Oh, yeah. So you mandate personal name first, family name last, eh? Good luck with that in most of East Asia. And, I think, Hungary. There may be others. And then there’s many Spanish-speaking countries, where a proper name officially includes your mother’s patronymic. And places like Indonesia, where it’s common to have just one name. And places ranging from England to India where the alleged ‘family’ name derives from some ancestor’s occupation; ‘Smith’ and ‘Patel’ (‘Farmer’) are common. Or where the name comes from a location; pretty much every noble title plus a vast number of common names have those.
And then there would be writing systems. Latin alphabet, with/without accents and assorted weird Eastern Euro things. And weird Northern Euro things. And weird German things. And combinations of the above. And then there’s Cyrillic. And Hebrew (no vowels). And Arabic. (also no vowels. And both get written right to left.) And don’t get me started on Urdu, Hindi, Thai, Korean… And then there’s Chinese, a whole different concept right there, especially as ‘Chinese’ is really at least six languages which use the same writing system.
It gets worse. Half of China would have names based on a dozen names. A fifth of Korea shares ‘Kim’. (There’s a bloody reason why at one point the president of South Korea was named Kim, and was no relation whatsoever to the Great/Dear/Young Leaders in North Korea…) About half of Korea uses six names for ‘family’ names. And, for fun, Japanese, which can be written three different official ways. (When you mess it up, Japanese people will just nod politely, mere gaijin aren’t expected to understand how true people do things.)
And then there are clan (and variants of clans) names.
And, of course, there are names which change, depending… well, depending on just about anything, depending on where and when. And names based on physical characteristics. (Eric the Red, Rolf Walker) And names based on past behavior. (Bugsy Siegel…)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
