Other random information about names that I find interesting:
* The US habit of addressing all people, eg even the CEO, by first name in business setting would be unthinkable in most other cultures. This is one aspect that many foreigners stumble at (email heading using “Dear Sir” is typical).
* Some languages/cultures heavily use shortened names (eg Mike, Herb, Liz), even in formal settings. Again this would be a huge faux pas in other cultures. Even if people have and use such names, it would be unthinkable to address them if you are not close friends (eg Memo is an informal shortened form of the Turkish Mehmet)
* Commonly, names are chosen from a culture specific fixed set, which evolves on the order of a decade or so (not exactly true, eg the name Apple and many others) but a good approximation. In other countries names are generally made up from words, with desirable meanings, AFAIK names in Chinese are of this kind. Of course all names started this way, eg Peter=stone but I’d guess most people don’t know the meaning of their names in this sense, ie what does Elisabeth mean?
* Related to the above, one thing I was surprised to learn about Chinese names is that it is hard/impossible? to know the gender of the person from just the name. Sure, English has un-gendered names, too, but they are really small minority.
chinese names can absolutely be gendered - for example, if i met a 璐, there's a 99% chance that name belongs to a woman because of its meaning (beautiful jade) and its character composition (王 radicals tend to be feminine). i feel like gender-ambiguous names have become more common in recent years, but maybe that's just me not keeping up with naming trends.
I have a Chinese friend whose name is 黑 ("hei", black). Whenever they give their name to other Chinese folks, they are met with disbelief and often suspected of using a fake name.
About the first point, is this really universal in USA?
I mean, consider you see Bill Gates (i.e. somebody well respected and quite older than you) in the airport, and you want to address him for some reason. Do you yell "Hey, Bill!", or would it rather be "Mr. Gates"? Is the former actually fully appropriate?
Whenever I was in meetings at MS with people who were passing on information directly from the man, they would always refer to him as Bill. I never heard his last name mentioned once. "Bill told us he spent $400m on this. Bill wants his money back."
If you are also called Bill at Microsoft, this might have been confusing.
At Pixar, Steve Jobs was always just Steve, never Mr. Jobs. That was also true of his other companies I believe. After I left Pixar, I was accused of named dropping when I kept referring to him as Steve and I had to change to calling him Mr. Jobs or just Jobs.
Yeah, ok, I could assume that from the gp's post, but what about answering my question directly? How do you address him at the airport, if you have no connection whatsoever? IDK why, maybe you wanna ask him some question, or take an autograph, or you see that he just dropped a wallet, whatever. Will it be "Hey, Bill" or "Mr. Gates"?
* The US habit of addressing all people, eg even the CEO, by first name in business setting would be unthinkable in most other cultures. This is one aspect that many foreigners stumble at (email heading using “Dear Sir” is typical).
* Some languages/cultures heavily use shortened names (eg Mike, Herb, Liz), even in formal settings. Again this would be a huge faux pas in other cultures. Even if people have and use such names, it would be unthinkable to address them if you are not close friends (eg Memo is an informal shortened form of the Turkish Mehmet)
* Commonly, names are chosen from a culture specific fixed set, which evolves on the order of a decade or so (not exactly true, eg the name Apple and many others) but a good approximation. In other countries names are generally made up from words, with desirable meanings, AFAIK names in Chinese are of this kind. Of course all names started this way, eg Peter=stone but I’d guess most people don’t know the meaning of their names in this sense, ie what does Elisabeth mean?
* Related to the above, one thing I was surprised to learn about Chinese names is that it is hard/impossible? to know the gender of the person from just the name. Sure, English has un-gendered names, too, but they are really small minority.
Totally unrelated, but how proper names work (ie, how they refer) is a big area of discussion in Phil of Language. Check out this entry if you want to go down that rabbit hole: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/names/#:~:text=Proper%20n...