10 ms·

Personal names around the world

261 points by gulbrandr 12y ago

PeterisP 12y ago
To sum it up: TL;DR - Names are complex, simply ask the person for an unicode representation of how they'd like to be called and use exactly that. 1. Any reasonable assumptions or generealizations that you could try to make about names are wrong for millions of people, so don't make any. 2. There is no reasonable way to automatically split a person name in meaningful parts, because there is no such thing as a single universal ontology of meaningful name parts that will fit everyone. Treat personal names as indivisible, immutable items; don't try to separate them in parts. 3. There is no reasonable way to automatically generate a short-polite-addressable form from a full name, aside from (a) asking the user or (b) limiting yourself to a whitelisted subset of names that won't work for millions of USA citizens, much less globally. So don't even try. 4. Don't assume that you can infer [non]existence of family relations from their names. You can't.
- cliveowen 12y ago
  I was about to write the same thing, I'll add that the takeaway is basically: keep doing what you've been doing and handle outliers singularly/let people figure it out themselves. It worked pretty well this far, it will keep working well the future.
  - yiyus 12y ago
    It did not work pretty well so far. It works horribly wrong for most of the people in this planet.
- bane 12y ago
  > Names are complex, simply ask the person for an unicode representation of how they'd like to be called and use exactly that. Right, sometimes the best way to model a complex thing is to simply provide a free-text field called "description".
- jchrisa 12y ago
  One more interesting implication of 2: you might want to let the user specify what to use for sorting. Although that seems problematic to me.
  - pornel 12y ago
    Internationalized sorting is a whole new can of worms, and there are mutually exclusive rules in different languages. http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/ http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/
    - frobozz 12y ago
      And (for names, at least) in the same language in different contexts. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_and_Mc_together https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_and_Mc_together (poor article, but the gist is there) I believe the same is true of de~ and van~ surnames, which are sometimes ordered by the first capital (i.e. van Houten comes before de Koninck), and sometimes not. This means that offering a user the option of presenting a sort version of their name still leaves them in the dark as to what comes before or after it.
    - HNJohnC 12y ago
      Which is why, I guess, going on 4 years now Mongo has has an open issue to implement unicode sorting and still has not.
- LaGrange 12y ago
  > Treat personal names as indivisible, immutable items; don't try to separate them in parts. Unfortunately, that's (often) not an option; as soon as you have to interact with external entities such as banks (but not exclusively them), you're going to be asked for the first and last name of the user. EDIT: and, by the way, I think that's horrible. Mangling someone's identity like that is pretty bad.
  - saraid216 12y ago
    Don't treat those as personal names, then. Expose the bank's interface to your user. If the bank is asking for "first and last name", then say, "the bank is asking for your first and last name; what do you wish us to tell them?"
    - LaGrange 12y ago
      The customer doesn't really care if it's going into a bank, CC processing (my case), a hotel registration system (also my case), or a soulless SAP installation somewhere in the guts of your company (yes, this is also my case). They're also used to dealing with this (in my opinion unfortunately), but usually not that interested in reading excuses. FWIW, we only ask for first/last name where relevant (i.e. billing information), but splitting hairs and asking for both is more bother for the user than it's worth.
      - lomnakkus 12y ago
        I can only agree. It's absolutely horrendous UI to ask for anything other than "what is your name?". It's incredibly unfortunate that various systems that one has to integrate with all have their own inadequate representation of names (given/last, given/middle/last, etc.) when everybody would probably be happier with a single Unicode string "name". :(
      - saraid216 12y ago
        > but splitting hairs and asking for both is more bother for the user than it's worth. Then don't. Be honest and don't ask for personal names at all. Ask for billing information. The "name" fields in billing forms are not personal names. They're keys by which the billing system can correctly identify the account to access. Don't try to pretend that you know someone's name just because you have their billing information. That's lying. Especially in cases as simple as a customer who is using someone else's credit card to pay for your service. That name is definitely wrong even if one is John Smith and the other is Jane Doe.
- ojii 12y ago
  I agree, a "how should we address you field" is ideal. I'd like to add though that in case you might have to call them at some point, maybe ask them for a transliteration too where applicable (eg Japanese).
  - a-priori 12y ago
    Yes, that's the correct solution for asking for a name. As an example of this, as a side project I'm building an app for my wife (or other teachers) to collect assignments from her high school students and mark their work. In this case, there are separate fields to ask teachers "What name do other teachers call you?" and "What name do students call you?". Both are single, free form text fields that take any UTF-8 text of a reasonable length. This is especially important for the school environment because the same teacher might be "Joe Schmoe" to other teachers, and "Mr. Schmoe" to students. I also know of some women who married and changed their name, but still use their maiden name with students. Other teachers are casual with their students and have them use their first name. If they teach a Judo class at the school, they might want to be called something like "Sensei Joe". At any rate, each use case for a person's name should be asked separately, and used verbatim -- without trying to break them up at all.
- goblin89 12y ago
  No, this is overly simplified and W3C recommends nothing of the sort. The article helps you analyze your project's requirements (what data do you need to capture? what is your audience? how much resources can be spent on nice UX? etc.) and come up with a solution appropriate for these particular requirements.
- snogglethorpe 12y ago
  For some applications a single "name" is good enough, but in other cases, even if your application doesn't interpret it, some downstream consumer of that information (either a person or a computer) will interpret it, like it or not, and may well be more likely to screw it up if there's no additional information (family/given distinction etc). I think there probably isn't any universal solution that will minimize screwups in all cases, and you do need to look at your usage and audience... ><
billpg 12y ago
My legal name is "William Godfrey". (No middle name.) My stage name is "Bill P. Godfrey". (Because Google have too many called Bill Godfrey ahead of me.) In an informal setting I prefer to be called "Bill", 4 characters which appear nowhere in my legal name. So yes, please have "What should we call you" field on your forms.
- a3n 12y ago
  And also, if you ask "what should we call you," DO NOT use that as any sort of unique identifier. I just registered on a site that did not let me use my given name as "what should we call you" because it was taken. The stupidity. If you need something unique, generate it, and keep it to yourself. I don't care a whit about your database.
