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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?

#511

Post by throwaway2037 »

jholman wrote: post #489
vultour wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who decides which side should do the adapting?

Oh, that one's easy. You are entitled to no adaptation from others. Your reactions to their "errors" are your problem, and your responsibility, although of course you can choose to start a fight over whatever you want. On the other hand, if you do not adapt to them, sometimes they will choose to start a fight over it, or be offended, or whatever. As such, if you want to improve your social outcomes, consider allocati…

This genuinely misunderstands people from internal-only diverse cultures like Mainland Chine and India where they make frequent social faux pas yet are convinced they could never be uncomfortable or offensive to other cultures because "my country is so diverse!". If I had one Euro for each I heard that, I would be richer.

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

#512

Post by david-gpu »

lelanthran wrote: post #484
david-gpu wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You presumably have a formal name: A B C D, with A and B being your two given names, C and D being your two surnames. Yes, that's right. That is my full legal name. > So what does it say on your ID? Your birth certificate if you have no ID? Same as my full legal name: A B C D. > Does your countries revenue service address you as "Dear A B", "Mr C D", "Dear A", "Mr D" or something else altogether? Well, there is no…

> > So what does it say on your ID? Your birth certificate if you have no ID? > Same as my full legal name: A B C D. Right, so your Firstname is A and your Lastname is D. There's no ambiguity there. You're sorted for those forms that ask for firstname/lastname, not for those forms that ask for given/family name.

> Right, so your Firstname is A and your Lastname is D. There's no ambiguity there.

You are offering your own unique technical solution to a cultural problem that has already been solved, and while I admire your confidence, I must explain why it is incorrect.

I don't have a "last name", I have two surnames. The notion of "last name" implicitly assumes that there is one and only one surname.

As I already hinted at, people in Spain customarily use their first surname as their "last name". That's why 90% of communications address me as A C, even while living in Canada.

It is my understanding that the same rule is used in all of Latin America, including Brazil.

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

#513

Post by twic »

rvba wrote: post #485
alentred wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is why a website or a form asks for it, and there is no way around it, better just ask for it directly ("How would you prefer to be addressed? He/him, she/her, or neutral?") instead of a choice of 25 historical titles.

I always choose the clergy titles! (Monarch ones are never available)

In Discordian beliefs, everyone (even non-Discordians) is a pope, so this is perfectly legitimate.

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

#514

Post by twic »

lelanthran wrote: post #440
ghaff wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(PhD) Dr. is a funny one in the Anglosphere and also at least parts of continental Europe (and possibly elsewhere). It's sort of a big deal in academia and some percentage of other people feel pretty attached to the title. For others, the attitude is more it's just a degree and lots of people have advanced degrees that we don't go around using honorifics for.

> For others, the attitude is more it's just a degree Good for them. In reality, it's not just a degree, it's the final degree. It's the degree you start working towards only after you get just a degree.

A friend of mine got a PhD, and then got three more degrees (so far) afterwards.

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

#515

Post by WentFullRetard »

Tainnor wrote: post #337
ghaff wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> "Avoid asking users for their title. It’s extra work for them and you’re asking them to potentially reveal their gender and marital status, which they may not want to do." I'm always a bit surprised when I see some e.g. tech conferences still insisting on title as a mandatory field (or really asking at all). It's not just the gender and the marital status but some people attach a lot of significance to all manner…

At least in Germany, titles are still rather important. I agree that it's silly but if you have a PhD you're very likely to put "Dr." on your doorbell name plate.

[dead]

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

#516

Post by imrehg »

You say Asian, but same order in Hungary too.

Funny part, now living in Taiwan, when the forms ask me for my "English Name", I never know it means "First Last" (which would be the opposite order for me of the original form), or merely "Name in Latin characters".

Names are hard.

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

#517

Post by tremon »

lelanthran wrote: post #484
david-gpu wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You presumably have a formal name: A B C D, with A and B being your two given names, C and D being your two surnames. Yes, that's right. That is my full legal name. > So what does it say on your ID? Your birth certificate if you have no ID? Same as my full legal name: A B C D. > Does your countries revenue service address you as "Dear A B", "Mr C D", "Dear A", "Mr D" or something else altogether? Well, there is no…

> > So what does it say on your ID? Your birth certificate if you have no ID? > Same as my full legal name: A B C D. Right, so your Firstname is A and your Lastname is D. There's no ambiguity there. You're sorted for those forms that ask for firstname/lastname, not for those forms that ask for given/family name.

No, their full family name is C D. If you must abbreviate it, the correct address would be Sr C, not Sr D. There is no way that entering D in a "last name" field would be correct unless you're aiming for passive aggressive obstinacy.

To take a famous example: the full name of Rafael Nadal is Rafael Nadal Parera: one given name and two surnames, with the first surname taking precedence.

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

#518

Post by PeterisP »

gremlinunderway wrote: post #491
PeterisP wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That assumption isn't valid. In some languages in order to say anything about anything you have to apply either the masculine or feminine form of the verbs and adjectives, so there's no way around picking one of the two, so if you don't know, you must guess or assume. And if we look at languages with three grammatical genders, for some of them the neutral option is exclusive to inanimate objects, and using these neut…

But aren't we talking about form fields? When would you absolutely need a gendered title from someone in a form field so that you could refer to them in the third person? In any case, I understand your point about there not being many options for gendered pronouns in some languages, but you're also assuming that there aren't movements to change that. French is a good example where even though its heavily gendered, th…

> In any case, I understand your point about there not being many options for gendered pronouns in some languages,

No, I explicitly did not mention pronouns, my post was about all the language groups where merely changing pronouns is barely scratching the surface as core grammar features rely on grammatical gender. Like, no offense intended, but French is not an example of a "heavily gendered language" - I'd consider French on the very low end of the grammatical gender complexity scale, where indeed suggestions such as yours might be plausible. For example, consider Hebrew or Slavic languages which have verbs and adjectives denoting the gender of the subject/object. Consider grammatical gender in Hindi or Welsh. And I'm not even talking about more complicated systems like you might see in Bantu languages.

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

#519

Post by Toutouxc »

brigandish wrote: post #502
Toutouxc wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you? I only say my own name when I’m introducing myself to someone.

On my own, I use my own name and pronouns. Not ever said or thought something like " Toutouxc , what are you doing?"

Nope, literally never. The idea of talking to myself using my own name is even a bit unpleasant, actually. I don’t have a bad name, I just don’t use it in my relationship with myself. Just like I know and like the name of my girlfriend, but I seldom address her by the name, we usually use the honey/love/baby equivalents.

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

#520

Post by alkonaut »

ttepasse wrote: post #312
alkonaut wrote: post #98

So first of all everyone has read "falsehoods programmers believe about names". And of course everyone knows we should just use "name" and that's it. Perhaps a greeting/displayname if we need to do "Hello $customer" in an email. But still. There are often hard requirements that are impossible to reconcile with the "just store one name" idea. As an example: you need to produce alphabetically sorted lists. It would rar…

Even sorting alphabetically sorted lists by last name differ in western cultures, in the case of particles in the last names. Some countries file “de Rohan”, “von Ruhr”, “van Rotterdam” and similar under “R”, others just under the first character of the string.

How does that work in countries where it is common (like in the Netherlands)? I imagine software handles it by pattern matching as when sorting artists as “Beatles, The”? To just match some known “de”, “van” or “van der”!

Anywhere I know van der Whatever would just be sorted on “v” but that only works because almost no one has such a last name.

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