually paying tax as an adult, I had to provide details to the tax office and my first employer that lined up. At this point my middle name was well and truly out of use, so both got just "First Last". This is also the form of my name that appears on most utility bills, professional correspondence, etc.
Name 4: And then on top of that, I have a nickname I'm commonly known by. This is what's on a lot of personal correspondence (sometimes as just Nickname, sometimes as Nickname LastName), what people call me face to face, etc.
Now a lot of countries have a concept of a singular "legal name". In some countries it may be at least procedurally incorrect or sometimes even legally fraud if you were to use something else in passport applications, tax documents, etc. But Ireland does not. If you use something as your name, it is your name. Most government interactions will accept evidence (such as utility bills, employment contracts, etc.) that you've been using it for 6 months to update the above documents.
For any of the 4 variations above, I could provide enough evidence to the government to get them to update the other documents in line, but it's just not important. But if I was to bother I'd use "First Last" as the target name, and I'd actually rather not update the passport as I travel to the US frequently enough and "your name is different to last time you were here" strikes me as the kind of thing to make US immigration unhappy.
Alternatively, you can register a deed poll to get a piece of government paper stating effectively "X Y Z has informed the government they're now known as A B". But this is not a prerequisite to changing your name, just a way of short circuiting the process if you're stuck getting documentary evidence that you have changed your name via other mechanisms.
And that's all before we get into marriages, gender transitions, Irish vs English names, immigrants who anglicise their names, confirmation names, etc.
After several years of getting queried on mismatching ID, now I've moved to another country, I'm going through the process to "rename myself" - and mostly that's a matter of saying "Here's the name I've used for a long time, please make it official".
After the renaming goes through I'll be updating everything to match which will no doubt be a pain. But once it's done I'll have a much easier life.
At one point I had cards from two different banks, one with my middle name and one without.
[0] https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F10528
[1] If you need examples of real names which disprove any of the above commonly held misconceptions, I will happily introduce you to several.
It's just not that hard to find problems with name inputs.
Though it it also may be just "given - family", as well as any other variation informally. So you wouldn't make a mistake with UI
I think this is to make sorting easier, since names are sorted in alphabetical order by surname then given names.
One field.
Also, don't use type=number fields... the browser UX is terrible across many devices. Just make everything type=text and be done with it.
- Label the fields FAMILY, GIVEN, MIDDLE (then put them in the order you desire) - Or simply put NAME
For a LOT of use cases, FULL NAME side-steps the issue and works out great. Sure your emails that go out are "Hi {{ full_name }}," but that's okay.
In India there are patronymic names with initials, mononyms (no “family name” or initials), names with just a given name (one or multiple words) and no “family name”, names where the “last name” is a place, etc.
If you truly want to cater to all kinds, just have one field for name and another for what they’d like to be addressed as.
[1]: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
But the question sounds like there are already substantial asian users in divergent conventions without frictions. If that is what your app is trying to fix, I'm not completely sure how it will work out.
It's common to hear "How should I address you?" This is equivalent to the people here suggesting a "nickname" field (good idea).
There are people with only one name. Don't make them double it (Ananda Ananda).
There are people with several given names. But they may only want to be called by the first, or the first two, or the last.
There are people who wish to be called by their full name. They may find it jarring to be addressed by just one piece of their name.
Finally there are people who go by a name which is not part of their legal name at all. Short forms like Bob instead of Robert, but also freeform names for various reasons, perhaps the most sensitive being that some government official may have determined their legal name contrary to their own wishes. Imagine your mother named you Sue but someone decided that must be short for Susan and put that on your government documents.
Related: when people want to show which part of their name is the family name, they either make it all uppercase or underline it. You can see this on some CVs but it happens elsewhere too when a full name is going to be read by people who don't know the addressee.
It’s not uncommon in the west either and it’s weird how much we ignored it in software e.g. “I’m John Q. Smith the Third but call me John” or “May I call you j-dog?”
> There are people who wish to be called by their full name. They may find it jarring to be addressed by just one piece of their name.
There’s also the issue of honorifics which you usually can’t get from names alone, as well as titles (whether professional or nobility) which can be very important to people’s identity.
Is there a similar sentiment among older people in parts of Asia?
Same goes with names: missing accents, umlauts, special characters, wrong ordering, wrong titles/gender etc. is aggravating. And customers do complain.
German companies often spend a non-trivial amount on software engineering time and data cleanup to get these things right. And the French take it even more seriously.
Non-native speakers may not understand it, but that's no excuse and you will alienate people and customers. Even younger generations notice.
And just fyi I'm a millennial and per "Du" with everyone I know. Not my telco provider though.
My ideal message from my telco would be this one line:
"Hi Leo, your monthly bill for <phone number> is available. Get it here: <url>"
[1] https://www.abendblatt.de/wirtschaft/article233949947/firmen...
Knowing what name to display isn't always enough - you also need to think about how the rest of the text around it should be translated to match. For German, the safe answer is still third-person plural Sie, unless you're absolutely certain your audience are all children, and missing that distinction might be taken by your audience as either that you're trying to be creepily over-familiar, or that you think they're children.
A sibling comment says that "Du" (second-person familiar) for business is becoming more common, and while that's true, I would NOT recommend using it without a good knowledge of German culture and your specific audience.
Depending on the level of formality you might need to conjugate verbs slightly differently or use vocabulary that's considered more respectful. From my experience the younger generation is more relaxed about the rules, but Japan as a whole is pretty slow to change.
[1] https://www.wasabi-jpn.com/japanese-lessons/how-to-write-ema...
