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> My system will never have to deal with names from China I work in a small French town where Chinese people were quite rare until a few years ago. Their passp
by jmnicolas 6y ago
> My system will never have to deal with names from China
I work in a small French town where Chinese people were quite rare until a few years ago. Their passports have a translation of their names in Latin alphabet, same for Russians.
However one day one of my user told me "hey I can't find some customers in your app, but I'm 100% sure I recorded them previously. Funnily they're all Chinese".
It turns out that to avoid querying the database too much I was starting to look for customers name once the user had entered at least 3 chars. Most of the Chinese names were only 2 chars like "Xi", "Wu" etc.
I clearly remember thinking at the time of writing the original code that nobody had only a 2 letter name :)
- colejohnson66 6y agoI used to know of someone who’s middle name (not just initial) was “E”. One letter.
- DavidVoid 6y agoI think there's some computer scientist (or similar) whose given name is just R, I forget what their last name is though. And apparently Johnny Cash was born J. R. Cash. From Wikipedia: His mother wanted to name him John and his father preferred to name him Ray, so J. R. ended up being the only compromise they could agree on. When Cash enlisted in the Air Force, he was not permitted to use initials as a first name, so he changed it to John R. Cash. In 1955, when signing with Sun Records, he started using the name Johnny Cash.
- silicon2401 6y agoJust like Harry S Truman "Since the S did not stand for a name, Harry didn't use a period after it for most of his life." https://www.trumanlittlewhitehouse.com/key-west/president-truman-biography https://www.trumanlittlewhitehouse.com/key-west/president-tr...
- trent_lott 6y agoSimilarly Oppenheimer, of the Manhattan project He thought assuming that leading J made him seem more posh and WASPy
- pmiller2 6y agoInteresting story, but, unfortunately, it's not true. Wiki gives his full name as "Julius Robert Oppenheimer." Julius was apparently his father's name as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer
- junar 6y ago"E" can also be a surname or given name in Chinese. It's pronounced like "uh" in English. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_(surname) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_(surname) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cai_E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cai_E
- silicon2401 6y agoThis happens with western names as well. Jo, Bo, Malcolm X.
- pletsch 6y agoWasn't he just known as X though? His legal name would have been Islamic and his birth name was Little.
- chrisfinazzo 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_X._Cohen#Name_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_X._Cohen#Name_change
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- superhuzza 6y agoInteresting, now that you mention it I can't think of any French names that are 2 letters long. But in English we have tons, "Ed Mo" is a perfectly plausible name.
- 0x4a42 6y agoThere's a few french names that are 2 letters long and even some only one letter long.[1] ;-) [1] http://www.geopatronyme.com/cdip/lettresnoms/lettres1-3.html http://www.geopatronyme.com/cdip/lettresnoms/lettres1-3.html
- superhuzza 6y agoI clicked on some of them, and most have fewer than 20 recorded instances in over 100 years. I guess it happens sometimes, but it's really not comparable to the prevalence of names like Ed, Jo, Bo etc (which aren't always contractions). The most common two letter name in France is probably something like Li or Ng. Edit: Funny observation - when you use the system that's linked to try and look up the public records, it won't even let you search for names with less than two letters.
- karambahh 6y agoThe French minister for digital affairs is, funnily enough, named Cédric O https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A9dric_O https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A9dric_O
- ssully 6y agoOne of my first programming tasks as an intern was figuring out why the search function for a directory couldn't find certain users. It was the same reason you have, it just didn't return results until it had 3 or more characters!
- karambahh 6y agoI'm a friend (and former colleague) of the repo author. That's exactly some of the cases we had to deal with some legacy invoicing systems (of which Kevin was not responsible, but I was ;))
- BerislavLopac 6y agoA former UN Secretary General U Thant was actually named just Thant, with "U" being a honorific (King od like "Mr"). And the first Burmese prime minister was actually named Nu (formally U Nu). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_Nu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_Nu