At least in Germany, titles are still rather important. I agree that it's silly but if you have a PhD you're very likely to put "Dr." on your doorbell name plate.

What do you mean by, "important"? That it's impolite to not refer to someone using their preferred title, or that people tend to expect them?

Depends on the person, some people do get insulted if you don't use their title in a formal setting. As said, it's rather silly IMHO.

Never had a Herr Doktor for a supervisor huh?

A doorbell I can understand;[1] it's your own home. But the requirements might be lower if you are signing up for some Lidl customer benefit club.

[1] Well, personally I think that's silly too. But it's a question of degree.

Can confirm. In Germany, recipients of a US visa often complain that their title isn't used on the visa, only their name. Especially PhD visa applicants.

I think that's just out of the necessity of not having to explain who exactly "her Dr Rer Nat" is.

My mom listed our family as my dad's name with "Dr." in front, I think in the phone book. My dad was never happy about that. But we're not German.

not to mention that often the title is Prof. Dr.

We had a go-live delayed because the sponsoring executive needed to demo the app to a board member, and would not do it until the UI showed the full greeting of “Prof. Dr. xxxx”. We had to shoehorn that into the data model at the last minute.

Yeah, professor is an actual title here, you can be a professor without being tenured.

I certainly don't mind being called "Mr.", but I don't see why it can't just be another field, or part of a free-text field.

Like you, I don't mind being called "Mr.", but the problem is that my sister would very much prefer not to put "Miss" (and not to lie) because it results in undesired advances, and my wife would also prefer to not put "Mrs." because it results in discrimination for the opposite reason, and because it results in people asking to talk to me instead. At the same time, you can't drop it entirely, because my aunt will complain loudly if she's not allowed to put the "Dr." honorific that's very important to her identity in a title field.

I agree with the recommendation that it's best just to have a big name field and allow users to be "Dr. Firstname Lastname" if they want that, or "Firstname Lastname" if they don't want a title, or "Englishname Surname Givename" if they want that.

The push-back usually becomes that you can't trivially parse it a single name field later to use part of the name conversationally as if you know the person closely and send them spam with "Hey <nickname>, we haven't heard from you in a while, did you know that we now offer blah?". Instead, be honest, if you can't even take the time to understand the name syntax of an entire country, you don't know that user closely.

> would very much prefer not to put "Miss" (and not to lie) because it results in undesired advances, and my wife would also prefer to not put "Mrs." because it results in discrimination for the opposite reason

The opposite reason being that she desires advances? Unless you are implying an open marriage, that doesn’t sound right. Can you clarify what you mean?

> and because it results in people asking to talk to me instead.

No, for some reason it seems to result in her being ignored because she's unavailable. Probably preferable to undesired advances, but still not really treating her the same way they'd treat a man.

Isn’t the first problem you mentioned what “Ms” was invented for?

Right, so ask them their full formal name, and how they want to be addressed.

  What is your full name?
    Ner D. P. Onx, BS DDS LCSW

  How would you like to be addressed?
    Mr. Onx

In an industry wide panic we renamed git master to git main, right after realtors renamed the "master bedroom", yet we're all continuing with an abbreviated "Master" or "Mistress".

Nobody said society was rational.

If you plan to only do English forever that's acceptable, but there's _a lot_ of languages where you need to know someone's gender to be able to use their name in a sentence.

Weird thing to look over in a thread about internationalization

I'd assume in these languages you can get away with either not using the name, or going for a neutral form (same as when you don't know who you're speaking to)

French has that gendered structure too, with workarounds to manage uncertainty.

There's some push to have gender neutral language in Spanish, but it's pretty controversial.

And downright dumb-sounding.

"Todes"

Please stop.

I would say that all gender-related changes are controversial. Otherwise they would have already happened.

There are many Indian languages where verb conjugations are either male or female and there is no neutral option.

By curiosity how do you deal with generic instructions ? Like if you needed to have "you will need to come to this counter to apply for special discounts" printed next to a ticketing machine ?

Generally, male gender is presumed if a neutral form is not available.