In France the etiquette requires that you ask permission to use "Tu", and there are people who refuse you the right (it basically signals that they see you as a servant).
I happen to be handing that data over to airlines, which has some of the less forgiving, yet fragmented name requirements. If you handle this incorrectly, your customer can't fly, even after they paid for the flight. And for those who say that this doesn't matter as much: It absolutely does. People do get confused by this more frequently than you think. I've seen people losing an entire trip that they saved for, all because of unclear naming requirements.
The way I deal with this is to provide a country and locale specific name fields. You don't have to detect the geolocation or track the user for this, just let them choose whatever locale setting they want, and give them the "sensible" layout. Here are some examples:
- In Vietnam, we use last name then first name.
- In Indonesia, we use first name, then last name, but also give an option to declare that the person doesn't have a last name.
- In Singapore, we use a single field to input the first name and last name.
Even when you've handled the layout convention carefully, the 3rd party you're handing the data to, if one exists, might not give the same care and attention that you do. In my case: some airlines just haven't gotten around the idea that some people simply don't have last names. When a person with a single name wants to fly, airlines want the customer to use the name for both first and last name (e.g. If the person's name is David, then the airline expects "David David"). If you require First Name and Last Name as the input, and don't elaborate on how to fill them, the customer might simply fill the last name with a dot (".") character. The airlines / any other 3rd party won't accept that. For this, I suggest to detail out the ways in which you handle the data and go talk to your providers, if any.
All in all, it's a pretty tough challenge, and the wisdom around this isn't going to fit inside a single HN post. I do commend you for actually thinking about this problem. Good Luck.
I have a completely “ordinary” name from a western perspective – first (given), middle, last (family). I live in Singapore, which has a few different popular naming conventions from a few different cultures. I’ve received documents with my name in every single variation possible. I‘ve been Mr First Name, Mr Middle Name, Mr Last Name, and so on. Often I can’t even determine if they have my name correct in their records – it could be recorded correctly but used incorrectly, or it could be recorded incorrectly and used correctly. Sometimes I suspect it’s recorded incorrectly but also used incorrectly in a different way.
Normally it’s not a problem, but like you say, airline tickets can cause issues. I think I’ve been demoted from “check in online” to “check in at a counter because we need to check your paperwork” a bunch of times because my passport doesn’t match my name on my ticket. Often it’s not even the name order – the airline will only sell my ticket with a first name and last name field (meaning I have to drop my middle name, which is on my passport) or they ask for all three and then concatenate first and middle with no space and truncate the last few letters.
Everything would be so much easier if I could just enter my name.
One of my passports has my name like that, the other is first middle1 last, so even between passports its not the same, as one of them drops one of my middle names.
About government IDs and reducing people to numbers, most of the threads here are already giving them for granted. We are a number once we're in a database.
How do you handle this when passing the data to the airlines?
I've always found it weird how broken this is. Some US airlines have separate entry fields for first, middle, and last names. But then they jam it together on the boarding pass as "Last, Firstmiddle" (yes, with first and middle mashed together, and middle lowercased). That of course doesn't match my ID, but I've never had a problem traveling, even when I sometimes leave out my middle name entirely. (I guess I get less scrutiny most places since I'm an American white male.)
Bingo. I've had this problem dealing with insurance carriers. They want a very wide degree of name formats, and to make it worse some don't support unicode, some don't support apostrophes, and some don't understand names longer than 22 characters (had multi-hour discussions on exactly which part of the names I needed to cut out in this scenario). They were bewildered that these were problems for data which could include anybody in the US...
https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/149323/my-name-ca...
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21490850
Or just having a preferred name and full name, duplicating data but probably it wouldn't be a big deal in most cases.
This would be a nice GitHub project for someone to showcase name inputs in all languages.
At least it should be consistent across the app.
Indian name: Sathiavelllu Arunachalam, known as SA or Seth
SE Asian ethnic Chinese names: Harry Lee Kuan Yew, (English name) (Surname) (Given name). Hated the name Harry and got it removed, though many Chinese are referred to by an English name.
Indonesian name: Fatimah Azzahra (given name only)
Malaysian name: Sharifah Azizah binti Syed Ahmad Tarmizi, (honorific surname: Sharifah) (given name: Azizah) (patronym) (father's honorific surname: Syed) (father's given name: Ahmad Tarmizi)
If I sign up for an account, but the invoice is going to the billing department of my company, why do you care what my real name is?
Because the billing department verifies bills before paying them, and needs to know who to ask about the bill?
And if people really don't want the supplier to know their name, they just type "IT Procurement" into the name field.
I only use POs with my customers. I'm based in Sweden, doing work mostly in Germany, Switzerland, and England, as software sales and contract work. No one has even blinked.
In Swedish it's called a inköpsorder, but often abbreviated PO.
As an example, https://www.betydelse-definition.com/ink%C3%B6psorder has "Inköpsordern (ofta säker man PO som är kort för Purchase Order) är det viktigaste dokumentet i en inköpsverksamhet och är ett avtal mellan två parter. POn definierar vad som köps in och under vilka villkor och förutsättningar."
In English: "The purchase order (often said PO, which is short for Purchase Order) is the most important document in a purchasing operation and is an agreement between two parties. The PO defines what is bought in and under what conditions and requirements."
Looking around, here's a description of purchase order use in the UK: https://gocardless.com/guides/posts/guide-to-purchase-orders...
> Purchase orders are a helpful part of the procurement process, allowing business owners to keep track of incoming orders and to monitor stock levels. It’s a way to see exactly what money is being spent where and at what moment. In some cases, purchase orders are a basic requirement for doing business. Many government agencies and authorities insist upon PO forms being issued before they’ll agree to settle an invoice.
