People ask me sometimes why I insist on my full name, including the middle name, in attributions. Most people do, but you have to search for both Gregor J. Rothfuss and Gregor Rothfuss to get the full picture, and that leaves out attributions like Gregor or Greg (don’t use Greg, btw). You could argue that you don’t want that level of transparency, but face it, it is here. so anyway, I did a search on friendster to find a friend of mine, and I got 8 results. which one is it? Names define our identity. In the past, with very localized exchanges, it did not matter if there was someone else with your name somewhere. Now it does. So I am wondering, how much would it take to give every human being a unique name? Some considerations:
- Only use meaningful combinations of characters. No ewrjp ewrerwh
- Make it future-proof, for we may live a very long time
- Have mappings between languages
- Would numbers be impolite? Somedude23 certainly is
A linguist may be able to calculate how many characters it would take to achieve this feat. I wonder if it would be at a manageable length? Elke suggests Indian names (based on deeds) or email-style names which are based on association: someone@somewhere. Of course, for the glut of people at hotmail, that does not work, because the association is meaningless. I wonder what other naming schemes may be of interest?
2007-12-06: Thais try to have names as UUID: Any 2 families that are related will have the same last name, and usually quite complicated ones at that.
I guess that historically the main reason for the dominance of given names in Thai culture is because family names are a relatively recent innovation: they were introduced by King Rama VI towards the beginning of the 20th century. Family names were allocated to families systematically and the use of family names is still controlled by the government. Any two people in Thailand with the same family name are related. This leads to Thai family names being quite a mouthful. Here’s a sample from people in the news over the past couple of days: Leophairatana, Tantiwittayapitak, Boonyaratkalin. Even Thais have difficulty remembering each others family names.
If you become a Thai citizen, you have to choose a new, unused family name. Just as with domain names, all the good, short names have gone. So the more recently your family has become Thai, the longer and more unwieldy your family name is likely to be.
2015-04-23: I’ve wondered about this for a long time.
2016-03-11: Changing your last name for some dude had always been in extremely bad taste. The confusion leading to it has always been puzzling to me.
We’ll each keep our last name and take the other’s name as our middle name.
2022-07-04: Names should be chosen
I am willing to bet that 200 years from now (2222) more than 66% of people born on the planet will have adult names they chose themselves. Having a name chosen by your parents will be like having a marriage arranged by your parents. It’s not the modern thing to do, and a sign of a very conservative traditional family.
Being assigned a name at birth will still be common place, but this name will primarily be a placeholder until the name choosing ceremony, when you get to choose your legal adult name. Perhaps this happens at 12, or 16. The bureaucratic friction in changing your name which is currently normal will be reduced to make it super easy to do. The name changes will also be tracked on the blockchains, making it both easy to monitor and hard to scam. They system would only work if there was a continuum between names, so changing a name was not a way to hide.
Once changing your name at the threshold of adulthood is easy, changing your name later during adulthood will also be easy. I’d expect people to go through life with multiple name stages. We see the hints of that now with nicknames, and trail names, and playa names, and online handles and pseudonyms. The main difference is that these new names will be legal and it will be easy to track their lineage, since the ledger of names is public. The average person might have 3 of 4 hames in their lifetime.
2022-07-19: Dolphin names
Dolphins cannot use voices as their identifying feature because it becomes distorted at different depths. They instead invent a melody – a pattern of sound frequencies held for specific lengths of time – that they use to identify themselves for the rest of their lives. Bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) can even imitate the whistles of their friends, calling out their names if they are lost. Additional information, such as reproductive status, can be conveyed by changing the volume of different parts of the whistle, not unlike how people emphasize certain words to add nuance. Dolphins living among seagrass gave themselves a short, shrill name compared to the baritone sounds of dolphins living in muddier waters. Meanwhile, small pods displayed greater pitch variation than larger groups, which may help with identification when the probability of repeated encounters is higher. Marine researchers still don’t know why some bottlenoses base their whistles on family members and others on lesser acquaintances.
While the signature whistles of female dolphins will barely change throughout their life, male dolphins may adjust their whistle to mirror the signature whistle of their best friend. In addition to an individual signature whistle, groups of dolphins may invent a shared whistle to promote social cohesion.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 