Middle names are definitely not universal, sure, but I can't seem to find a list of cultures that can't map down to "first name, last name".
Iceland, Indonesia, Turkey, Ethiopia, everything I've come across seems to have adopted some superset of "first name, last name" in the last hundred years.
> The only justification to collect them separately is to link with third-party data.
In Japan, many organizations are required to collect this for legal compliance.
> They should stop playing around and just ask me what they want to know, "How would you like to be addressed?"
That is a good thing to ask -- and certainly suitable for generating nametags! -- but I can still see many cases for needing to have a legal name. Generating receipts, etc.
> I can't seem to find a list of cultures that can't map down to "first name, last name".
It's the meaning of them that's mainly the problem. In western cultures, the first name is your given name and the last name is your family name. In eastern cultures the first name is your family name and the last name is your personal name.
So without more information, you don't know whether to call them "Mr [first name]" or "Mr [last name]". If you don't know what to call them after they've filled in the name fields in your form, that's a pretty fundamental failure.
> I can still see many cases for needing to have a legal name.
Sure, but first name / last name is not a good way to do it.
> In eastern cultures the first name is your family name and the last name is your personal name.
First name and last name are bad proxies for given name and family name. Anyone from an Eastern culture filling in an English form knows or should know that. If they don't, it's mostly their fault.
> So without more information, you don't know whether to call them "Mr [first name]" or "Mr [last name]".
You call them "Mr [last name]".
This is mostly an imagined problem, and it goes away if you ask for "first name/given name" and "last name/surname", which removes any ambiguity.
(I happen to have an Eastern name, so I did not call it an imagined problem because I knew nothing about it.)
> First name and last name are bad proxies for given name and family name.
It sounds like you are agreeing with me here.
> Anyone from an Eastern culture filling in an English form knows or should know that. If they don't, it's mostly their fault.
A bad form design collects bad data and it's the fault of the person filling it in? How about we just use better form fields?
> This is mostly an imagined problem, and it goes away if you ask for "first name/given name" and "last name/surname", which removes any ambiguity.
If you acknowledge that this ambiguity can be resolved by changing what you are asking, why are you arguing this point? Just use better form fields.
> (I happen to have an Eastern name, so I did not call it an imagined problem because I knew nothing about it.)
I have a western name and my name is backwards on all sorts of documents and I've been called "Mr Jim" a huge number of times because of this issue. It's not mostly imagined, it's extremely common in my experience.
If you want to know their legal name, ask for their legal name. If you want to know what you should call them, ask what you should call them. First name / last name are not good fields for this and the solutions are simple.
> If you acknowledge that this ambiguity can be resolved by changing what you are asking, why are you arguing this point? Just use better form fields.
I mean, it's a very simple cosmetic fix and has no bearing on the schema. I thought you were arguing that the first name / last name model is fundamentally broken, but I guess you were not.
I'm struggling to come up with a list of those.
Middle names are definitely not universal, sure, but I can't seem to find a list of cultures that can't map down to "first name, last name".
Iceland, Indonesia, Turkey, Ethiopia, everything I've come across seems to have adopted some superset of "first name, last name" in the last hundred years.
> The only justification to collect them separately is to link with third-party data.
In Japan, many organizations are required to collect this for legal compliance.
> They should stop playing around and just ask me what they want to know, "How would you like to be addressed?"
That is a good thing to ask -- and certainly suitable for generating nametags! -- but I can still see many cases for needing to have a legal name. Generating receipts, etc.