It wasn't hard to find similar examples for other European countries.
Otherwise there should be not a lot of reasons to parse and format Asian names, as suggested plenty times over here. If the incoming invoice has to go through legal checks first, the requirement shall be as codified and supplied, whether it's that the name shall be written back to front or in purple on red.
Maybe I'm just overthinking, likely I am.
There are plenty of situations where you need their full legal name as per passport or other form of identification. In here it's often some form of anti-money laundering laws. The first time I came across it was for a game show where you could win money, but to take the money out of the app, the law required some legal identification.
A simple, unimportant one: how do you politely address the person? In Germany, you'd start a letter with "Sehr geehrte Frau Dr. Musterfrau", which implies knowing the last name, gender and title of the person. You can drop the title, but dropping the gender makes the whole thing impersonal. Using the full name feels off.
In my case, it was to address a resignation notice, so it was a bit of a nitpick with no legal consequences. However in other cultures and scenarios it can matter a lot more.
An example with Italian. Welcome is benvenuto for men and benvenuta for women. Welcome back is either bentornato or bentornata. It's impossible to use them unless we ask for the genre of the customer or use a DB / AI to infer it from the name. We still need a way to let the customer fix any mistake, a mistake which would probably be unwelcome.
So the common workaround is to use words like ciao, which is informal and possibly not well received by older people, or buongiorno which is OK for most of the day but not in the night (good morning vs good evening) or just use the name.
Best solution, if you don't need names to serve your service or because of regulations, don't ask them, use only the email address and make GDPR happier.
That way, you don’t strictly know their gender, you don’t have to ask for it, just what grammar construct they prefer you use.
1, the easy one: there might be more that one inflected form (gendered) in the UI and it could be tedious for the user to select all of them. Of course by choosing one we can automatically set the others.
2, the substantial one: strictly speaking the users don't tell us about their gender but there are strong hints about what they are, given the statistics of the general population and the name they gave us. I'm not sure how the Privacy Authority of a EU country would look at that but IANAL.
Furthermore we're starting to make our app enter the rabbit hole of non binary gender identities and to handle that we would have spend more time and money for maybe no reason.
I give an example that covers all those points:
Of my current customers one is running a service for which they are mandated to collect personal data. They must know the official gender as in the official ID documents of the country. Anything more than that could be nice but it is not necessary and would be probably unexpected by users, maybe even looked at suspiciously.
Another customer is running a B2B service. They need only a username and the company email of the users. If they want to welcome them with Benvenuto/a, Bienvenido/a, Bienvenu/ue they would have to ask for a bit of personal data that could put them needlessly into the scope of GDPR.
So I guess it also depends a lot on to which degree the app is localized.
I imagine that it's not France either? French has similar greetings, with the same indecisiveness around the polite/casual pronouns. There's the added challenge of Quebec where casual pronouns are far more commonly used.
There's also the trap of "mademoiselle" which is no longer used because we no longer care about a woman's marital status. It's the same as with Fraulein.
You are right that rules might need to be made by country. The beauty of small scale solutions is that you can sweat small things like this instead of applying Silicon Valley sensibilities to the entire world.
Even this presents problems, as countries like Singapore have multiple overlapping cultures with unique naming conventions. Likewise, India encompasses many languages and even unique naming conventions within those languages.
It's a minefield!
Seeing all the title drop down when subscribing to the economist (UK) made it clear to me it is a thing there too, at least in some circles.
The "addressing people by their first name and using Du instead of Sie" is indeed handled very differently in different companies. I consider myself lucky to work for a company where "Du" and first name is the rule, so I don't have to keep an internal list of colleagues which I can use "Du" with...
This is I think solved with asking how people want to be addressed. It also helps deal with situations where someone's legal name isn't how they are usually referred to.
The other issue is that the full name is used in the address, but only the last name in the greeting. There are no apartment numbers in Germany, so the name in the address must match the name on the mailbox. There can also be a lot of "Herr Müller" working at the same address.
In the end I opted for Mr/Mrs/Other + first and last name, and dropped the title. It's good enough for this purpose, but it shows how tricky something like a name can get, especially if the person filling the form is not aware of all this.
To give a bit of context I help people as a courtesy when the information on my website does not suffice. If readers can't be arsed to say hello before they ask for a few minutes of my time, I quietly wonder who raised them. Imagine walking up to a retail employee and blurting out "I need printer paper" without saying "hello" or "excuse me".
No it doesn't. Just ask how they want to be addressed. You can't encode all the possible variants, not everyone in Germany will want to be addressed in that way even if they are both a woman and a doctor.
I always feel awkward responding to them, because I don't know if I'm typing `Hello $FIRSTNAME` or `Hello $LASTNAME`.
I mean otherwise it's like literally any other communication medium, and you'll have to either take a culturally-appropriate respectful best effort guess at a preferred address, or just ask.
Are you aware that it is polite to start a convo with people from South Asia with a small greeting? They wait for you to ack. If you don't ack, they will not continue.
It is an important part of intercultural communication to continuously adapt to different communication styles.
Why don't people write a tiny chatbot that applies to certain users? When the person says: "Hello." The bot can reply: "Hello!" It seems easy enough.
Which is possibly one of the (admittedly probably very minor) reasons why they were left so far behind economically. Focusing on form over function in communication can be very counterproductive.
Not that I'm saying that saying "Hello, how are you?" to someone is waste of time. However certain people/cultures really go overboard with this and expected outsider to comply with these norms when they have much better things to do is not the most sensible idea.