Male pronouns are assumed in most such cases, but that is not necessary in the example you provided—the instruction would be the same for both genders, in Hindi at least. "आपको विशेष छूट के लिए आवेदन देने के लिए इस काउंटर पर आना होगा।" It doesn't have any gendered pronouns, most such instructions don't.

That assumption isn't valid.

In some languages in order to say anything about anything you have to apply either the masculine or feminine form of the verbs and adjectives, so there's no way around picking one of the two, so if you don't know, you must guess or assume.

And if we look at languages with three grammatical genders, for some of them the neutral option is exclusive to inanimate objects, and using these neutral-gender forms of verbs and adjectives involving any person is explicitly insultingly dehumanizing, you wouldn't even use it to refer to an animal, much less to any person unless you want to make a point of intentionally disrespecting them as "it", saying that they are not worthy to be considered a person. In these languages[1] we do see the neutral gender option applied towards nonbinary and transgender people, but it's done by transphobes as a way of dehumanizing them in conversations.

In such languages usually the proper way to behave if you don't know the gender or if that's a mixed gender group is to default to masculine grammatical gender; because there's no polite way to avoid choosing; and, I might guess that there's also probably some aspect that historical patriarchal social reasons it might have been traditionally considered that misgendering someone male-to-female is more offensive than misgendering someone female-to-male, so that's how that default might have come to be.

[1] edit - I know about some of these languages, I'm not asserting that this applies for all such languages, perhaps there are some of them where the social norms are different, it's very hard to generalize globally.

But aren't we talking about form fields? When would you absolutely need a gendered title from someone in a form field so that you could refer to them in the third person?

In any case, I understand your point about there not being many options for gendered pronouns in some languages, but you're also assuming that there aren't movements to change that. French is a good example where even though its heavily gendered, things are evolving to the point that Le Robert even includes 'iel' as a pronom personnel [1]. Sure its use is contentious, but so are gendered pronouns even in English are still contentious for some people, but it exists and people do use it.

[1] https://dictionnaire.lerobert.com/definition/iel

> In any case, I understand your point about there not being many options for gendered pronouns in some languages,

No, I explicitly did not mention pronouns, my post was about all the language groups where merely changing pronouns is barely scratching the surface as core grammar features rely on grammatical gender. Like, no offense intended, but French is not an example of a "heavily gendered language" - I'd consider French on the very low end of the grammatical gender complexity scale, where indeed suggestions such as yours might be plausible. For example, consider Hebrew or Slavic languages which have verbs and adjectives denoting the gender of the subject/object. Consider grammatical gender in Hindi or Welsh. And I'm not even talking about more complicated systems like you might see in Bantu languages.

You can certainly make titles optional or just part of a name field although, in the case of some titles like Dr., that still doesn't give you what you supposedly need anyway. Personally, if I had a form that didn't need title information for some reason, it's probably a minefield I would just bypass even if there are potential edge cases.

If this is why a website or a form asks for it, and there is no way around it, better just ask for it directly ("How would you prefer to be addressed? He/him, she/her, or neutral?") instead of a choice of 25 historical titles.

I always choose the clergy titles! (Monarch ones are never available)

In Discordian beliefs, everyone (even non-Discordians) is a pope, so this is perfectly legitimate.

What if they want to be addressed by those titles? Mr/Ms is always in the list so what is to be complained about here?

Couldn't people enter whatever is the equivalent of the nominative gendered singular form of the full name if they cared?

Just to add (as clergy myself) that clerical titles are in current use, are not limited to one faith tradition, and space ought to be allowed for them.

I'm privy to Software <D&D/Video Game Class Name> for titles.

Hmm, Software Barbarian, I like it.

So how would you fill this email template:

> Dear <usually title> <usually last name>,

When I worked for an ecommerce retailer, we had a title field, with some preset choices and a freeform other option.

The sw dev looked up a bunch of titles - Sir, Dame, Lord, Duke, Earl, Baron, Prince, Princess, Reverend, Bishop... - and decided the DB field could be 8 letters.

Of course it broke for the first Archbishop.