  - darylfritz 12y ago
    It sounds like the form you filled out just poorly labelled their "Pick a Username" field; The concept of a website generating something to call you is interesting though. It could lead to hilarious scenarios.
    - a3n 12y ago
      No, the login is your email. Or is there a login and a username? Stupid again. And no, I don't mean generating something to call me. I'm assumming they need a unique digital identifier, and they're just falling back on "name," whatever "name" means.
      - k-mcgrady 12y ago
        >> "Or is there a login and a username? Stupid again" Lots of sites allow you to login with a username or an email address. I agree it can complicate things but is you need an email address to validate a user is real and a unique username for the service (e.g. it's social) allowing either for login will probably result in less forgotten logins.
reuven 12y ago
Fascinating article. Back in the early 1980s, my sleepaway camp went to Boston, where we visited the Children's Museum. It had a computer with which you could interact. Ever the aspiring nerd, I went over the computer. It asked me to enter my name. I did so. It answered: "Reuven isn't a real name. Please enter a real name." (I ended up entering "David," my counselor's name, just to get through that first screen.) Be very careful when you vet names; for format, spelling, or anything else: As this article points out, there is a lot of variety among names in the world. However, even well-meaning people can make mistakes, and it's useful to be forgiving. I have been teaching programming courses for years, and in one of my examples, I create a Person class. However, when I got to China, I realized that all of my slides talked about a "first name" and a "last name," which was both confusing and backwards from what my students expected. I'm working on updating these slides, so that they will be appropriate for all of my audiences. But as this article points out, it's a struggle to do so.
- blt 12y ago
  Unbelievable, especially in the days of few-hundred-kb memories, that someone had that idea and thought it was good.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
    Well, if you restrict people to a list of 65536 names, you can just use the index into the list to save space on representation ;)
    - GFischer 12y ago
      Some countries have a list of "approved" names, and it's very hard to register a name not in it, for example in Argentina, every province has a list of approved names, and you have to write a letter with the etymology of the name for it to get approved: http://www.planetamama.com.ar/nota/ley-nombres-como-registrar-un-nombre-raro http://www.planetamama.com.ar/nota/ley-nombres-como-registra... Law: http://www.sdh.gba.gov.ar/comunicacion/normativanacyprov/pueblosoriginarios/nacional/nac_ley18248.pdf http://www.sdh.gba.gov.ar/comunicacion/normativanacyprov/pue...
michaelt 12y ago
What's the advice if you have a business requirement to support both formal, informal and full names? For example, the order confirmation e-mail might say "Good news Joe, your order is on its way" while the apology e-mail might say "Dear Mr Biden, we're sorry but your order isn't on its way" and the parcel might say "Joe Biden, White House, Washington DC" Should you ask the customer to fill out three different fields?
- jpatokal 12y ago
  You rethink that business requirement, because it's virtually impossible to get that right against the full spectrum of names.
- rtb 12y ago
  Yes. There is no other way to get all three cases correct. (If this is a burden on your users, you should consider ways to drop this requirement.)
- alkonaut 12y ago
  If you want to be international, you don't even try that. You let the communication say "Dear $Name" and you are done. Even if it means none of the emails say what you want it to say. And yes, even for a US system I don't think it's a good idea to ask for first/initial/last or to ask for formal/informal. Chinese users in the US will be happy to just see a "Name" field. Just ask for a name! I'd stay away from gender/greeting too. Mr/Ms/Mrs/Dr etc. are way too culturally narrow even for the US.
  - legulere 12y ago
    This might break if the language the name is in has a vocative case http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocative_case http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocative_case
    - alkonaut 12y ago
      interesting. If the message is in English, would such rules still apply? We are talking about formatting a message with a foreign name (origin unknown) in a known language, e.g English.
bgdam 12y ago
In a similar vein: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...
- binarymax 12y ago
  I too though of this post while reading the article. Great insight on both counts, but I appreciate how the W3C article gives some strategy for how to account for most cases that you will run into. Trying to turn Patrick's list into a practical design is quite an undertaking.
jgreen10 12y ago
I don't like the "Full name" label. It's very uncommon to be asked for your full name in the Netherlands. You use initials in almost all formal documents. Why not "Name"?
- LaGrange 12y ago
  I loved that after moving in! The culture I'm from is actually more compatible with most entry systems than the Dutch one (no vans or anything), but my full name is long, and doesn't fit e.g. on credit cards. In Netherlands, nobody bats an eye when I just reduce my names to a bunch of initials.
ludwigvan 12y ago
Here is an interesting video on names by Django core dev Russell Keith-Magee: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHg6AoExYjs#t=125 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHg6AoExYjs#t=125
davidw 12y ago
I wonder how much people adapt to things though... I work with a company that sells something with "first name", "last name" fields. And they do manage to sell it around the world. To my knowledge (I'm not involved in sales), the fact that the name fields are very Europe-oriented has never really been a problem: people buy the system because it's very good at other things, not because it's good at record keeping. In a newer version, we're considering dropping the first/last name, but some people are wary of that.
- PeterisP 12y ago
  Well, people are flexible enough to mangle their names to fit pretty much any arbitrary criteria, and that is sufficient for selling & shipping goods. E.g. I can misspell a few letters of my name to fit ASCII and invent a middle initial if it's required for some stupid form. It simply leads to names that don't really represent reality, and unhappy customers - people often are quite attached to their names and like to see them properly.
  - silencio 12y ago
    I didn't have a legal middle name until this year and I lost count of how many imaginary middle initials and names I've had to make up until now. Then... My husband decided to hyphenate one of his names and Social Security explicitly didn't use the hyphen even though it's on the marriage certificate. I wonder what DMV and the Department of State will do with his documents next. Even the author of the original post kinda gets it vague by saying Korean names are three names - maybe technically so - but the middle name is not a middle name like in the US sense. My parents' given name is the first+middle put together unless you're looking at their English names that got separated out. My name they chose on purpose to match in both languages - Jane in English, 제인 (jae-in) in Korean. My nickname Janey works in Korean too - 제인이. ;) Speaking of Korean, I'm not sure there's even a process for changing my Korean name like there was my English name since it's rare for women to change their names after marriage. I'm looking into dual citizenship right now. The idea of having passports with mismatching names is kinda sad and funny at the same time. Names are hard but there's definitely a nice feeling when people don't screw it up. :)