You are entitled to no adaptation from others. Your reactions to their "errors" are your problem, and your responsibility, although of course you can choose to start a fight over whatever you want.
On the other hand, if you do not adapt to them, sometimes they will choose to start a fight over it, or be offended, or whatever. As such, if you want to improve your social outcomes, consider allocating energy to adapting to others.
See? Simple. No centralized decision-making necessary. Each person can ruin their own life however they choose.
Asking for a hello is holding the information until I'm engaged, at which point we should just meet for 5 minutes because it will be faster.
Say, you're in the same town as a friend and want to meet them. The American approach might be to ask, "Hey, I'm in town. Want to hang out?" The sender has done their job of delivering a clear message.
But some cultures would just say, "Hey, I'm in town."
That removes the pressure from the other person to say no, I don't want to see you.
You can also bat it back and say, "Joe's is a nice place to eat if you like burgers," which hints that you're available to have lunch together, but it could also mean a polite "ok".
But the ack is there to make sure the other person is paying attention before delivering the message, so they don't misinterpret it.
I don't necessarily think one is better. TCP vs UDP. If it's an important message, an American might still say, "We have to talk."
Mandatory reference to nohello.net/en/
Clickable English: https://nohello.net/en/
Starting a full message with your request/business with a greeting is basic decency with no harm.
Really? Your parents named you the exact same name as a famous politician?
Edit: Really? Downvote me for the OP’s bad English?
Also it was his grandfather that gave him the name “Harry”, not his parents.
The fragment "Hated the name Harry and got it removed" probably means "[He] hated the name Harry and got it removed", not "[I] hated the name Harry and got it removed". The grammar is acceptable in many contexts.
So:
* honorific surname: Sharifah * given name: Azizah * father's honorific surname: Syed * father's given name: Ahmad Tarmizi * address me as: Zaphod Beeblebrox the 4th
This is the way to go.
"The family/given name format doesn't make much sense here."
It doesn't make much sense in many places all over the world. In Germany technically speaking our given names are a set and we can have many of them. While it is practically necessary to write them out in a certain order in our documents, from a legal standpoint they are all equal. There is no first and second given name and most certainly no middle name. Consequence is that in everyday life today I can be Hans and tomorrow Fritz. I can be Hans Fritz or Fritz Hans too, but not Hans-Fritz (with a hyphen) except if it's written like that in my birth certificate and then the order is fixed and I can't decide to be Hans, Fritz or Fritz-Hans.
The trade-off in this system is that it is much harder to change your name here then in most other places.
In Bavaria where I live, the informal convention is also last name first, exactly like in Asia.
It's probably a Roman thing. Julius Caesar was actually "Caesar, of the gens Julia", so last-name first.
In Italy we also used to list last-name first, particularly in official and military communications. This has changed significantly in the last 40 years, particularly in everyday bureaucracy, but it's still used by police and other bodies.
In France they seem to prefer <LAST NAME> (yes, all caps) <First name> even for less formal things.
Also this "reversal" had me confused when we hosted a French exchange student without knowing French (I spoke German, but the teachers knew my family were happy to host if they needed). His name was written like "KHALID Mohamed" and he was very polite so he didn't really correct me when I was calling him "Khalid", and since I was unfamiliar with Algerian names I had experience to suggest "Khalid" was more surname-y than firstname-y. It sorted itself out after a day or two though :-)
Julius Caesar has the 'group/last' name first because it doesn't include his first name at all: including it he would be Gaius Julius Caesar. The cognomen (there Caesar), meanwhile, was a bit of an inconsistent mess that in various times and contexts could be personal, hereditary, honorific, given, adopted...
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_naming_conventions
So Caesar's close relatives were all also called Caesar, which is how it got to be an imperial title. You might think that with the original cognomen locked into place for such families, members would get a second cognomen so that there would be at least one part of their name that could identify them. But apparently not.
The whole part about the Roman naming system indicating heritage became even more complicated when Caracalla (properly named Marcus Aurelius Antoninus) made every free man in the Empire a Roman citizen and now basically everyone was called "Marcus Aurelius" without ever having had any ties to the Aurelii family.
There is very likely no connection. The introduction of surnames in Germany took place in the 15th century (somewhat earlier in German speaking parts of Switzerland). In Franconia, the "ethnic" distinct northern part of which is today Bavaria and which was never a part of the Roman empire, the last-name first custom also occurs in a few places such as Bamberg.
In inscriptions (short): CAIVS IVLIVS CAESAR
In speaking he would (in English;)) rather formally introduce himself as "Gaius of the Iulii, called Caesar".
His mother called him Gaius, his peers called him Caesar once he got or choose?) this name.
His father was 'Gaius Julius Caesar' his grandfather (supposedly the first 'Ceasar') was 'Sextus Julius Caesar'.
The Cognomen is presumable something that evolved as a way to tell apart people belonging to different branches of the same family/clan because the number of first names was very limited.
Initially, it was more of a nickname or even an earned name, like with Caesars contemporary Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognomen
Nicer than his other nickname 'adulescentulus carnifex ("teenage butcher") ' I guess..
But yeah, the cognomen seems weird/hard to understand e.g. Pompey's dad was called Strabo but he seems to have never used that name himself, while other like Ceasa, Metellus or Cicero were pretty much just surnames.
Romans probably found their naming system as confusing as we do so they started using nicknames ad hoc.
