On Sun, Apr 22, 2007 at 10:01:26AM -0500, Peter da Silva wrote:
> I've seen both "first name" or "given name" on forms, with "last name"
> or "family name" as the other slot.
Even "family name" isn't really right, as not everyone inherits a name
>from their parents. If I were to change my name to David Smith I would
no longer have a family name. Using first and last names doesn't work
as that gives you no idea about which one is more important - for
example, is Chow Yun-Fat Mr. Chow or Mr. Yun-Fat? How about Joseph
Boulogne de Saint-Georges? M. Boulogne or M. de Saint-Georges?
> Japanese can get messed up with that because their family name comes
> first, but the internal databases behind the documents assume that
> "first name" is "given name".
If you want to get it correct, you have to ask everyone to provide an
arbitrarily long list of names, and to indicate what they prefer to
be called in various situations.
I am David Richard Cantrell.
If I am your customer I will graciously permit you to refer to me as Mr.
Cantrell and address me as Sir.
Down the pub you can call me Dave.
If you're family, I'm David.
And so on.
Alternatively, you can just collect my given name and my family name and
hope that's good enough. You won't piss me off *that* much if you get
it wrong, and it's not as if weirdly-named people are a significant
proportion of your user base (for a definition of weird that varies from
one place to another).
--
David Cantrell | Godless Liberal Elitist
Irregular English:
you have anecdotes; they have data; I have proof