  - 12y ago
paul_f 12y ago
Great article. This is forcing me to ask myself why I would ever need to separate first and last names. Maybe it is time to stop.
sirn 12y ago
Thais don't have family name system until early 1900, everyone was named by short syllables like Daeng, Maew, Pu, Chai, etc. Once the family name system is introduced, the custom of naming someone using short syllables continues in a form of family nickname. The trend continues to today, thus Thais have a nickname that don't related to the full name. Except in formal situation, everyone here would refer to each other with their nickname. Calling Thais by first name or family name is equally awkward (even more so for ex-nobles, who have "na $Location" suffix in their family name, e.g. "na Ayudhaya"). So yes, please have a "What should we call you" in your form.
bowlofpetunias 12y ago
At least once every 2 years I have to deal with trying to explain why the following set of requirements is a bit of an issue: 1. We want separate first name and last name fields, but no additional fields. 2. We want to be able to sort by last name. 3. We want to go international. The worst part is: this happens in the Netherlands, where "van" and "de" are common and people should really know better. It is so hard to explain why beyond a simple "full name" field naming conventions are tricky to design and code for.
orng 12y ago
OT and nitpicking but the part about Icelandic names is actually slightly incorrect. The typical Icelandic "surname" is made up of the genitive case of the father's name (in rare cases the mother's) followed by "son" or "dóttir", not "sson" or sdóttir". It just so happens that the genitive case of most names ends with an "s", e.g. Gunnar->Gunnars or Guðmundur->Guðmunds. There are however many names where this is not the case. My name for instance, "Örn", is "Arnar" in genitive case and thus if I had a son his surname would be "Arnarson" and my daughter's surname would be "Arnardóttir".
- steanne 12y ago
  what do you do if the parent has a foreign name?
  - orng 12y ago
    I am far from being an expert but I think the most common thing to do is to just take on the surname of the parent as a sort of family name. So if Björk's father was John Smith then she would be Björk Smith. Family names are not unheard of and there are even a few Icelandic ones (although they are definitely the exception). Name laws in Iceland are really strict[0] but they mostly regard peoples "given name". I think you actually get to choose the surname of your child. I have seen cases where people have gone with the "-son" or "-dóttir" formula, typically in cases where the foreign name has an Icelandic counterpart, e.g. "John" and the Icelandic "Jón". The surname of the child could then be either "Johnson" or "Jónsson". [0]: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/26/iceland-strict-naming-convention-cardew-family http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/26/iceland-strict-...
j2kun 12y ago
When I see forms that ask "what should we call you?" I have a very hard time (and often fail) resisting the urge to put "Captain ..." or "Beloved Leader ..."
_delirium 12y ago
Another sorting oddity: you can't correctly sort proper names in Danish without knowing if the name is a Scandinavian or foreign name, e.g. via some big lookup table (or maybe heuristics). If it's a Scandinavian name, 'aa' is an alternate rendition of 'å' (retained mainly in proper names), and is sorted after 'z'. But if it's a foreign name, 'aa' is just two 'a' in a row, and is sorted at the front. Therefore the city of Aalborg goes towards the end of an encyclopedia, but the city of Aachen goes towards the front. Also the case with personal names, e.g. Kierkegaard (a Danish surname) is sorted as if it were Kierkegård, but Haas (a German and Dutch surname) is sorted as H-a-a-s, not H-å-s. On the other hand, people are getting more used to just sorting 'aa' as 'a-a' rather than 'å', because many computer systems do so. Encyclopedias still use the traditional sort order, as do hand-ordered lists of people, but if you get a printout of students registered in a course from the registrar, it's pretty likely it'll be sorted the way an English speaker would expect. Either that, or the reverse: the computer might use a collation method where all 'aa' pairs are treated as an 'å', which isn't quite right either, and maybe actually more confusing.
- IgorPartola 12y ago
  Does that mean that you can use Kierkegård and Kierkegaard interchangeably? Does that cause confusion when you are trying to locate personal records?
  - taejo 12y ago
    I don't know about Danish, but in German, ü "decomposes" into "ue" and is sorted that way in phonebooks. Herr Müller wouldn't be surprised to see his name spelled Mueller in ASCII-only contexts. OTOH, in some families it is traditional to write the name without the umlaut, and in these cases it's wrong to write it with, so Frau Mueller wouldn't like to see her surname written Müller (though it has the same pronunciation and origin). Famous examples are Goebbels and Goethe (not Göbbels and Göthe). There's a similar situation with ß vs. ss. So if Danish is like German, you can't call Kierkegaard Kierkegård, but they're still the "same" surname and appear next to each other in the phone book.
    - 12y ago
IgorPartola 12y ago
I am a naturalized US citizen who was born in the former USSR republic, which then became the independent country Ukraine. (PSA: it's pronounced ukrAIne, not UKraine, and definitely not "the UKraine"). My original name was Igor Andreevhich Partola, where Andreevich is my father's name with a -vich ending. My birth certificate was issued in the USSR with this name, but since the USSR was no more, and Ukraine started using Ukrainian as the official language, before coming to the US, my middle name on my birth certificate translation got changed to Andriyovich (Ukrainian version). Thankfully my first name did not have to change. When I got to the US, I stopped using my middle name altogether, both to avoid having to spell it on the phone, etc. and to minimize this type of confusion. In most cases I had no issues, but the immigration process was stumped by this. In general, immigration officers are not really prepared to deal with foreign documents and foreign names. You'd think by now they would have seen it all, but seeing a birth certificate from the USSR and a translation of it in English was something that stumped most of them. Going from being here on a visa to getting a green card is a grueling process because of issues likes this. By contrast, going from green card to citizen is a cake walk since they can simply refer to your US-issued green card as a form of ID. P.S.: I am lucky that my last name does not change between genders. For example Ivanov and Ivanova is the same last name but one is masculine one is feminine. I have heard from friends about having issues with this too.
- chrisBob 12y ago
  I am pretty disappointed with our name handling also. I was helping an Iraqi move to the US, and someone translated his name as Hogar instead of Hoger on one document, and it cost him a few months. As far as he was concerned his name doesn't have any english letters in it, so Hogar and Hoger are just about the same.
  - IgorPartola 12y ago