It was even more awful if you were a woman, you technically didn't even have your own name until the imperial period. You and your sisters would just be called Aemilia I, Aemilia II, III etc (or the 'elder'/'younger'). if your father was belonged to the Aemilius clan for example...
Only that... it didn't? The vast majority of bureaucracy and even many private entities in Italy use and strongly prefer the "Surname Birthname" format.
I believe that it's mostly the English speaking world that is strict with having "first name" first and "last name" last.
It's not an Asian cultural feature to have family name first, but it's an English speaking thing to have it last.
OP isn't trying to use his software in Asia specifically. He's just adapting to non US market.
In languages like Japanese or Hungarian, that's what family name first means.
Some additional observations from the German-speaking world (both Vienna and rural Austria):
- yes, we also often refer to people, even in everyday speech, as LastName FirstName
- often when referring to someone by name they are also given a definite article (equivalent of English "the"), e.g. "die Maria" or "der Gruber Hansi"
- some people I've encountered with a background in the German aristocracy (not Austrian, where such titles are technically abolished) have extremely long legal names with multiple prince/duke/von X und Y etc clauses. This will be their full legal name that appears in the passport and must be used when booking flights etc, but is not what they would use as "full name" in an everyday business context. So "Full Name" might not always be "Legal Name".
Also in a South Asian/Indian diaspora context, it is very common for people to be addressed by a semi-formal nickname that does not appear anywhere in their legal name. Come to think of it, I know one or two Austrian aristos* who use the same approach.
* yes, technically the aristocracy is abolished but they still live in their castles and know each other's pedigrees...
But those informal regional order conventions? I read them as formalized disrespect for the individual: "you're not Hans who happens to be a Müller, you're a Müller who happens to be Hans. And the Müllers, they are part of us, so subsume!" Those regional things can be quite peculiar: a childhood memory of my mother (northern Germany) is that as a child she was sometimes referred to as given name + name of the family farm, I suspect not in that order. With that farm's name still being the name of the family that ran ran it before her family took over, at some point between the thirty years war and the industrial revolution.
That has a very "part of the crew, part of the ship" feeling to it. Work the land, become the land, you're named for the land that you work! With marital status, who your father was, your family's occupation, and where you're working, all in a name, résumés needn't be a thing.
Another difference between northern and southern Germany is the Münchner-Du and the Hamburger-Sie. In standard German we use the formal pronoun Sie with the last name in formal situations and the informal pronoun Du with the given name in informal situations. Nowadays in semi-formal situations, like between colleagues at work, it's completely informal but two or three decades ago it wasn't. Officially the workplace was supposed to be formal and often it was, but in many cases a mixture between formal and informal forms was common.
In the north people tended to use the formal Sie but in conjunction with the given name, like Markus, können sie bitte das Auto holen." (Marcus, can thee get the car, please.), whereas in Bavaria the opposite combination of informal Du combined with the family name was prevalent, like *"Du, Frau Müller, kannst Du bitte das Auto holen." (You, Mrs. Miller, can you get the car please.)
Two notes:
First, you'd use "thou" here, as it's the nominative case, and the correct conjugation would be "canst".
Secondly, "thee" and "thou" were very much the form used to speak to a close friend or social inferior in early modern English. "You" functioned more like French "vous" or German "Sie"- as either a plural formation or a formal address of a social superior.
With that in mind, it would probably be more accurate to say that they should be rendered "Marcus, can you get the car, please?" and "Mrs. Miller, canst thou get the car, please?" And notice the parallel between "canst thou" and "kannst Du"!
I disambiguate my grandparents via the name of the farmhouse they live in, rather than the last names. I am from austria. But I dunno how common that is.
> This is the way to go.
Agreed. Does anyone know of any reason to care about first/last, apart from it being part of My First SQL Database and sating our inner desire to create pointless taxonomies?
So, our software has a whole pile of names... FML, preferred, mailing, formal, sort name, and probably a few others I'm forgetting. It's a mess.
In an ebook management system I've been developing, I use a full_name and a sort_name field for authors/editors/contributors, because books are a reasonable thing to want to sort by author names.
For example, in my studies I had cause to read many books by Hans Urs von Balthasar. Nobody ever referred to him as "von Balthasar," just "Balthasar," but his books were always sorted by the "von."
It's never not going to.
I'm pretty sure I've seen a by-name sorting scheme that excludes these sorts of prefixes for alphabetisation purposes. Of course, then you have to second guess whether you are using such a sorting system :)
I don't think there's an easy fix to this. Not everyone has a first and a last name, but in many places, cultural conventions (or legal practice) assume that you do.
Another reason is being able to generate various forms automatically: i.e. from "Fstname:William Robert, Lstname:Smith" to generate "William Robert Smith", "W.R. Smith", "Bill Smith", or just "Bill" without storing any of these variants separately.
Of course this may fail if "William" prefers to be called "Will", not "Bill"...
"This article doesn't provide all the answers – the best answer will vary according to the needs of the application, and in most cases, it may be difficult to find a 'perfect' solution."
Everybody has a First name and Last name (unless they are mononymic), even if this doesn’t correspond semantically to what the writer of the form anticipated.
Many people don’t have a Family name and this creates user confusion when filling out forms.
However, I don't do this. If I want someone's name so I can talk to them, I just ask them "what do you want us to call you?" with a single field (and if they enter "Captain HugePenis" then I cheerfully start the email "Hello Captain HugePenis,"). I only use Given/Family if I need their official name for bureaucracy reasons, and then it's very much "what's your name as it is written in your passport/id?", and I don't use it to address them, because it's very easy to get wrong.
What you call them is always better done as a separate single field, rather than trying to concatenate the official name fields.
