Unlike Western Names, Oriental Names esp. Indian Names are displayed in the order
Surname Middlename Name
So as of now my name is displayed as
Ashwin Adurthi ( Name Surname ( Middle name omitted))
It should be displayed as
Adurthi Ashwin (Swarup)
It would be great to include this option of changing display format of name ( wont be too difficult either i guess ..just a radio button)
Human names can take many, many forms. Even in the West, the now apparently standard "name, middle name, surname" became the standard quite recently. In some countries, only the nobility had family names, and the others had a descriptive name added to distinguish "John Smith" from "John Baker". At some point, the last name became an inheritance. Sweden offers a variation. We can find that "Jan" begat "Lars Jansson", who begat "Peter Larsson", who begat Anders, who decided he would change his name from what would have been the traditional "Anders Petersson" to the new-fangled "Anders Larsson", making "Larsson" the "surname" from now on. And this happened only a few generations ago.
And the stories get even more interesting, below. So how can we get a grip on family trees?
The first point to note is that the *syntax* of a name is a linguistic matter, and changes from language to language. E.g., in Telugu, a South Indian language, the family name takes a genitive- or adjective- like form and precedes the name. "Ashwin Adurthi" sounds wrong, just as "ball red" sounds wrong in English. The word order should be reversed. (In keeping with this, "Ashwin, Adurthi" might be acceptable in the same way that "Smith, John" is, but that's relevant possibly to telephone books, but not to family trees).
The point is that "Smith" and "Adurthi" are family names (*semantics*), and this is what you need to know to make family trees. Perhaps you could ask
1. What name do we use to structure your family tree? NB: future versions may want to provide multiple family names. Spanish and Danish names often keep track of the family names of both parents.
2. What names are yours alone?
3. Other names (some middle names have semantics, e.g., patronymics, so future versions may want to use this)
4. How should your name appear written out in full? (I.e. the order in which 1, 2 and 3 appear)
5. Nicknames, public persona names, etc.
Hungarian, Chinese and Japanese names have long lived double lives under the pressure to conform to Western syntax. They twist the names around at the border. I remember reading a biography of the famous director known in the West as "Akira Kurosawa", which said "Can we now finally do him the honour of restoring his name to Kurosawa Akira, as it is in his native tongue?". (In Japanese, the family name comes first).
Telugu speakers have been in the last few decades been hastily twisting their names around to conform to American syntax, but given the overwhelming dominance of English in India, these twisted names now appear everywhere in India as well. A fate worse than that of the Japanese names. And yet, famous artists of just a generation ago are still known by their traditional Telugu names.
In North Indian languages, the syntax corresponds to that of English, but here too people are still deciding which of the many possible elements of their names they want to keep. Caste and community names, if used, often appear last, and can do duty as "surname", but many now choose to drop these. Some speakers of Kannada, a South Indian language, have no tradition of lining up their various names in order; they simply use the name appropriate to the context. The new demand for a fixed linear order of some chosen elements provides several examples where close relatives have apparently completely unrelated names.
And the story gets more interesting the more cultures and languages we look at. It would be a great pity, and an unnecessary ethnocentric imposition, to force all our beautiful names into one model.
So: Please provide as free a syntax as you can, and let people decide which element means what. And prepare for many more semantically significant elements than just one "surname".
bump
Oh, yes, please. Facebook has already sorted this problem ages ago.
Oh, yes, please. Facebook has already sorted this problem ages ago.
It certainly should be customizable. I'd like to add that for Chinese names, family name precedes given name, and there is NO space in between. Your system should allow this possibility.