Awesome links about conventions of personal naming in different cultures

[qijm]

Thai Personal NamesThe article itself is mostly about Thai culture, but there is a comments thread with people giving examples of a variety of other cultures as well

Comments

[dymaxion]

Ooh, thanks, this is really cool!

[qijm]

There's a lot of good stuff packed in there. The material is just plain interesting to start with.

There's a commenter who gives an example vcard for a Vietnamese name with semantic markup based on intended context of use, which is in stark contrast to an approach that attempts to decompose a name according to a predefined schema (and losing fidelity in the process) and reconstitute it on demand. There's something subtle but philosophically very important going on there which, while usefully applied to data modeling, is broader in its implications.

[dymaxion]

Yeah -- there's this very hardcore systematizing viewpoint to how we think about personal data in software in general, and I think that kind of system design has a lot to do with the kind of system misfits that we get as software becomes more social. People figure out how to adapt, but it tends to result in them forcing their identity to fit inside the box that the programmer thought to provide, which, even if it works, is a horrible way of going about things. See also stuff like facebook relationship statuses