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Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

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Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#211

Post by rob74 »

shafyy wrote: post #195
msh wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think to address your politeness questions, it can only be done if you handle each language/country split separately and the app creators have detailed cultural knowledge for each country/language. I come from a country right next to germany and addressing a person with a gender specifier like Frau would be seen as extremely old fashioned and potentially sexist. So I guess it also depends a lot on to which degree t…

Which country is that? And how would you address a person called Martina Müller in a written document? "Sehr geehrte Müller?" Or is it not a German-speaking country you're referring to?

Even "sehr geehrte Müller" already includes the gender (it would be "sehr geehrter" for a man), so if you want to avoid the whole situation, you have to go informal, and indeed, I have received a lot of emails recently which start with simply "Hallo [firstName] [lastName]" (which I guess is still more formal then only "Hallo [firstName]").

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#212

Post by regularfry »

sarabande wrote: post #136
jval43 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is an affront though, a butchering of the language and just generally disrespectful. The distinction is an integral part of the German language and it's wholly inappropriate for a telco provider to address someone like this. Same goes with names: missing accents, umlauts, special characters, wrong ordering, wrong titles/gender etc. is aggravating. And customers do complain. German companies often spend a non-trivi…

It's your personal preference to be addressed with _Sie_, but languages change and German is seeing shift to the use of _Du_ even for transactional business [1]. Target audience, region, familiarity etc. will all affect which word is used. Claiming the use of _Du_ in customer relationships as "wholly inappropriate" again is an expression of personal preference, not fact. [1] https://www.abendblatt.de/wirtschaft/artic…

I have a personal preference for wearing clothes in public. I think people would rather that was respected, certainly in my case.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#213

Post by danmaz74 »

toyg wrote: post #158
weinzierl wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Just have a single "name field" and maybe preferred name, which is not the same." This is the way to go. "The family/given name format doesn't make much sense here." It doesn't make much sense in many places all over the world. In Germany technically speaking our given names are a set and we can have many of them. While it is practically necessary to write them out in a certain order in our documents, from a legal s…

> In Bavaria where I live, the informal convention is also last name first It's probably a Roman thing. Julius Caesar was actually "Caesar, of the gens Julia", so last-name first. In Italy we also used to list last-name first, particularly in official and military communications. This has changed significantly in the last 40 years, particularly in everyday bureaucracy, but it's still used by police and other bodies.

Roman naming conventions were very different from current Italian ones, and Caesar's full name was Gaius Julius Caesar, where Gaius is the closest thing to what we would call a first name. If he had some brothers, they would all have been "Julius Caesar", and only the praenomen would have distinguished them. For example, Julius Caesar's father was also named Gaius Julius Caesar, and had (most likely) a brother whose name was Sextus Julius Caesar.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#215

Post by IanCal »

nicbou wrote: post #81
muzani wrote: post #67

Just have a single "name field" and maybe preferred name, which is not the same. The family/given name format doesn't make much sense here. Indian name: Sathiavelllu Arunachalam, known as SA or Seth SE Asian ethnic Chinese names: Harry Lee Kuan Yew, (English name) (Surname) (Given name). Hated the name Harry and got it removed, though many Chinese are referred to by an English name. Indonesian name: Fatimah Azzahra (…

This is what I usually do if I need the name at all, but sometimes you need to interface with systems that need that data split. A simple, unimportant one: how do you politely address the person? In Germany, you'd start a letter with "Sehr geehrte Frau Dr. Musterfrau", which implies knowing the last name, gender and title of the person. You can drop the title, but dropping the gender makes the whole thing impersonal.…

> A simple, unimportant one: how do you politely address the person?

This is I think solved with asking how people want to be addressed. It also helps deal with situations where someone's legal name isn't how they are usually referred to.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#216

Post by puszczyk »

zarzavat wrote: post #161
GoblinSlayer wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's w3c guideline for this https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names

I respectfully disagree with their advice to use “Family name” and “Given name”, over “First name” and “Last name”. Everybody has a First name and Last name (unless they are mononymic), even if this doesn’t correspond semantically to what the writer of the form anticipated. Many people don’t have a Family name and this creates user confusion when filling out forms.