Then, if I started getting spam to that name, I knew who sold me out.
It was especially useful for physical spam mail that wasn't coming to an email address. I discovered quite quickly which magazine gave all my info to every company that wanted it.
Yes, there are people with only one. There is/was a fairly well-known example in UK network infrastructure circles. That's a problem in either system if you make the fields required.
Given/family removes ambiguity for a larger number of humans than first/last, but you're always going to run into something from the Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names list so unless you can get away with just a single "name" field (and you can't always) it's the better option of the two.
My partner has only given names. When forms ask for their “Family name”, my internal thought process goes like this:
1. WTF do I write here?
2. Why are they asking for Family name? Oh they are probably just Anglophone and assume this is how names are.
3. It’s okay, just lie on the form then.
Then I choose their final given name and write it in the family name field.
This kind of enforced microdishonesty grates on the user over time. It certainly makes me grumpy!
First and last name is better because it’s not imposing a structure that may not exist. The burden of that false structure goes on the service rather than the user.
Your partner and billion others from their cultural sphere with single-field name system is a testament that concatenated two-field name system is the problem and is actually not working due to the falsehoods, not that the first/last nomenclature is better than given/family which is much less ambiguous.
I dunno. The former places the cognitive load on the user. The latter places no additional cognitive load on either party.
After all, what exactly do you mean by "Family Name" and how sure are you that meaning you have is shared by even a significant minority of cultures and people? How many countries have passports that label each name in the name field as a "given" name or a "family name"? How many countries have their revenue service care about whether a "given" name is to be used or a "family" name?
OTOH, to figure out which name is first and which name is last, all the user has to do is look at their ID, which they have presumably seen thousands of times already.
First/last at least has the benefit that, to the user filling in the form, they don't have to think about it - the first name on the ID goes first, the last name on their ID goes last. They can leave out anything in the middle because the form didn't ask them for it!
The problem isn't the NAME, the problem is the addressing of that person which can be only be solved by by adding a field for addressing, and where it can't be solved (titles, honorifics, etc), then given/family name won't solve it either.
With that said, the idea behind that recommendation is that, the "first" and "last" names in American mind corresponds to, or SHALL correspond to, the European idea of given names(Gates III or John or Jong-Il) and family names(father's name, name of their home communal village of The Vincis, or whatever for greater identities of an individual) respectively, rather than simply being the 1st and 2nd items of your `struct name` in either cases of American name orders and Asian name orders in use, and hence relevant forms for names SHALL be so marked clearly to avoid systems falsely identifying you with your community identifier that comes first in your culture. Doing this makes sense for this context and purpose.
So the “pre-marriage” name is referred to as: - “nazwisko panieńskie” (maiden name) - or “nazwisko rodowe” (literally this is “family name”)
Consider the name of a famous violinist, Lalgudi Gopala Jayaraman Radhakrishnan, also known as Lalgudi G. J. R. Krishnan. From a Western perspective, 'Lalgudi' isn't strictly a 'name' per se: it is a toponymic surname, and is the name of a taluk (or administrative subdivision: it is a third-order division after state, and district) in Tamil Nadu.
Gopala is an avonymic, i.e. his grandfather's name, and Jayaraman is a patronymic, his father's name. His given name is Radhakrishnan, but frequently rendered as Krishnan.
Also, in (South) Korea, depending upon the person's preference, they may choose to do family name first or last. It's crazy. I don't know why. (Can someone explain it to me?) As a result, most will write their romanized family name in all uppercase. Then, it can easily be identified as first or last. The easiest place to see it is in movie credits. When the screen is full of romanized Korean names, you see a mix of family name in all upper as first or last.
South Indian names can be incredibly long. Many people will shorten to use a single character from either first or last name.
Just have a single free text field. That should work for all cultures. Allow for 64 chars minimum (hello Spaniards!) and possibly 128 chars. Also, you might try a second field for "nick name". Lots of people with very long names use a shorter form in less formal settings.
In Korean, the family name comes first, then the given name. (There are no middle names.) It is almost always a single-character surname (Kim, Lee, etc.) and a two-character given name, though there are exceptions, with a small minority of surnames being two characters, and a small minority of given names being one character.
Romanization rules have changed over the years. The first president of the modern Republic of Korea was Syngman Rhee, with his given name Syngman first (with no spaces or hyphens) and family name Rhee last. Then take Park Chung Hee, the third president, in office in the 60s and 70s; his family name is Park, and his given name is Chung Hee. A few presidents later, you have Roh Tae-woo, in office around the 90s, with family name Roh and given name Tae-woo; notice the hyphenation. The current president is Yoon Suk Yeul, back to not having a hyphen to join the two characters of his given name.
Sometimes it depends on when it was that someone was first issued a passport, because the government is loathe to change the way someone's romanized name is spelled after the first issuance.
I was confused for a long time when I saw the name of Namkoong Min, I thought they wrote it reversed for some reason. Now that he's in the news again, I realized Namkoong 남궁 is the family name -- never seen one like this before.
Either in the format:
- given-name middle-name surname
- surname, given-name (note there is no comma here) middle-name or middle initial
> "Use single or multiple fields depending on your user’s needs. Not everyone’s name fits the first-name, last-name format. Using multiple name fields mean there’s more risk that a person’s name will not fit the format you’ve chosen and that it is entered incorrectly."
and
> "Avoid asking users for their title. It’s extra work for them and you’re asking them to potentially reveal their gender and marital status, which they may not want to do."
and
> "If your service stores personal information, you should allow users to update their details, including their name. Allowing users to change their name helps your service respect their personal identity. It also means they can continue using your service without having to start over. People change their name for many reasons. For example, because of a change in marital status, family situation or gender. Avoid making it hard for users to change their name. As well as causing them distress, it may make them reluctant to use your service."
