Is that something that is common or becoming common now? I noticed it in the list of signees in this open letter from employees of IGN.
When names are written “Firstname Lastname” (which is the way people commonly sign their names) and you ask a computer to sort the entries, that’s what you get.
I see it in at least two systems I interact with often. When substitute teachers sign in in the main office, the list is alphabetized by substitute’s first name. And one of the online textbooks I use for homework for my students, one of the default orders it uses for students is alphabetized by first name (I say “one of the defaults”, because sometimes it defaults to last name, and some of the times it defaults to random order. It’s a very frustrating program).
I think Zoom might do it sometimes, too. But then, you can’t count on Zoom names having any particular format: They could be just last names, or just first names, or both, or nicknames of any number of words, etc. There’s not really much you can do there but treat the entire name, as given, as a single string.
One issue is that it’s a complicated task trying to parse any international list to identify the surname - Spanish and Chinese names for example don’t follow the same pattern. I can imagine that when it’s not important to try to identify the surname, it’s simpler (and perhaps less likely to cause confusion or even offense) if you just don’t try.
And so many people like Ed Zotti are tired of going last all the time.
I have seen the convention where the “surname” is helpfully capitalized:
MAO Ze-dong
Shahin NAJAFI
HARISHCHANDRA
It’s also more likely in environments where the names can be screen names and not (necessarily) people’s given names. Michael Jones going under “j” for Jones is one thing, but do we file Thudlow_Boink under “b”? Boink probably isn’t a surname. So the convention reverts to alphabetizing by the entire char string making no assumptions.
MS Outlook has had the option to alphabetize your contacts as “Last, First” or “First Last” since the Win 3.1 days. Which when applied to countries with different naming conventions than the USA of course requires that whoever creates the contact puts the culturally correct part of the name in Outlook’s US-centrically named “first” and “last” fields
I just don’t find your claim credible. Mao’s ideas didn’t align with Harishchandra at all, he would never have cosigned an open letter with him.
Software finds it difficult to convert ‘firstname lastname’ into ‘lastname firstname’, I’ve tried and the real world throws up somqme difficulties.
Most cases are easy: John Smith becomes Smith John.
I think Andrew Lloyd Weber become Lloyd Weber Andrew
but Anne Marie Presley becomes Presley Anne Marie
The algorithm has to have real-world knowledge.
The actor Terry-Thomas: has just one name: Terry-Thomas.
What about the singer Anne Sofie Von Otter?
The seemingly comqmqprehensive ‘12 rules of filing’ does not even touch on this problem.
So, just keeping the namqme as it is solves the problem.
As always, if the data starts out with the human separating given name from family name and those are stored separately the problem is trivial.
But for a few internationalization reasons, and a LOT of laziness, that approach is becoming passe in exchange for one single long input box and storage field for the whole name as a unit.
Which, ref lots of folks above, simply cannot be machine-parsed reliably. Once the breakpoint information is lost or never captured, it can’t be reliably re-created.
It’s trivially easy to write software that parses your examples above correctly—but of course, there are many other scenarios that would be problematic to get right, some of which you list later in your post.
In French, at least, the convention is generally to write the “last name” first and in all caps. This makes sorting easy, but that’s just one cultural approach out of thousands. IMHO, that’s why this is a hard problem for computers: it hinges on human culture.
LSLguy is right: the trick is to get the person themselves to indicate how they want their name to appear. But even that isn’t trivial. “Last name” will confuse people who use the term “family name.” And then there’s “given name,” “surname,” “Christian name” (archaic, yes, but someone will use the term in their form). And that’s just in English!
It’s a thorny problem—I’d probably make the same choice the major videoconferencing company’s have. No programmer wants to be responsible for turning Lady Gaga into Gaga Lady in front of a national audience.
That’s originally a French convention AFAIK, but in the world of diplomacy and international organisations, which has a strong influence from French culture, it’s quite common.
How? The famous Andrew Lloyd Weber has a double last name, but Weber by itself is also a last name, and Lloyd by itself is also a given name. There’s no reason why a parent named Weber couldn’t give their son the first name Andrew and the middle name Lloyd. The computer would then be presented with two identical inputs, for which it was expected to produce different outputs.
Mea culpa.
You got me—I was unaware that Andy’s last name was an in-hyphenated compound name. I sincerely thought his last name was Webber, and I was just wrong.
I further misunderstood the poster I was replying to. I thought they used “becomes” to mean “when incorrectly parsed,” but in reality, I’m now pretty sure they meant “when correctly parsed.”
What’s more, my kids have un-hyphenated compound last names (with spaces, just like ALW’s) and I have to deal with people not getting this all the time.
Embarrassing as that is, it does illustrate my point that this is difficult for computers (and many people, myself included) because it is so tightly interwoven with culture.
The Contacts List on my cell phone is ordered alphabetically by first name. I assume this is true for most.
That’s almost certainly a setting you can tweak. At least on an Android. I’ve got mine configured to list contacts in [Last, First] order. So a jump to S gets me to the “Sanders, Colonel” part of the list, not to the “Sam Jones” part.
I understand iPhones generally don’t allow users to set anything.
Even within cultures, it varies. So like a kids named Juan Martinez Hernandez might consider Martinez his last name, and Hernandez just an optional extra he uses in formal situations, or he might consider Hernandez his Last Last name. He may leave on or the other off because their wasn’t room on the form. He may well not have a middle name, so he may put “Martinez” in that slot. His mother may do it differently than he does, so the forms he fills out are different than the ones she does. Extra fun is when it’s not Juan, it’s Maria Fernanda Martinez Hernandez, which is read as only two names, both non-hyphenated doubles and which no form has room enough to handle.
It’s way past time we (government, business, and society in general) switch to forms and data systems that have room for 50 character given and 50 characcter family names. And that start using those terms, “given” and “family” over “first” and “last”.
Aye; seconded. Not all cultures list names in the same order.