    To me the best solution really would be to issue documents with two fields: your name as an unbreakable set of characters in your mother tongue, and pronunciation of your name in Latin1. That way I could be: Игорь Партола / Igor Partola The trouble with this is when you have to spell your name over the phone. Nobody would figure that out. One day that won't be a problem. That'll probably be the same day that all manner of government computer systems stop using all caps.
gulbrandr 12y ago
It exists a gender API [1] which predict the gender of a personal name on a -1 (Male) to +1 (Female) scale. Examples: http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/gendre/John/Smith http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/gendre/John/Smith http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/Alix/Dupond http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/Alix/Dupond http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/声涛/周 http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/声涛/周 http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/淑珍/張 http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/淑珍/張 http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/معين/المرعبي http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/معين/المرعب... http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/Илья/Ковальчук http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/Илья/Коваль... http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/בנימין/נתניהו http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/בנימין/נתני... http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/Julia/Roberts http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/Julia/Rober... http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/Olga/Sokolova http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/Olga/Sokolo... http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/Kjell/Bergqvist http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/Kjell/Bergq... [1] http://namesorts.com/api/ http://namesorts.com/api/
- jamiepenney 12y ago
  That got my name wrong. Damn.
- Piskvorrr 12y ago
  ...and it gets my gender wrong (USian bias, I suppose?). A nice idea, but not very reliable.
- kalleboo 12y ago
  Which makes the mistake of defining a "first" and "last" name. What's a "first" name?
strictfp 12y ago
Don't forget about catering for the symbol formerly known as Prince :) No but seriously, names are horrendously complex, just as adresses are. But you might be better of ignoring some detail than trying to cater for every possible case.
linux_devil 12y ago
I tried something similar in my last organisation using millions of social media profiles : check out http://whatsinmyname.prokta.com http://whatsinmyname.prokta.com
bitwize 12y ago
Fun fact: Pocahontas's given name was Matoaka. "Pocahontas" meant "little naughty one" and was a nickname, but among the Powhatans it was customary to give one name for ingroup people to call you and another for outgroup people to call you; and "Pocahontas" also filled that latter role. Complicating matters further she converted to Christianity and took the name Rebecca Rolfe.
danbruc 12y ago
Let's just assign a UUID to every baby born and nature solves the problem in about 100 years. ^^ ...historic data you say...
byoung2 12y ago
The first form we have to change is the birth certificate. When my daughter was born, we knew that she was going to have 4 names (2 given, 2 surnames). My wife is from the Philippines, and it is typical there to have 1 or more given names, and then maternal surname and paternal surname. It is common for people to have several names (e.g. the signer Sheree is actually Cherry Hazel Sweet Fae Bautista Augustin). Unfortunately the birth certificate only had first, middle, last. We didn't want to hyphenate the last name so we had to either have a 2 word first name or middle name. In the end, we went with 2 names for the first name, maternal surname as middle name, and paternal surname as last name.
cyorir 12y ago
With the spread of the LGBT+ movement, the connection between titles, personal names, and gender can also change. Some people would rather not identify as being male or female, and instead identify as a specific gender minority. This has different conseqeunces for different languages, since some have gender-specific naming and others have gender-specific titles, prefixes, suffixes, etc., but the fact is that most websites ignore gender minorities. There is also the distinction between gender and sex, which websites often neglect (in some cases to the detriment of intersex individuals). I would love to see either more websites that, like Facebook, offer treatment of gender as more than just a binary data value, or forgoe it altogether. Of course, gender is always going to bring up problems when attempting to translate both names and standard text.
jccalhoun 12y ago
My first name is hyphenated. I still run into web forms that insist that having a hyphen in your first name is "invalid" or that my first name is too long for the form. So I get mail addressed to all sorts of variations of my name not to mention people that "correct" my name by thinking that it is my last name that is hyphenated. And there's also the fact that search engines seem to ignore a hyphen so someone searching for me will get lots of results for someone whose first and last name make up my first name. That is real fun when that person is a famous kidnapper...
hc5 12y ago
> People in Korea, who typically do have 3 names but who don't usually initialize them... No, not really. This is a completely wrong interpretation of Korean names. Most of us have two names: family/clan name ("last" name like "Park", "Kim", etc) followed by given name ("first" name like "Chan-Ho" or "Geun-Hye"). The given name typically consists of two parts, but that doesn't mean we have three names.
- x1798DE 12y ago
  I was always curious as to why nearly every Korean person I've met has "two" first names. According to Wikipedia [1], traditionally Korean names were "generation names", where everyone in a specific family of a specific generation shares part of the first name. The example they give of an equivalent Chinese name would be someone named Xia Zhou-jin might have a brother named Xia Zhou-sui, and children Xia Han-zheng and Xia Han-Li (in this case Xia is the family name, Zhou and Han are generation names, Jin, Sui, Zheng and Li are personal given names). I'm curious - is this no longer the case, or do you (either you personally or, if you can speak to it, the zeitgeist in Korea) not think of the "generation" part of the "generation name" to be a separate name? 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_name#Given_names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_name#Given_names
  - hc5 12y ago
    FWIW, my parents didn't give me a generation name, and my kids don't have one. I have cousins and uncles (I think this is for males only? I could be wrong) who do have generation names. From what I understand, this practice is slowly dying out in favor of better sounding or more native-Korean names (without Chinese characters) in recent generations.
  - yongjik 12y ago
    The "generation" part is only part (one syllable) of the given name and doesn't constitute a separate name. The "yong" in my name is "generation name", but no Korean will call me "Yong" any more than an English speaker would call Richard "Chard". Because most Korean names are neatly split into three characters (each character is a syllable in Korean), many people also write their names in three space-delimited words in Latin alphabet. And then westerners get confused and end up with patterns like "Gil D. Hong". (I'm not blaming them; you can't expect everyone to understand all the world's naming systems.)
deleted 12y ago
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261 points by gulbrandr 12y ago