[1] https://design-system.service.gov.uk/patterns/names/
We as technical nerds often forget how people actually interact with technology and assume way too much attention, familiarity and ability to understand UI patterns.
We often think of accessibility in terms of screen readers, but that’s just a fraction of the story…
Add varied devices, slow connections, very bad performance etc.
I’m craving for things like simplicity, performance, robustness and accessibility.
This looks like a holistic, carefully crafted design system. I’m looking forward to study it.
I'm always a bit surprised when I see some e.g. tech conferences still insisting on title as a mandatory field (or really asking at all). It's not just the gender and the marital status but some people attach a lot of significance to all manner of honorifics.
When I last registered for some conference put on by The Economist, it must have had 25 titles to choose from including a whole bunch of aristocratic and clergy-related titles.
Seems a lot easier just not to bother today.
[1] Well, personally I think that's silly too. But it's a question of degree.
I agree with the recommendation that it's best just to have a big name field and allow users to be "Dr. Firstname Lastname" if they want that, or "Firstname Lastname" if they don't want a title, or "Englishname Surname Givename" if they want that.
The push-back usually becomes that you can't trivially parse it a single name field later to use part of the name conversationally as if you know the person closely and send them spam with "Hey <nickname>, we haven't heard from you in a while, did you know that we now offer blah?". Instead, be honest, if you can't even take the time to understand the name syntax of an entire country, you don't know that user closely.
The opposite reason being that she desires advances? Unless you are implying an open marriage, that doesn’t sound right. Can you clarify what you mean?
Nobody said society was rational.
Weird thing to look over in a thread about internationalization
French has that gendered structure too, with workarounds to manage uncertainty.
"Todes"
Please stop.
In some languages in order to say anything about anything you have to apply either the masculine or feminine form of the verbs and adjectives, so there's no way around picking one of the two, so if you don't know, you must guess or assume.
And if we look at languages with three grammatical genders, for some of them the neutral option is exclusive to inanimate objects, and using these neutral-gender forms of verbs and adjectives involving any person is explicitly insultingly dehumanizing, you wouldn't even use it to refer to an animal, much less to any person unless you want to make a point of intentionally disrespecting them as "it", saying that they are not worthy to be considered a person. In these languages[1] we do see the neutral gender option applied towards nonbinary and transgender people, but it's done by transphobes as a way of dehumanizing them in conversations.
In such languages usually the proper way to behave if you don't know the gender or if that's a mixed gender group is to default to masculine grammatical gender; because there's no polite way to avoid choosing; and, I might guess that there's also probably some aspect that historical patriarchal social reasons it might have been traditionally considered that misgendering someone male-to-female is more offensive than misgendering someone female-to-male, so that's how that default might have come to be.
[1] edit - I know about some of these languages, I'm not asserting that this applies for all such languages, perhaps there are some of them where the social norms are different, it's very hard to generalize globally.
In any case, I understand your point about there not being many options for gendered pronouns in some languages, but you're also assuming that there aren't movements to change that. French is a good example where even though its heavily gendered, things are evolving to the point that Le Robert even includes 'iel' as a pronom personnel [1]. Sure its use is contentious, but so are gendered pronouns even in English are still contentious for some people, but it exists and people do use it.
[1] https://dictionnaire.lerobert.com/definition/iel
No, I explicitly did not mention pronouns, my post was about all the language groups where merely changing pronouns is barely scratching the surface as core grammar features rely on grammatical gender. Like, no offense intended, but French is not an example of a "heavily gendered language" - I'd consider French on the very low end of the grammatical gender complexity scale, where indeed suggestions such as yours might be plausible. For example, consider Hebrew or Slavic languages which have verbs and adjectives denoting the gender of the subject/object. Consider grammatical gender in Hindi or Welsh. And I'm not even talking about more complicated systems like you might see in Bantu languages.
> Dear <usually title> <usually last name>,
The sw dev looked up a bunch of titles - Sir, Dame, Lord, Duke, Earl, Baron, Bishop, Prince, Princess, Reverend - and decided the DB field could be 8 letters.
Of course it broke for the first Archbishop.
Yeah, probably. I sometimes will list degrees in a longer bio but that's mostly because it may turn out I went to school with someone. They're not very relevant to anything I'd be talking about at a conference. I'd never put degrees and class years next to my name unless it were an alumni thing.
As I say, PhDs in a non-academia setting are what you see something of a split on with some people displaying them liberally and others never mentioning them.
Lots of people (this will seem ridiculous to anyone who’s worked with academics, but) seem to mix up PhD’s, lecturers, and don’t know about the grueling path from there to full-on tenured professor.
Like what? Doesn't that argument work the other way around, that lots of people have equivalent or higher degrees than medicos, but only the latter are called doctors at their place of work?
All I can think is things like EngD, but I'd think those holders are as likely as PhDs to use the 'Doctor' from it, it's really just the term the university happened to use in awarding it.
I have no particular stake in the question though. Totally understand that people are proud of their achievement.
I just meant that I can't think of anything else at that level that we don't use (sometimes/to the same not-100% extent) an honourific for. In many countries (not North America I know) medicine is a lesser qualification (Bachelor of each Medicine & Surgery, MBBS or BMBS) but we still use it, so it seemed to me the argument up thread works there (Masters aren't called doctors) but not as far as I can think of anything at PhD level?
