Yes, this is the difference between more typically Western European surnames and patro/matronyms. Russians typically have both, many Americans of Scandinavian descent have whatever patronym their paternal n-th grandfather had when they switched customs. I believe that's become the case for many Scandinavians of Scandinavian descent as well.
But in any case, these are names which come from the family. By Appeal to Wikipedia, "family name" redirects here:
Note that this is different from having one, two, or several given names, as the whole of someone's name. That happens as well. Such a person has no family name, unlike someone with a surname, or surnames, be they patronymic, matronymic, or otherwise.
> I believe that's become the case for many Scandinavians of Scandinavian descent as well.
That's true. I'm Swedish, and Sweden shifted in mid/late 1800s. Some families just kept the name they had, and some made up a nice sounding family name, typically nature related.
Dealing with a defect right now in production where an external system had assumed that a person always has a first name and a last name whereas the person just has a name, which is neither the first name nor the family name – it is just a name.
I had a neighbour without a name. He was Tiwi. When a member of the tribe, higher on the totem pole than you, dies, then you lose that name for an appropriate mourning period.
An elder of reknown, with the name, died. The tribe decided that the name would never be taken again, as a matter of respect.
So, as a sign of respect, my neighbour gave up his name, permanently. His license and passport have a number, not a name.
That's already covered by points 32–36. I really want to see a counter-example to "People have names" that doesn't fall under "toddler who has yet to survive their first winter". When you're old enough that members of your community talk about you, they'll find some way to refer to you – maybe by an informal nickname, maybe by a description of kinship ("Dave's second son") – and that would be considered a name by the standards of that "falsehoods" list.
While I was reading about Burmese names, I also learned that people in Burma can change their names pretty much at will, so even the idea that a name is a stable identifier for a person is not necessarily true, not to mention the whole legal name change thing or the common practice in many Western countries of women taking there husband’s name at marriage. I remember as a kid seeing occasional pieces of mail addressed to my mom under her maiden name even though she had been married for 15 or so years at that point. (Then there was the mail that I occasionally got addressed to “Donald Lopez” thanks to badly written code misparsing the joint ownership of the home I owned with my wife before the divorce.)
Your IT system may need to handle entries linked to people who don't have names, for example, recording that some treatment was given to a baby who died soon after birth before being given a name.
A "John Doe" [1] presumably still has a name, even if it's unknown to you specifically. That would be a counter-example to "You always know a person's name", not to "People have names".
