You have a wildly-optimistic view of how many people know what is meant by “given name.”
The way we teach them is to start using the terms, perhaps including first and last as well. Not by throwing up our arms and saying “Americans will always live in the 1800s”.
The journey of a thousand steps won’t get done if we refuse to take that first one. Hell, a journey of just 3 steps won’t happen without the first one either.
One I’ve encountered is SF author Lois McMaster Bujold. I’ve seen bookstores that file her books under B and others than file them under M.
When I worked with businesses that had alphabetized client lists, we always alphabetized them by first name.
It drove some of the people in the office crazy, but I was in favor of it - I actually thought it was the only wsy.
Our clients were a mix of individuals and companies. If we had a client named, for example, Conrad Terry…there was no way to tell right off if that was the name of an individual or company. Is it some guy with the first name of Conrad and last name of Terry, or is it a business owned by Mr. Conrad and Mr Terry?
Alphabetizing by first name was really the only way.
This. SO much this. In California, when asking someone of Latin/Hispanic origin, I can’t tell you how many times we’ve run into this in the IT field. First name is always stable as “Jose”. But his used-last-name is Hernandez, while his social security card states Fernanda-Martinez, but for taxes its Miranda.
Then you get folks from different cultures that have a subglottal click in their name. N’ingune. And the program won’t accept apostrophes.
A rose, alphabetically by first or last name, would smell as sweet. That’s what ol’ Will said, sorta.
I was thinking of something similar a little while ago:
Why are professional wrestling’s Hardy Boyz always announced as “Matt and Jeff, The Hardy Boyz!” instead of “Jeff and Matt”? Jeff and Matt sounds wrong, even though it’s alphabetical order and they both have one syllable.
Because of “Mutt and Jeff” being an established idiom in US English?
He should change it to something that gets him to the front of the line either way, like Bob Carson, or Cecil Adams.
Aaron Aardvark?
Too obvious, he’d blow his cover.
It’s real fun when working on QuickBooks files for dozens of companies that may have been worked on by other people in the past, and you type a vendor name in and it doesn’t come up, but by adding it you’ve created the 4th instance of that vendor because the check writer decides to use a slightly different name each time. When you go to prepare a 1099 report at the end of the year, you have to ask if some of these people with similar names are actually the same person, or if some of them are just related. And on top of that, you get the owner of the business who names his son the same as himself, Jr, but always uses a nickname instead of a full name, and so you have to deal with Jimmy Smith and James Smith being different people, but Jimmy Clark and James Clark are just variations on the same name. Of course, the names sometimes being entered as Clark, James doesn’t help things either.
The worst case of thing was someone whose real name was Jose but went by Tony, and it wasn’t until we were pulling the 1099 reports for verification by the client (and asking them to get SSNs) that we were told they were the same person. I had just assumed they were brothers or whatever that both did subcontracting work for the company.
And certainly part of the problem is that QuickBooks doesn’t have a separate vendor format for an entity vs. a person. It gets around that by having a Display Name which can be whatever you want, and then a business name and also a contact person name where the fields are formatted as you expect for a person and not an single line for an entity, so if you have the time to dink around with things and have the right information you can get it all right, but I never have time to deal with that stuff. I’m an accountant, not a bookkeeper; when I have to do bookkeeping you better believe I do the minimum to get the tax return done or financial statements made.
I was trying to make a phone call on my car bluetooth this morning. I was unable to find the phonebook entry for “Paddy and Joan”. Later I discovered that the system had re-alphabetized it under J as “Joan, Paddy and”.
I’m an old fart who was raised in the US thinking that lists of names should always be alphabetized by last names. It was hard, the first time I moved to Indonesia, to get used to the convention of alphabetizing by first name. Indeed, I felt a little like the smug Christian colonialist who looks down on the natives’ religion - those poor dear heathens, their god is some primitive made-up thing, but my the-Bible-tells-me-so God is the real deal.
I got over it. To repurpose a word, I’m now “binomial” and equally functional in systems that alphabetize by first or last name. But my own lists alphabetize by first name.
When you say Indonesians alphabetize by first name, are you saying they alphabetize by the person’s given name, not family name? Or by the name that appears first in the usual word order when written?
Said another way, is Indonesia a country that calls people “GivenName FamilyName” like most of the “West” or do they, like e.g. China, use the “FamilyName GivenName” word order?
Some Javanese typically only have one name anyway. But for those who have a given name and a surname, the order is the name as in the West - for example, Joyce Chandra, not Chandra Joyce.
Thank you.
The first time I went to Egypt (1993) the phone book was sorted by first name.
To clarify further, many Indonesians have no family name. Many go by a single name, like Sukarno. Others have multiple given names, like Joko Widodo, but still no family name. Others use a patronymic surname, like Megawati Sukarnoputri (daughter of aforementioned Sukarno), which is still not a family name. Still others do indeed have a family or clan name like B. J. Habibie.
Note that I used the names of Indonesian presidents as my examples. There have only been seven since independence, but you can already see the great diversity in naming practice.
Good point. Even the [“family name” + “given name” in whichever order, but consistently so per culture] formulation contains a lot of cultural assumptions that won’t be true everywhere.
Even without stunts like The Artist Formerly Known as Prince.
Which sort of leaves the conscientious globally-minded IT designers with a conundrum. About the only screw-up proof option is to
- Ask people to enter their name(s) in the order(s) most comfortable to them.
- Store that as a single undivided block of text.
- Accept that there’s no way to extract meaningful parts from that whole.
- Only display it or pass it to other systems as a single undivided block of text.
- Accept that there’s no way to sort it along with other people’s names and have that result be meaningful to a human reader. Even within a subset of people from a single culture, there’s no assurance everyone plays by the same rules.