>Yeah certainly, and even at university most lecturers I had I think were 'just call me (first name)'.
Of course not all lecturers have doctorates and you also get into the very academia "Professor" sensitivity.
Good for them. In reality, it's not just a degree, it's the final degree.
It's the degree you start working towards only after you get just a degree.
Having been yelled at by colleagues for opting to not include Dr. on my own freaking business cards - here here.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/titles-included-i...
My personal favourite is if you change your first name to “Sir” and you are not actually a “Knight”, then you get the note “THE REFERENCE TO SIR IS TO THE HOLDER’S NAME AND NOT TO THE HOLDER’S TITLE” printed in your passport.
Context: I wanted “Dr.” to be added to my passport.
I do wonder what would happen if I used a tile that was not used in the UK.
If you set your title to "Graf" in the passport form:
> By Royal Warrant of 27 April 1932, the use in England and Wales of foreign titles of nobility was discontinued.
> You must include the observation: THE HOLDER IS ALSO KNOWN AS (foreign title).
If you instead set your given name to "Graf", these instructions would not apply, as you are not claiming it's your title. Nor would it be evident to the passport office or any other English speaker that your given name implied a title, so provided your supporting documents corroborate that "Graf" is your given name, they'd issue a passport in that name.
However, if you used not "Graf", but a title recognised in the English language:
> A person may call themselves any name they want, as long as it is not for fraudulent purposes
> You may receive an application supported by documents (for example, a birth certificate or a change of name deed) that shows a customer is using a name that includes a description of a title (for example, Lord, Princess, Earl or Baron as a forename).
> You must include the observation: THE REFERENCE TO (description of title) IS TO THE HOLDER’S NAME AND NOT TO THE HOLDER’S TITLE.
People can write whatever they want, there, in whatever order they want. We only allow 255 characters, though, because we use classic VARCHAR, and index the field.
Some Spanish (as in Catalan) names can be downright legendary.
I support non-Roman character sets.
Not only.
Argentinian national hero Manuel Belgrano had as full name Manuel José Joaquín del Corazón de Jesús Belgrano González.
Chilean painter Pablo Picasso's full name is Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso.
I have this problem that some software which doesn't readily discern what should be first name and what should be last name gives me a list of all Johns followed by all Lisas and then Peters, which is less than helpful. Other software thinks it got it right but then for Hungarian names, it gives me all Istváns followed by all Józsefs, which, again, is less than optimal.
Having a "sort key for bloody sorting" field may be a way to go, I personally would use it, but making it user friendly is a bitch, and heuristics will get it wrong more often than not. Sorry but I've run out of nice words for this problem.
(A bibliographer enters the chat, I cower in fear)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_law_in_Sweden#Brfxxccxx...
Introducing a hyphen isn't great: it doesn't match my legal name and it's awkward because some people do have a hyphenated surname plus another surname.
I've also met several people whose legal name doesn't include a surname.
You presumably have a formal name: A B C D, with A and B being your two given names, C and D being your two surnames.
So what does it say on your ID?
Your birth certificate if you have no ID?
Does your countries revenue service address you as "Dear A B", "Mr C D", "Dear A", "Mr D" or something else altogether?
Yes, that's right. That is my full legal name.
> So what does it say on your ID? Your birth certificate if you have no ID?
Same as my full legal name: A B C D.
> Does your countries revenue service address you as "Dear A B", "Mr C D", "Dear A", "Mr D" or something else altogether?
Well, there is no such thing as "my country" because I'm a dual citizen. Born in Spain, currently living in Canada as a naturalized citizen. That is where the troubles begin, because while in Spain IT systems typically assume people have two surnames, in North America they often assume a single surname.
So far it has not a problem when dealing with the various levels of the Canadian government, but for example my bank addresses me as A B C-D due to limitations in their IT infrastructure.
Incidentally, in Spain we are typically addressed as A C or Mr. C for brevity, while A B C D would be reserved for formal communications.
I hope this answers your questions.
> Same as my full legal name: A B C D.
Right, so your Firstname is A and your Lastname is D. There's no ambiguity there.
You're sorted for those forms that ask for firstname/lastname, not for those forms that ask for given/family name.
You are offering your own unique technical solution to a cultural problem that has already been solved, and while I admire your confidence, I must explain why it is incorrect.
I don't have a "last name", I have two surnames. The notion of "last name" implicitly assumes that there is one and only one surname.
As I already hinted at, people in Spain customarily use their first surname as their "last name". That's why 90% of communications address me as A C, even while living in Canada.
It is my understanding that the same rule is used in all of Latin America, including Brazil.
To take a famous example: the full name of Rafael Nadal is Rafael Nadal Parera: one given name and two surnames, with the first surname taking precedence.
I would also mention that I feel your pain to a degree. My wife has an extremely uncommon female name, but the spelling is very close to a common male name. Many times she has run into people "fixing" her name for her without saying anything only for it to cause issues months later, or people calling her by the name they assumed she meant to type. It's incredibly aggravating to deal with. Lots of missed emails. Lots of phone calls of helpful people informing her of the "error".
At times, I wish the entire naming system were replaced with something that had no room for error or miscommunication. Everyone is called Larry or something.
I had a friend with a single letter first name and the booking forms would never accept it, so he would add another couple of letters, but then at the airport he would be fucked because his ticket never matched his ID.
And how did you come by such a name?
- one "full name" field. (English speakers would use Firstname Lastname) - one "how should we call you?" name. (English speakers would use their first name, in some other cultures people would preferred to be called by their last name)
To clarify the purpose of the two