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.
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.
As short as zero characters? Not the full name, surely.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
I have a Chinese friend whose name is 黑 ("hei", black). Whenever they give their name to other Chinese folks, they are met with disbelief and often suspected of using a fake name.
Could it be a homophone of some other more name-worthy word? It seems to be a common occurrence in Japanese.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We used to use phone books. How quickly knowledge vanishes..
But it's a bad nonsolution. The problem persists. It can be fixed by decent form design.
Or by chosing a name.
I exploited one of these regional naming conventions so that I only have a first name on Facebook.
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?
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.
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)
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
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?
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).
Regarding "Singh", generic Sikh surnames aren't discussed in the article but they are particularly useless and challenging.
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.