It's probably a Roman thing. Julius Caesar was actually "Caesar, of the gens Julia", so last-name first.
In Italy we also used to list last-name first, particularly in official and military communications. This has changed significantly in the last 40 years, particularly in everyday bureaucracy, but it's still used by police and other bodies.
In France they seem to prefer <LAST NAME> (yes, all caps) <First name> even for less formal things.
Also this "reversal" had me confused when we hosted a French exchange student without knowing French (I spoke German, but the teachers knew my family were happy to host if they needed). His name was written like "KHALID Mohamed" and he was very polite so he didn't really correct me when I was calling him "Khalid", and since I was unfamiliar with Algerian names I had experience to suggest "Khalid" was more surname-y than firstname-y. It sorted itself out after a day or two though :-)
Julius Caesar has the 'group/last' name first because it doesn't include his first name at all: including it he would be Gaius Julius Caesar. The cognomen (there Caesar), meanwhile, was a bit of an inconsistent mess that in various times and contexts could be personal, hereditary, honorific, given, adopted...
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_naming_conventions
So Caesar's close relatives were all also called Caesar, which is how it got to be an imperial title. You might think that with the original cognomen locked into place for such families, members would get a second cognomen so that there would be at least one part of their name that could identify them. But apparently not.
The whole part about the Roman naming system indicating heritage became even more complicated when Caracalla (properly named Marcus Aurelius Antoninus) made every free man in the Empire a Roman citizen and now basically everyone was called "Marcus Aurelius" without ever having had any ties to the Aurelii family.
There is very likely no connection. The introduction of surnames in Germany took place in the 15th century (somewhat earlier in German speaking parts of Switzerland). In Franconia, the "ethnic" distinct northern part of which is today Bavaria and which was never a part of the Roman empire, the last-name first custom also occurs in a few places such as Bamberg.
In inscriptions (short): CAIVS IVLIVS CAESAR
In speaking he would (in English;)) rather formally introduce himself as "Gaius of the Iulii, called Caesar".
His mother called him Gaius, his peers called him Caesar once he got or choose?) this name.
His father was 'Gaius Julius Caesar' his grandfather (supposedly the first 'Ceasar') was 'Sextus Julius Caesar'.
The Cognomen is presumable something that evolved as a way to tell apart people belonging to different branches of the same family/clan because the number of first names was very limited.
Initially, it was more of a nickname or even an earned name, like with Caesars contemporary Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus.
Nicer than his other nickname 'adulescentulus carnifex ("teenage butcher") ' I guess..
But yeah, the cognomen seems weird/hard to understand e.g. Pompey's dad was called Strabo but he seems to have never used that name himself, while other like Ceasa, Metellus or Cicero were pretty much just surnames.
Romans probably found their naming system as confusing as we do so they started using nicknames ad hoc.
It was even more awful if you were a woman, you technically didn't even have your own name until the imperial period. You and your sisters would just be called Aemilia I, Aemilia II, III etc (or the 'elder'/'younger'). if your father was belonged to the Aemilius clan for example...
Only that... it didn't? The vast majority of bureaucracy and even many private entities in Italy use and strongly prefer the "Surname Birthname" format.
I believe that it's mostly the English speaking world that is strict with having "first name" first and "last name" last.
It's not an Asian cultural feature to have family name first, but it's an English speaking thing to have it last.
OP isn't trying to use his software in Asia specifically. He's just adapting to non US market.
In languages like Japanese or Hungarian, that's what family name first means.
Some additional observations from the German-speaking world (both Vienna and rural Austria):
- yes, we also often refer to people, even in everyday speech, as LastName FirstName
- often when referring to someone by name they are also given a definite article (equivalent of English "the"), e.g. "die Maria" or "der Gruber Hansi"
- some people I've encountered with a background in the German aristocracy (not Austrian, where such titles are technically abolished) have extremely long legal names with multiple prince/duke/von X und Y etc clauses. This will be their full legal name that appears in the passport and must be used when booking flights etc, but is not what they would use as "full name" in an everyday business context. So "Full Name" might not always be "Legal Name".
Also in a South Asian/Indian diaspora context, it is very common for people to be addressed by a semi-formal nickname that does not appear anywhere in their legal name. Come to think of it, I know one or two Austrian aristos* who use the same approach.
