All of the entries on my phone are first and last names, including my wife. The only exceptions are my parents which are listed as Mom & Dad, and businesses.
I don’t personally enter the data into Spotify or other music services. That’s what that reference was about.
There’s the specific issue of how I enter my contacts data into my phone. When doing that, I use all the separate fields.
There’s the general issue of how name data is being handled in society generally, such as by Spotify, Apple Music and other services. There, the trend is to have just one name field sorted by whatever the first word is. That’s what my Jimi Hendrix example was referring to.
This is not isolated to music services. In general, more and more maintainers of databases are switching to a single name field, in part to accommodate the fact that not all human societies in the world have a “given name first, family name last” naming system.
(Examples: Iceland, Hungary, China, Japan, Indonesia.)
And many people I know in the United States don’t bother with all the fields. They just use the “first name” field for everything. I would guess that more people use that system as opposed to my system of meticulously using all the fields.
Thank you. I’d seen your reply to @puzzlegal, but not your earlier post which set the stage about Jimi Hendrix, etc. So my context was stuck back on contact records. Carry on.
Moving to the larger issue you rightly gripe about …
There’s certainly no easy answer to internationalization of human names. So many IT folks try insofar as possible to simply sidestep the issue: a name is an opaque blob of text however the end-user provided it, period. Especially so when we’re not talking about that person’s official identity documents.
And then you get things like musical groups where the group name and the frontpersons’ name(s) can get wrapped up. It’s easy enough to alphabetize the Beatles under B. But should “Huey Lewis and the News” be under “L” or “N” or maybe even “H”? “Crosby, Nash, Stills, and Young” go where?. If you (any you) like “C” for Crosby et al, why not “H” for the News? etc. It’s an ugly tar-baby no matter how you grasp it.
When I was organizing my physical CD collection I also battled with the classical stuff: When the New York Philharmonic performs some Beethoven while conducted by Arnold Schwartz, do we sort by Schwartz, Beethoven, or New York? Hellifino. I settled on the composer as primary for my personal collection.
About all we can all agree upon is that any “the” in the name should not be the most significant word in the sort order, no matter where you put it in the string being used as the sort/index key.
My theory is that there should be two name fields:
- Full name
- Alphabetization guide
So:
Western European
- John Albert Smith
- Smith John Albert
Chinese:
- Xi Jinping
- Xi Jinping
Indonesian:
- Sukarno
- Sukarno
Icelandic:
- Inga Eriksdottir
- Inga Eriksdottir
Hispanic:
- Jorge Luis Gonzalez-Martinez
- Gonzalez Martinez Jorge Luis
French:
- Guy de Maupassant
- Maupassant Guy
and so on …
But, (1) software programmers won’t understand it, and (2) users will ignore it.
Also,
John, Zachary
should precede
Johnson, Albert
but I don’t know how software is programmed to sort these.
Agree 100% with your plan. And that users will ignore it. What’s vexing to me is the fact developers as a community not only won’t understand it but can’t be taught to understand it.
Humanity; it’s why we can’t have nice things. Sigh.
I mean, I have answers to these. I don’t know whether anyone else would agree.
Person’s Name “and the” Band Name should be alphabetized like an individual person with extra information, so:
Lewis Huey News
But “Huey Lewis’s News” would be done as not a person’s name:
Huey Lewis s News
A band name made up of a list of family names is not a person’s name, so:
Crosby Stills Nash Young
This is why databases are better than a list of banned. My contact app has a database. You might complain that “last name” isn’t a uniform concept, and that’s fair, but it’s so much better to have a field for given name and a field for family name than to jam everyone into a single name field
I maintain a list of people i invite to an event. But i have several ID fields. I have full name, last name, and email, and i alphabetize by each of those for different reasons.
My music is organized by iTunes, and it has name of song, name of album, track number, artist, and composer. I select and sort by several of those, depending on what I’m trying to do.
I’m not sure I understand your point. Are you agreeing or disagreeing with my full name and alphabetization guide proposal?
I support a slightly broader standard than you propose. But fwiw, i have implemented your full name and alphabetized name idea (except that i also added email, which i also sometime alphabetize by) in a large list of names that i maintain.
Woo-hoo! 
Same here: I came to read what kind of phone book does not list the complete name of the people listed, because how would it work otherwise? Was surprised to read that a contact list has become a phone book.
Answering the OP: Yes, I write the first name and the last name of most of my contacs in full. Just checked: there are 245 in my phone, perhaps 20 are one name only, including “me” (so I can check my own number in case I forget again), “papá” (who died years ago, I could delete that), “Matthias” (no idea who he is, could delete him too) and very few more. I guess I have never called most of my contacts, but I want to see clearly who calls me before answering, the more detailed, the better.
