What’s in a name?
Being “non-standard” in our standard-conforming society is not easy. Southpaws know this. Minorities of all kinds know this. Having a non-standard name is no exception. By and large, most societies, especially western ones, tend to make implicit assumptions about the names of people: that everyone has (at least) first and last names, that the first name is the preferred personal name, that the last name is a family name that is passed on from a parent (usually father) to children.
Obviously this is not universally true. I am one of those people whose name does not conform to this perceived western “standard.”
My last name is in fact my given name. In many cultures, especially in East Asia, given names are written last even though the western tendency is to equate “given name” with “first name.” Even in the western world, people who use their middle name as their preferred personal name know the difficulties of dealing with the ingrained implicit assumption that one’s first name is also the preferred personal name.
I am often asked about my name. So shortly after arriving in the US as a grad student, I wrote up an explanation of my name.
My first name is technically a patronymic — it is my father’s given name. My name follows the Tamil patronymic style, common in places like Tamil Nadu in India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, and Malaysia. Because the first name is a patronymic, we usually abbreviate it with an initial. This is why I write my name as “N. Asokan” in most formal contexts, like in research papers. I write out my name in full only in legal contexts, like identity documents, or contracts.
People’s implicit assumptions about names make their way into the software they write. Having a “non-standard” name like this, I usually end up tripping the personnel and IT administrative systems that I have had to deal with in North America and Europe. Most have been flexible enough to adapt their systems to suit my wishes. The people who hard-code specific (western) naming conventions while designing their systems have forgotten their CS 101 lessons about the “mechanism, not policy” design principle.
When I first came to Switzerland to work at IBM Research, an IBM system administrator complained that my name broke his program for pretty-printing the personnel list in two vertically aligned columns.
At Nokia, the IT department issued me a standard firstname.lastname@nokia.com e-mail address. I asked for n.asokan@nokia.com instead, and the IT department promptly refused at first. Luckily for me, one of the four core Nokia values at the time was “Respect for the Individual.” I wrote to the head of IT, appealing to this Nokia Value, and asking for my e-mail address to be changed. He agreed even though (or, perhaps, because) there were only a handful of people at Nokia at the time who had names that followed the Tamil patronymic style. A couple of years later, Nokia opened a factory in Tamil Nadu. Suddenly thousands of people with Tamil patronymic names became Nokia employees. Unfortunately for them, someone in Nokia HR must have decided to shoehorn their names into the western system of nomenclature — the personnel database started to be populated with single-letter last names! So much for “Respect for the Individual.”
Most people are curious about my name at first, but once I tell them how I want my name written out, they oblige. Some insist on going to great lengths to figure out what my first name is (my patents, being legal documents, necessarily have my name spelled out in full) so that they can write my name out in full or write letters addressing me by my first name. I sign off on my letters and e-mails with my preferred personal name, “Asokan.” Some respondents are observant enough to spot this and to use this name to address me in future e-mails they write to me. The way people address me in e-mails thus serves me as a signal for how thoughtful and observant they are!
There are other naming systems around the world that do not match up with the western system. Mononyms are common among Indonesians. East Asians write their family names first, and so on.
I am still surprised why large, widely used, software systems, from companies that have substantial software expertise, still have not figured out that they should not make false implicit assumptions about the relationship between concepts like “full name”, “first name”, “last name”, “family name”, and “preferred name.” Given the extent of globalization, these companies would do well to avoid such assumptions. Facebook, for example, insists on assuming that your first name is also your preferred name, forcing people to write their preferred name into Facebook’s “first name” field (Facebook does attempt to accommodate people who use mononyms, but does not make it easy, unless you live in, or pretend to live in, Indonesia!). Other systems are more enlightened, for example, asking specifically for the preferred name separately. Security-savvy programmers do indeed learn the importance of sanitizing input from users. But those developing systems that deal with people’s name should be cognizant of “Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names.”
Sometimes, silly software can lead to desirable results. University of Waterloo has a policy for creating permanent 8-character university account IDs — formed by your initials in sequence followed by your last name (any conflicts are resolved by inserting a sequence number after the initials, like j498wang). Legend has it that an Indonesian student with a single name, Eddie, joined UWaterloo and was assigned the single letter account ID, “e” — as a consequence, he also got the very memorable e-mail address, e@uwaterloo.ca. Reportedly Eddie was very happy with how things turned out.
If Tamil patronymic names confuse people in the west, Tamils themselves don’t fare much better when they end up having to write their names using the roman alphabet. Just like Chinese people who choose “English names” in the hope of being able to navigate the western world more easily, Tamils have also developed folk wisdom about how to map their Tamil names to the western systems that insist on asking people for their first names, middle names, and surnames: “your father’s name is your surname.” Sometimes they are surprised by the ramifications of this choice: their father’s first name will persist as the last name of the families they build later on. In the olden days, when Kandiah Kumaran married Suppiah Shanthi, and Shanthi wanted to be a traditional wife, she would change her name to Kumaran Shanthi. But if Kumaran emigrated to some western country, and followed the folk wisdom to change his name to Kumaran Kandiah, Shanthi will end up as Shanthi Kandiah after their marriage, potentially making everyone uncomfortable!
Patronymics were once very common, even in western societies, as evidenced by the European patronymic prefixes or suffixes like the Scottish/Gaelic Mac-, the French Fitz-, the Hebrew Ben- , the Nordic -son/-sen/-dottir, the slavonic -vich, and so on. Outside Europe, the Arabic ibn/bin is an example of a patronymic prefix. Ethiopians and Eritreans follow a patronymic scheme similar to that of Tamils. Somalis append their father’s and grandfather’s names to their given names. There are many more examples of patronyms around the world.
Everywhere in Europe, except in Iceland, patronyms fossilized into standard family names at some point during the last few centuries. My guess is that they wanted to stop having to explain constantly and decided to conform instead. At least that is what we decided when we had to name our children — they bear my name as their last name.