* yes, technically the aristocracy is abolished but they still live in their castles and know each other's pedigrees...
But those informal regional order conventions? I read them as formalized disrespect for the individual: "you're not Hans who happens to be a Müller, you're a Müller who happens to be Hans. And the Müllers, they are part of us, so subsume!" Those regional things can be quite peculiar: a childhood memory of my mother (northern Germany) is that as a child she was sometimes referred to as given name + name of the family farm, I suspect not in that order. With that farm's name still being the name of the family that ran ran it before her family took over, at some point between the thirty years war and the industrial revolution.
That has a very "part of the crew, part of the ship" feeling to it. Work the land, become the land, you're named for the land that you work! With marital status, who your father was, your family's occupation, and where you're working, all in a name, résumés needn't be a thing.
Another difference between northern and southern Germany is the Munich-Du and the Hamburg-Sie. In standard German we use the formal pronoun Sie with the last name in formal situations and the informal pronoun Du with the given name in informal situations. Nowadays in semi-formal situations, like between colleagues at work, it's completely informal but two or three decades ago it wasn't. Officially the workplace was supposed to be formal and often it was, but in many cases a mixture between formal and informal forms was common.
In the north people tended to use the formal Sie but in conjunction with the given name, like Markus, können sie bitte das Auto holen." (Marcus, can thee get the car, please.), whereas in Bavaria the opposite combination of informal Du combined with the family name was prevalent, like *"Du, Frau Müller, kannst Du bitte das Auto holen." (You, Mrs. Miller, can you get the car please.)
Two notes:
First, you'd use "thou" here, as it's the nominative case, and the correct conjugation would be "canst".
Secondly, "thee" and "thou" were very much the form used to speak to a close friend or social inferior in early modern English. "You" functioned more like French "vous" or German "Sie"- as either a plural formation or a formal address of a social superior.
With that in mind, it would probably be more accurate to say that they should be rendered "Marcus, can you get the car, please?" and "Mrs. Miller, canst thou get the car, please?" And notice the parallel between "canst thou" and "kannst Du"!
I disambiguate my grandparents via the name of the farmhouse they live in, rather than the last names. I am from austria. But I dunno how common that is.
> This is the way to go.
Agreed. Does anyone know of any reason to care about first/last, apart from it being part of My First SQL Database and sating our inner desire to create pointless taxonomies?
In an ebook management system I've been developing, I use a full_name and a sort_name field for authors/editors/contributors, because books are a reasonable thing to want to sort by author names.
For example, in my studies I had cause to read many books by Hans Urs von Balthasar. Nobody ever referred to him as "von Balthasar," just "Balthasar," but his books were always sorted by the "von."
I'm pretty sure I've seen a by-name sorting scheme that excludes these sorts of prefixes for alphabetisation purposes. Of course, then you have to second guess whether you are using such a sorting system :)
It's never not going to.
So, our software has a whole pile of names... FML, preferred, mailing, formal, sort name, and probably a few others I'm forgetting. It's a mess.
I don't think there's an easy fix to this. Not everyone has a first and a last name, but in many places, cultural conventions (or legal practice) assume that you do.
Another reason is being able to generate various forms automatically: i.e. from "Fstname:William Robert, Lstname:Smith" to generate "William Robert Smith", "W.R. Smith", "Bill Smith", or just "Bill" without storing any of these variants separately.
Of course this may fail if "William" prefers to be called "Will", not "Bill"...
This is the way to go.
"The family/given name format doesn't make much sense here."
It doesn't make much sense in many places all over the world. In Germany technically speaking our given names are a set and we can have many of them. While it is practically necessary to write them out in a certain order in our documents, from a legal standpoint they are all equal. There is no first and second given name and most certainly no middle name. Consequence is that in everyday life today I can be Hans and tomorrow Fritz. I can be Hans Fritz or Fritz Hans too, but not Hans-Fritz (with a hyphen) except if it's written like that in my birth certificate and then the order is fixed and I can't decide to be Hans, Fritz or Fritz-Hans.
The trade-off in this system is that it is much harder to change your name here then in most other places.
In Bavaria where I live, the informal convention is also last name first, exactly like in Asia.