In some languages ”family name” maybe confusing. E.g . in Polish it sometimes (often) mean maiden name (women traditionally replace or add to their last name the last name of their husbands).

So the “pre-marriage” name is referred to as: - “nazwisko panieńskie” (maiden name) - or “nazwisko rodowe” (literally this is “family name”)

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#217

Post by cge »

toyg wrote: post #158
weinzierl wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Just have a single "name field" and maybe preferred name, which is not the same." This is the way to go. "The family/given name format doesn't make much sense here." It doesn't make much sense in many places all over the world. In Germany technically speaking our given names are a set and we can have many of them. While it is practically necessary to write them out in a certain order in our documents, from a legal s…

> In Bavaria where I live, the informal convention is also last name first It's probably a Roman thing. Julius Caesar was actually "Caesar, of the gens Julia", so last-name first. In Italy we also used to list last-name first, particularly in official and military communications. This has changed significantly in the last 40 years, particularly in everyday bureaucracy, but it's still used by police and other bodies.

Roman naming conventions[1] technically did have a personal first name that came first and was called that: first name or forename is a reasonably direct translation for praenomen. The complexity is that by the late republic praenomina were largely from such a small set of names that they were not particularly useful to distinguish anyone, and they became somewhat of a formality that would often be omitted.

Julius Caesar has the 'group/last' name first because it doesn't include his first name at all: including it he would be Gaius Julius Caesar. The cognomen (there Caesar), meanwhile, was a bit of an inconsistent mess that in various times and contexts could be personal, hereditary, honorific, given, adopted...

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_naming_conventions

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#218

Post by lifthrasiir »

kelnos wrote: post #194
saltymimir wrote: post #57

Ohh boy, as someone who works on a travel booking, service serving customers in Asia, this problem hits hard. I guess the answer depends on how you plan to handle the names once they got submitted. I happen to be handing that data over to airlines, which has some of the less forgiving, yet fragmented name requirements. If you handle this incorrectly, your customer can't fly, even after they paid for the flight. And f…

Why not just have a single field for "your name as it appears on your identity document"? Or do the various airline systems expect the name to be split into separate fields depending on the locale? I've always found it weird how broken this is. Some US airlines have separate entry fields for first, middle, and last names. But then they jam it together on the boarding pass as "Last, Firstmiddle" (yes, with first and m…

There may be multiple identity documents with different names. This particularly happens a lot when the name itself is not written in Latin script and has to be romanized---one of my credit card had a different romanization (that I couldn't control) compared to what was written to my passport (that I had a control). Of course it is also possible that there is no canonical romanization available in any of those documents as well.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#219

Post by Archelaos »

toyg wrote: post #158
weinzierl wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Just have a single "name field" and maybe preferred name, which is not the same." This is the way to go. "The family/given name format doesn't make much sense here." It doesn't make much sense in many places all over the world. In Germany technically speaking our given names are a set and we can have many of them. While it is practically necessary to write them out in a certain order in our documents, from a legal s…

> In Bavaria where I live, the informal convention is also last name first It's probably a Roman thing. Julius Caesar was actually "Caesar, of the gens Julia", so last-name first. In Italy we also used to list last-name first, particularly in official and military communications. This has changed significantly in the last 40 years, particularly in everyday bureaucracy, but it's still used by police and other bodies.

> It's probably a Roman thing.

There is very likely no connection. The introduction of surnames in Germany took place in the 15th century (somewhat earlier in German speaking parts of Switzerland). In Franconia, the "ethnic" distinct northern part of which is today Bavaria and which was never a part of the Roman empire, the last-name first custom also occurs in a few places such as Bamberg.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#220

Post by sethammons »

brigandish wrote: post #156
croes wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there an article showing a solution because listing problems is the easy part? And maybe it's just me but >because names are central to our identities, virtually by definition. isn't true, my name is for the outside world, inside I'm just I, that's my identity.

You don't refer to yourself in private by your own name?

What you are suggesting is talking in 3rd person. It is odd when someone does that.
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