To sum it up: TL;DR - Names are complex, simply ask the person for an unicode representation of how they'd like to be called and use exactly that. 1. Any reasonable assumptions or generealizations that you could try to make about names are wrong for millions of people, so don't make any. 2. There is no reasonable way to automatically split a person name in meaningful parts, because there is no such thing as a single universal ontology of meaningful name parts that will fit everyone. Treat personal names as indivisible, immutable items; don't try to separate them in parts. 3. There is no reasonable way to automatically generate a short-polite-addressable form from a full name, aside from (a) asking the user or (b) limiting yourself to a whitelisted subset of names that won't work for millions of USA citizens, much less globally. So don't even try. 4. Don't assume that you can infer [non]existence of family relations from their names. You can't.

cliveowen 12y ago
I was about to write the same thing, I'll add that the takeaway is basically: keep doing what you've been doing and handle outliers singularly/let people figure it out themselves. It worked pretty well this far, it will keep working well the future.
- yiyus 12y ago
  It did not work pretty well so far. It works horribly wrong for most of the people in this planet.
bane 12y ago
> Names are complex, simply ask the person for an unicode representation of how they'd like to be called and use exactly that. Right, sometimes the best way to model a complex thing is to simply provide a free-text field called "description".
jchrisa 12y ago
One more interesting implication of 2: you might want to let the user specify what to use for sorting. Although that seems problematic to me.
- pornel 12y ago
  Internationalized sorting is a whole new can of worms, and there are mutually exclusive rules in different languages. http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/ http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/
  - frobozz 12y ago
    And (for names, at least) in the same language in different contexts. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_and_Mc_together https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_and_Mc_together (poor article, but the gist is there) I believe the same is true of de~ and van~ surnames, which are sometimes ordered by the first capital (i.e. van Houten comes before de Koninck), and sometimes not. This means that offering a user the option of presenting a sort version of their name still leaves them in the dark as to what comes before or after it.
  - HNJohnC 12y ago
    Which is why, I guess, going on 4 years now Mongo has has an open issue to implement unicode sorting and still has not.
LaGrange 12y ago
> Treat personal names as indivisible, immutable items; don't try to separate them in parts. Unfortunately, that's (often) not an option; as soon as you have to interact with external entities such as banks (but not exclusively them), you're going to be asked for the first and last name of the user. EDIT: and, by the way, I think that's horrible. Mangling someone's identity like that is pretty bad.
- saraid216 12y ago
  Don't treat those as personal names, then. Expose the bank's interface to your user. If the bank is asking for "first and last name", then say, "the bank is asking for your first and last name; what do you wish us to tell them?"
  - LaGrange 12y ago
    The customer doesn't really care if it's going into a bank, CC processing (my case), a hotel registration system (also my case), or a soulless SAP installation somewhere in the guts of your company (yes, this is also my case). They're also used to dealing with this (in my opinion unfortunately), but usually not that interested in reading excuses. FWIW, we only ask for first/last name where relevant (i.e. billing information), but splitting hairs and asking for both is more bother for the user than it's worth.
    - lomnakkus 12y ago
      I can only agree. It's absolutely horrendous UI to ask for anything other than "what is your name?". It's incredibly unfortunate that various systems that one has to integrate with all have their own inadequate representation of names (given/last, given/middle/last, etc.) when everybody would probably be happier with a single Unicode string "name". :(
    - saraid216 12y ago
      > but splitting hairs and asking for both is more bother for the user than it's worth. Then don't. Be honest and don't ask for personal names at all. Ask for billing information. The "name" fields in billing forms are not personal names. They're keys by which the billing system can correctly identify the account to access. Don't try to pretend that you know someone's name just because you have their billing information. That's lying. Especially in cases as simple as a customer who is using someone else's credit card to pay for your service. That name is definitely wrong even if one is John Smith and the other is Jane Doe.
ojii 12y ago
I agree, a "how should we address you field" is ideal. I'd like to add though that in case you might have to call them at some point, maybe ask them for a transliteration too where applicable (eg Japanese).
- a-priori 12y ago
  Yes, that's the correct solution for asking for a name. As an example of this, as a side project I'm building an app for my wife (or other teachers) to collect assignments from her high school students and mark their work. In this case, there are separate fields to ask teachers "What name do other teachers call you?" and "What name do students call you?". Both are single, free form text fields that take any UTF-8 text of a reasonable length. This is especially important for the school environment because the same teacher might be "Joe Schmoe" to other teachers, and "Mr. Schmoe" to students. I also know of some women who married and changed their name, but still use their maiden name with students. Other teachers are casual with their students and have them use their first name. If they teach a Judo class at the school, they might want to be called something like "Sensei Joe". At any rate, each use case for a person's name should be asked separately, and used verbatim -- without trying to break them up at all.
goblin89 12y ago
No, this is overly simplified and W3C recommends nothing of the sort. The article helps you analyze your project's requirements (what data do you need to capture? what is your audience? how much resources can be spent on nice UX? etc.) and come up with a solution appropriate for these particular requirements.
snogglethorpe 12y ago
For some applications a single "name" is good enough, but in other cases, even if your application doesn't interpret it, some downstream consumer of that information (either a person or a computer) will interpret it, like it or not, and may well be more likely to screw it up if there's no additional information (family/given distinction etc). I think there probably isn't any universal solution that will minimize screwups in all cases, and you do need to look at your usage and audience... ><

billpg 12y ago

My legal name is "William Godfrey". (No middle name.) My stage name is "Bill P. Godfrey". (Because Google have too many called Bill Godfrey ahead of me.) In an informal setting I prefer to be called "Bill", 4 characters which appear nowhere in my legal name. So yes, please have "What should we call you" field on your forms.