Well, phone books are pretty obsolete by now. I suspect most young people have not seen one.
The only person in my contact list that doesn’t have a full name is my mother. She’s listed as Mom (Last Name).
I also have paired some contacs with songs as a ringing tone. Wife: Das Model, by Kraftwerk. My pal Micha, big Stones fan: (I can get no) Satisfaction. Stephan, big Chuck Berry fan: Johnny B. Goode. Many bank contacts: Money (Pink Floid). It is important to choose a song that starts right away, so “Wish You Were Here” is no good. The answering machine (I guess it is not called that anymore either) takes over before I know it is ringing.
Pretty much everyone in my contacts has one name - my mother is “Mom” and mostly everyone else is just their first name. Or a nickname - in 30 years, I’ve never called Bucky by his actual name. If I put “Marc” in my contacts, I wouldn’t know who it was. For a few people, there are listings with the last name of “Cell” and “Work”
There’s another problem - Ok, so now we have two fields , one for the full name and one for the alphabetization guide. We’ve gotten the software programmers to go along with it and the users all think it will make things easier - but there’s still a problem. In Wai Duck Tang ( and this is the way most Chinese people I know write their name) which is the family name and which is the personal name ? How do you know how Arndis Jónsdóttir should be alphabetized- it seems from your listing that Icelandic names should be alphabetized by the first name but maybe Arndis was born in the US to Laufey Jónsdóttir and Jónsdóttir is on the way to becoming a family name like Erikson and its variants already are.
My phone lets me specify more than one number for a person. I can have “work” “home” “cell” and “backup cell” for the same person. Same with email addresses. Street addresses, too. I often keep a person’s old address around after they move, so i know why that street is familiar. I change it from “home” to “prior”, and update “home”. I have both work and home addresses for a couple of people.
It’s a classic problem. To be fair, it’s also far more complicated than anyone wants to admit. This old page goes through many of the myths developers believe about names:
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
- People have exactly one canonical full name.
- People have exactly one full name which they go by.
- People have, at this point in time, exactly one canonical full name.
- People have, at this point in time, one full name which they go by.
- People have exactly N names, for any value of N.
- People’s names fit within a certain defined amount of space.
- People’s names do not change.
- People’s names change, but only at a certain enumerated set of events.
- People’s names are written in ASCII.
- People’s names are written in any single character set.
- People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points.
- People’s names are case sensitive.
- People’s names are case insensitive.
- People’s names sometimes have prefixes or suffixes, but you can safely ignore those.
- People’s names do not contain numbers.
- People’s names are not written in ALL CAPS.
- People’s names are not written in all lower case letters.
- People’s names have an order to them. Picking any ordering scheme will automatically result in consistent ordering among all systems, as long as both use the same ordering scheme for the same name.
- People’s first names and last names are, by necessity, different.
- People have last names, family names, or anything else which is shared by folks recognized as their relatives.
- People’s names are globally unique.
- People’s names are almost globally unique.
- Alright alright but surely people’s names are diverse enough such that no million people share the same name.
- My system will never have to deal with names from China.
- Or Japan.
- Or Korea.
- Or Ireland, the United Kingdom, the United States, Spain, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Russia, Sweden, Botswana, South Africa, Trinidad, Haiti, France, or the Klingon Empire, all of which have “weird” naming schemes in common use.
- That Klingon Empire thing was a joke, right?
- Confound your cultural relativism! People in my society, at least, agree on one commonly accepted standard for names.
- There exists an algorithm which transforms names and can be reversed losslessly. (Yes, yes, you can do it if your algorithm returns the input. You get a gold star.)
- I can safely assume that this dictionary of bad words contains no people’s names in it.
- People’s names are assigned at birth.
- OK, maybe not at birth, but at least pretty close to birth.
- Alright, alright, within a year or so of birth.
- Five years?
- You’re kidding me, right?
- Two different systems containing data about the same person will use the same name for that person.
- Two different data entry operators, given a person’s name, will by necessity enter bitwise equivalent strings on any single system, if the system is well-designed.
- People whose names break my system are weird outliers. They should have had solid, acceptable names, like 田中太郎.
- People have names.
It maybe shouldn’t surprise people that devs throw their hands up and just assume a name style familiar to them.
When they gave us new phones at work they deleted all my existing contacts on the directory and imported all the ones in Contacts from Outlook. Most of which I will never phone again, some were even dead.
I used to have the unlikeable janitor woman at the office listed in my work phone as Wicked Witch Of The West - made redundant since then, thank goodness.
Mine lets me specify more than one number per person, too - I just find it easier to have separate contacts
Wow. I have over 1500 contacts in my phone. Trying to know which “Jim” or “Sally” is which would be far beyond my feeble mind. I need last names, companies, etc., to tell them all apart.