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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

A friend's foreign passport has "Full name" with his 2 word name. German bureaucracy requires first name, last name, but from that field it isn't clear which is which. So his first name according to bureaucracy was "-", and his complete name is in the "last name" field. The separation is odd anyway, what is the reasoning for wanting to sort by last/family name? I guess it makes it easy to identify clusters (e.g. of families) in a list, but nowadays the spouse keeping their last name wouldn't be grouped in the cluster. And to follow the site's example, if there's the 2 sisters Mao Anna and Mao Zsazsa, they won't be near each other in a list sorted by last name if they put in "Mao" as first name.

watwut 2y ago
I think the reason for sorting by last name is that there are many more common last names then common first names. There is huge number of Toms, Marias etc. You will find target person faster if searching manually and they are sorted by the last name.
- bux93 2y ago
  We used to use phone books. How quickly knowledge vanishes..
jerf 2y ago
"The separation is odd anyway, what is the reasoning for wanting to sort by last/family name?" Cultural assumptions that date from before the world being as small as it is, more than anything else. HN is in English, and there's a bias towards stories of people from non-English areas integrating into English-speaking locales (which does not have to be "the US", much broader than that) because that's what gets noticed and told around here. But it flows in all directions and all cultures. I've read plenty of tales of woe of non-Japanese trying to live in Japan and integrate with their legal system and having various woes in the process based around their names not fitting into the legal system. And just like the West slowly gets better about accommodating Eastern names, it slowly gets better the other way around too. It's a generalized culture-mismatch problem. I'll cop to being sort of the opinion that the "Xty-Billion Things Programmers Don't Know About {Names/Time/Addresses}" can end up being overly harsh as they are generally written, but at their core, they do have a point, and while we may read it in English and the examples the articles write about are about our more Western sensibilities impacting a broader world, every culture has that problem and could have their own equivalent documents written in their own language with their own examples (e.g. "not everyone in the world lists their family name first").

watwut 2y ago

I think the reason for sorting by last name is that there are many more common last names then common first names. There is huge number of Toms, Marias etc. You will find target person faster if searching manually and they are sorted by the last name.

bux93 2y ago
We used to use phone books. How quickly knowledge vanishes..

jerf 2y ago

"The separation is odd anyway, what is the reasoning for wanting to sort by last/family name?" Cultural assumptions that date from before the world being as small as it is, more than anything else. HN is in English, and there's a bias towards stories of people from non-English areas integrating into English-speaking locales (which does not have to be "the US", much broader than that) because that's what gets noticed and told around here. But it flows in all directions and all cultures. I've read plenty of tales of woe of non-Japanese trying to live in Japan and integrate with their legal system and having various woes in the process based around their names not fitting into the legal system. And just like the West slowly gets better about accommodating Eastern names, it slowly gets better the other way around too. It's a generalized culture-mismatch problem. I'll cop to being sort of the opinion that the "Xty-Billion Things Programmers Don't Know About {Names/Time/Addresses}" can end up being overly harsh as they are generally written, but at their core, they do have a point, and while we may read it in English and the examples the articles write about are about our more Western sensibilities impacting a broader world, every culture has that problem and could have their own equivalent documents written in their own language with their own examples (e.g. "not everyone in the world lists their family name first").