a3n 12y ago
And also, if you ask "what should we call you," DO NOT use that as any sort of unique identifier. I just registered on a site that did not let me use my given name as "what should we call you" because it was taken. The stupidity. If you need something unique, generate it, and keep it to yourself. I don't care a whit about your database.
- darylfritz 12y ago
  It sounds like the form you filled out just poorly labelled their "Pick a Username" field; The concept of a website generating something to call you is interesting though. It could lead to hilarious scenarios.
  - a3n 12y ago
    No, the login is your email. Or is there a login and a username? Stupid again. And no, I don't mean generating something to call me. I'm assumming they need a unique digital identifier, and they're just falling back on "name," whatever "name" means.
    - k-mcgrady 12y ago
      >> "Or is there a login and a username? Stupid again" Lots of sites allow you to login with a username or an email address. I agree it can complicate things but is you need an email address to validate a user is real and a unique username for the service (e.g. it's social) allowing either for login will probably result in less forgotten logins.

reuven 12y ago

Fascinating article. Back in the early 1980s, my sleepaway camp went to Boston, where we visited the Children's Museum. It had a computer with which you could interact. Ever the aspiring nerd, I went over the computer. It asked me to enter my name. I did so. It answered: "Reuven isn't a real name. Please enter a real name." (I ended up entering "David," my counselor's name, just to get through that first screen.) Be very careful when you vet names; for format, spelling, or anything else: As this article points out, there is a lot of variety among names in the world. However, even well-meaning people can make mistakes, and it's useful to be forgiving. I have been teaching programming courses for years, and in one of my examples, I create a Person class. However, when I got to China, I realized that all of my slides talked about a "first name" and a "last name," which was both confusing and backwards from what my students expected. I'm working on updating these slides, so that they will be appropriate for all of my audiences. But as this article points out, it's a struggle to do so.

blt 12y ago
Unbelievable, especially in the days of few-hundred-kb memories, that someone had that idea and thought it was good.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  Well, if you restrict people to a list of 65536 names, you can just use the index into the list to save space on representation ;)
  - GFischer 12y ago
    Some countries have a list of "approved" names, and it's very hard to register a name not in it, for example in Argentina, every province has a list of approved names, and you have to write a letter with the etymology of the name for it to get approved: http://www.planetamama.com.ar/nota/ley-nombres-como-registrar-un-nombre-raro http://www.planetamama.com.ar/nota/ley-nombres-como-registra... Law: http://www.sdh.gba.gov.ar/comunicacion/normativanacyprov/pueblosoriginarios/nacional/nac_ley18248.pdf http://www.sdh.gba.gov.ar/comunicacion/normativanacyprov/pue...

michaelt 12y ago

What's the advice if you have a business requirement to support both formal, informal and full names? For example, the order confirmation e-mail might say "Good news Joe, your order is on its way" while the apology e-mail might say "Dear Mr Biden, we're sorry but your order isn't on its way" and the parcel might say "Joe Biden, White House, Washington DC" Should you ask the customer to fill out three different fields?

jpatokal 12y ago
You rethink that business requirement, because it's virtually impossible to get that right against the full spectrum of names.
rtb 12y ago
Yes. There is no other way to get all three cases correct. (If this is a burden on your users, you should consider ways to drop this requirement.)
alkonaut 12y ago
If you want to be international, you don't even try that. You let the communication say "Dear $Name" and you are done. Even if it means none of the emails say what you want it to say. And yes, even for a US system I don't think it's a good idea to ask for first/initial/last or to ask for formal/informal. Chinese users in the US will be happy to just see a "Name" field. Just ask for a name! I'd stay away from gender/greeting too. Mr/Ms/Mrs/Dr etc. are way too culturally narrow even for the US.
- legulere 12y ago
  This might break if the language the name is in has a vocative case http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocative_case http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocative_case
  - alkonaut 12y ago
    interesting. If the message is in English, would such rules still apply? We are talking about formatting a message with a foreign name (origin unknown) in a known language, e.g English.

bgdam 12y ago

In a similar vein: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

binarymax 12y ago
I too though of this post while reading the article. Great insight on both counts, but I appreciate how the W3C article gives some strategy for how to account for most cases that you will run into. Trying to turn Patrick's list into a practical design is quite an undertaking.

jgreen10 12y ago

I don't like the "Full name" label. It's very uncommon to be asked for your full name in the Netherlands. You use initials in almost all formal documents. Why not "Name"?

LaGrange 12y ago
I loved that after moving in! The culture I'm from is actually more compatible with most entry systems than the Dutch one (no vans or anything), but my full name is long, and doesn't fit e.g. on credit cards. In Netherlands, nobody bats an eye when I just reduce my names to a bunch of initials.

ludwigvan 12y ago

Here is an interesting video on names by Django core dev Russell Keith-Magee: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHg6AoExYjs#t=125 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHg6AoExYjs#t=125

davidw 12y ago

I wonder how much people adapt to things though... I work with a company that sells something with "first name", "last name" fields. And they do manage to sell it around the world. To my knowledge (I'm not involved in sales), the fact that the name fields are very Europe-oriented has never really been a problem: people buy the system because it's very good at other things, not because it's good at record keeping. In a newer version, we're considering dropping the first/last name, but some people are wary of that.

PeterisP 12y ago
Well, people are flexible enough to mangle their names to fit pretty much any arbitrary criteria, and that is sufficient for selling & shipping goods. E.g. I can misspell a few letters of my name to fit ASCII and invent a middle initial if it's required for some stupid form. It simply leads to names that don't really represent reality, and unhappy customers - people often are quite attached to their names and like to see them properly.
- silencio 12y ago
  I didn't have a legal middle name until this year and I lost count of how many imaginary middle initials and names I've had to make up until now. Then... My husband decided to hyphenate one of his names and Social Security explicitly didn't use the hyphen even though it's on the marriage certificate. I wonder what DMV and the Department of State will do with his documents next. Even the author of the original post kinda gets it vague by saying Korean names are three names - maybe technically so - but the middle name is not a middle name like in the US sense. My parents' given name is the first+middle put together unless you're looking at their English names that got separated out. My name they chose on purpose to match in both languages - Jane in English, 제인 (jae-in) in Korean. My nickname Janey works in Korean too - 제인이. ;) Speaking of Korean, I'm not sure there's even a process for changing my Korean name like there was my English name since it's rare for women to change their names after marriage. I'm looking into dual citizenship right now. The idea of having passports with mismatching names is kinda sad and funny at the same time. Names are hard but there's definitely a nice feeling when people don't screw it up. :)
- 12y ago

paul_f 12y ago

Great article. This is forcing me to ask myself why I would ever need to separate first and last names. Maybe it is time to stop.

