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.<p>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 <i>all</i> 'aa' pairs are treated as an 'å', which isn't quite right either, and maybe actually more confusing.
To sum it up:<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>4. Don't assume that you can infer [non]existence of family relations from their names. You can't.
Fascinating article.<p>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.<p>Ever the aspiring nerd, I went over the computer. It asked me to enter my name. I did so.<p>It answered: "Reuven isn't a real name. Please enter a real name."<p>(I ended up entering "David," my counselor's name, just to get through that first screen.)<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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>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.
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".
In a similar vein:<p><a href="http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/" rel="nofollow">http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...</a>
It exists a gender API [1] which predict the gender of a personal name on a -1 (Male) to +1 (Female) scale. Examples:<p><a href="http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/gendre/John/Smith" rel="nofollow">http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/gendre/John/Smith</a><p><a href="http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/Alix/Dupond" rel="nofollow">http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/Alix/Dupond</a><p><a href="http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/声涛/周" rel="nofollow">http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/声涛/周</a><p><a href="http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/淑珍/張" rel="nofollow">http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/淑珍/張</a><p><a href="http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/معين/المرعبي" rel="nofollow">http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/معين/المرعب...</a><p><a href="http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/Илья/Ковальчук" rel="nofollow">http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/Илья/Коваль...</a><p><a href="http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/בנימין/נתניהו" rel="nofollow">http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/בנימין/נתני...</a><p><a href="http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/Julia/Roberts" rel="nofollow">http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/Julia/Rober...</a><p><a href="http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/Olga/Sokolova" rel="nofollow">http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/Olga/Sokolo...</a><p><a href="http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/Kjell/Bergqvist" rel="nofollow">http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/Kjell/Bergq...</a><p>[1] <a href="http://namesorts.com/api/" rel="nofollow">http://namesorts.com/api/</a>
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:<p>1. We want separate first name and last name fields, but no additional fields.<p>2. We want to be able to sort by last name.<p>3. We want to go international.<p>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.
My legal name is "William Godfrey". (No middle name.)<p>My stage name is "Bill P. Godfrey". (Because Google have too many called Bill Godfrey ahead of me.)<p>In an informal setting I prefer to be called "Bill", 4 characters which appear nowhere in my legal name.<p>So yes, please have "What should we call you" field on your forms.
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 ..."
> People in Korea, who typically do have 3 names but who don't usually initialize them...<p>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.
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.<p>There is also the distinction between gender and sex, which websites often neglect (in some cases to the detriment of intersex individuals).<p>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.
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.<p>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.
What's the advice if you have a business requirement to support both formal, informal and full names?<p>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"<p>Should you ask the customer to fill out three different fields?
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.
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...
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"?
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.<p>Complicating matters further she converted to Christianity and took the name Rebecca Rolfe.
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.
I tried something similar in my last organisation using millions of social media profiles : check out <a href="http://whatsinmyname.prokta.com" rel="nofollow">http://whatsinmyname.prokta.com</a>
Here is an interesting video on names by Django core dev Russell Keith-Magee:<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHg6AoExYjs#t=125" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHg6AoExYjs#t=125</a>
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.