sirn 12y ago

Thais don't have family name system until early 1900, everyone was named by short syllables like Daeng, Maew, Pu, Chai, etc. Once the family name system is introduced, the custom of naming someone using short syllables continues in a form of family nickname. The trend continues to today, thus Thais have a nickname that don't related to the full name. Except in formal situation, everyone here would refer to each other with their nickname. Calling Thais by first name or family name is equally awkward (even more so for ex-nobles, who have "na $Location" suffix in their family name, e.g. "na Ayudhaya"). So yes, please have a "What should we call you" in your form.

bowlofpetunias 12y ago

At least once every 2 years I have to deal with trying to explain why the following set of requirements is a bit of an issue: 1. We want separate first name and last name fields, but no additional fields. 2. We want to be able to sort by last name. 3. We want to go international. The worst part is: this happens in the Netherlands, where "van" and "de" are common and people should really know better. It is so hard to explain why beyond a simple "full name" field naming conventions are tricky to design and code for.

orng 12y ago

OT and nitpicking but the part about Icelandic names is actually slightly incorrect. The typical Icelandic "surname" is made up of the genitive case of the father's name (in rare cases the mother's) followed by "son" or "dóttir", not "sson" or sdóttir". It just so happens that the genitive case of most names ends with an "s", e.g. Gunnar->Gunnars or Guðmundur->Guðmunds. There are however many names where this is not the case. My name for instance, "Örn", is "Arnar" in genitive case and thus if I had a son his surname would be "Arnarson" and my daughter's surname would be "Arnardóttir".

steanne 12y ago
what do you do if the parent has a foreign name?
- orng 12y ago
  I am far from being an expert but I think the most common thing to do is to just take on the surname of the parent as a sort of family name. So if Björk's father was John Smith then she would be Björk Smith. Family names are not unheard of and there are even a few Icelandic ones (although they are definitely the exception). Name laws in Iceland are really strict[0] but they mostly regard peoples "given name". I think you actually get to choose the surname of your child. I have seen cases where people have gone with the "-son" or "-dóttir" formula, typically in cases where the foreign name has an Icelandic counterpart, e.g. "John" and the Icelandic "Jón". The surname of the child could then be either "Johnson" or "Jónsson". [0]: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/26/iceland-strict-naming-convention-cardew-family http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/26/iceland-strict-...

j2kun 12y ago

When I see forms that ask "what should we call you?" I have a very hard time (and often fail) resisting the urge to put "Captain ..." or "Beloved Leader ..."

_delirium 12y ago

Another sorting oddity: you can't correctly sort proper names in Danish without knowing if the name is a Scandinavian or foreign name, e.g. via some big lookup table (or maybe heuristics). If it's a Scandinavian name, 'aa' is an alternate rendition of 'å' (retained mainly in proper names), and is sorted after 'z'. But if it's a foreign name, 'aa' is just two 'a' in a row, and is sorted at the front. Therefore the city of Aalborg goes towards the end of an encyclopedia, but the city of Aachen goes towards the front. Also the case with personal names, e.g. Kierkegaard (a Danish surname) is sorted as if it were Kierkegård, but Haas (a German and Dutch surname) is sorted as H-a-a-s, not H-å-s. On the other hand, people are getting more used to just sorting 'aa' as 'a-a' rather than 'å', because many computer systems do so. Encyclopedias still use the traditional sort order, as do hand-ordered lists of people, but if you get a printout of students registered in a course from the registrar, it's pretty likely it'll be sorted the way an English speaker would expect. Either that, or the reverse: the computer might use a collation method where all 'aa' pairs are treated as an 'å', which isn't quite right either, and maybe actually more confusing.

IgorPartola 12y ago
Does that mean that you can use Kierkegård and Kierkegaard interchangeably? Does that cause confusion when you are trying to locate personal records?
- taejo 12y ago
  I don't know about Danish, but in German, ü "decomposes" into "ue" and is sorted that way in phonebooks. Herr Müller wouldn't be surprised to see his name spelled Mueller in ASCII-only contexts. OTOH, in some families it is traditional to write the name without the umlaut, and in these cases it's wrong to write it with, so Frau Mueller wouldn't like to see her surname written Müller (though it has the same pronunciation and origin). Famous examples are Goebbels and Goethe (not Göbbels and Göthe). There's a similar situation with ß vs. ss. So if Danish is like German, you can't call Kierkegaard Kierkegård, but they're still the "same" surname and appear next to each other in the phone book.
  - 12y ago

IgorPartola 12y ago

I am a naturalized US citizen who was born in the former USSR republic, which then became the independent country Ukraine. (PSA: it's pronounced ukrAIne, not UKraine, and definitely not "the UKraine"). My original name was Igor Andreevhich Partola, where Andreevich is my father's name with a -vich ending. My birth certificate was issued in the USSR with this name, but since the USSR was no more, and Ukraine started using Ukrainian as the official language, before coming to the US, my middle name on my birth certificate translation got changed to Andriyovich (Ukrainian version). Thankfully my first name did not have to change. When I got to the US, I stopped using my middle name altogether, both to avoid having to spell it on the phone, etc. and to minimize this type of confusion. In most cases I had no issues, but the immigration process was stumped by this. In general, immigration officers are not really prepared to deal with foreign documents and foreign names. You'd think by now they would have seen it all, but seeing a birth certificate from the USSR and a translation of it in English was something that stumped most of them. Going from being here on a visa to getting a green card is a grueling process because of issues likes this. By contrast, going from green card to citizen is a cake walk since they can simply refer to your US-issued green card as a form of ID. P.S.: I am lucky that my last name does not change between genders. For example Ivanov and Ivanova is the same last name but one is masculine one is feminine. I have heard from friends about having issues with this too.

chrisBob 12y ago
I am pretty disappointed with our name handling also. I was helping an Iraqi move to the US, and someone translated his name as Hogar instead of Hoger on one document, and it cost him a few months. As far as he was concerned his name doesn't have any english letters in it, so Hogar and Hoger are just about the same.
- IgorPartola 12y ago
  To me the best solution really would be to issue documents with two fields: your name as an unbreakable set of characters in your mother tongue, and pronunciation of your name in Latin1. That way I could be: Игорь Партола / Igor Partola The trouble with this is when you have to spell your name over the phone. Nobody would figure that out. One day that won't be a problem. That'll probably be the same day that all manner of government computer systems stop using all caps.

gulbrandr 12y ago

It exists a gender API [1] which predict the gender of a personal name on a -1 (Male) to +1 (Female) scale. Examples: http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/gendre/John/Smith http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/gendre/John/Smith http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/Alix/Dupond http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/Alix/Dupond http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/声涛/周 http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/声涛/周 http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/淑珍/張 http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/淑珍/張 http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/معين/المرعبي http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/معين/المرعب... http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/Илья/Ковальчук http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/Илья/Коваль... http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/בנימין/נתניהו http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/בנימין/נתני... http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/Julia/Roberts http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/Julia/Rober... http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/Olga/Sokolova http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/Olga/Sokolo... http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/Kjell/Bergqvist http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/Kjell/Bergq... [1] http://namesorts.com/api/ http://namesorts.com/api/

jamiepenney 12y ago
That got my name wrong. Damn.
Piskvorrr 12y ago
...and it gets my gender wrong (USian bias, I suppose?). A nice idea, but not very reliable.
kalleboo 12y ago
Which makes the mistake of defining a "first" and "last" name. What's a "first" name?

strictfp 12y ago

Don't forget about catering for the symbol formerly known as Prince :) No but seriously, names are horrendously complex, just as adresses are. But you might be better of ignoring some detail than trying to cater for every possible case.

linux_devil 12y ago

I tried something similar in my last organisation using millions of social media profiles : check out http://whatsinmyname.prokta.com http://whatsinmyname.prokta.com

bitwize 12y ago

Fun fact: Pocahontas's given name was Matoaka. "Pocahontas" meant "little naughty one" and was a nickname, but among the Powhatans it was customary to give one name for ingroup people to call you and another for outgroup people to call you; and "Pocahontas" also filled that latter role. Complicating matters further she converted to Christianity and took the name Rebecca Rolfe.

danbruc 12y ago

Let's just assign a UUID to every baby born and nature solves the problem in about 100 years. ^^ ...historic data you say...

byoung2 12y ago

The first form we have to change is the birth certificate. When my daughter was born, we knew that she was going to have 4 names (2 given, 2 surnames). My wife is from the Philippines, and it is typical there to have 1 or more given names, and then maternal surname and paternal surname. It is common for people to have several names (e.g. the signer Sheree is actually Cherry Hazel Sweet Fae Bautista Augustin). Unfortunately the birth certificate only had first, middle, last. We didn't want to hyphenate the last name so we had to either have a 2 word first name or middle name. In the end, we went with 2 names for the first name, maternal surname as middle name, and paternal surname as last name.

cyorir 12y ago

With the spread of the LGBT+ movement, the connection between titles, personal names, and gender can also change. Some people would rather not identify as being male or female, and instead identify as a specific gender minority. This has different conseqeunces for different languages, since some have gender-specific naming and others have gender-specific titles, prefixes, suffixes, etc., but the fact is that most websites ignore gender minorities. There is also the distinction between gender and sex, which websites often neglect (in some cases to the detriment of intersex individuals). I would love to see either more websites that, like Facebook, offer treatment of gender as more than just a binary data value, or forgoe it altogether. Of course, gender is always going to bring up problems when attempting to translate both names and standard text.

jccalhoun 12y ago

My first name is hyphenated. I still run into web forms that insist that having a hyphen in your first name is "invalid" or that my first name is too long for the form. So I get mail addressed to all sorts of variations of my name not to mention people that "correct" my name by thinking that it is my last name that is hyphenated. And there's also the fact that search engines seem to ignore a hyphen so someone searching for me will get lots of results for someone whose first and last name make up my first name. That is real fun when that person is a famous kidnapper...

hc5 12y ago

> People in Korea, who typically do have 3 names but who don't usually initialize them... No, not really. This is a completely wrong interpretation of Korean names. Most of us have two names: family/clan name ("last" name like "Park", "Kim", etc) followed by given name ("first" name like "Chan-Ho" or "Geun-Hye"). The given name typically consists of two parts, but that doesn't mean we have three names.

x1798DE 12y ago
I was always curious as to why nearly every Korean person I've met has "two" first names. According to Wikipedia [1], traditionally Korean names were "generation names", where everyone in a specific family of a specific generation shares part of the first name. The example they give of an equivalent Chinese name would be someone named Xia Zhou-jin might have a brother named Xia Zhou-sui, and children Xia Han-zheng and Xia Han-Li (in this case Xia is the family name, Zhou and Han are generation names, Jin, Sui, Zheng and Li are personal given names). I'm curious - is this no longer the case, or do you (either you personally or, if you can speak to it, the zeitgeist in Korea) not think of the "generation" part of the "generation name" to be a separate name? 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_name#Given_names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_name#Given_names
- hc5 12y ago
  FWIW, my parents didn't give me a generation name, and my kids don't have one. I have cousins and uncles (I think this is for males only? I could be wrong) who do have generation names. From what I understand, this practice is slowly dying out in favor of better sounding or more native-Korean names (without Chinese characters) in recent generations.
- yongjik 12y ago
  The "generation" part is only part (one syllable) of the given name and doesn't constitute a separate name. The "yong" in my name is "generation name", but no Korean will call me "Yong" any more than an English speaker would call Richard "Chard". Because most Korean names are neatly split into three characters (each character is a syllable in Korean), many people also write their names in three space-delimited words in Latin alphabet. And then westerners get confused and end up with patterns like "Gil D. Hong". (I'm not blaming them; you can't expect everyone to understand all the world's naming systems.)

deleted 12y ago

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