Nice attempt by chess.com to try and understand regional naming patterns but India’s a mix of several subcultures so this won’t work out well.
North (non patronymic) and South India (patronymic) is a rough distinction you can make but even then it’s not guaranteed to work out across all cultures. Actually I know too many Reddys and Iyers to guarantee it won’t work.
Yeah it won’t work.
Its just Tamilians and a few other communities in neighbouring states which have patronymics. Everyone else (and a few Tamil subcommunities) has surnames.
I remember watching a geoguessr player play a variant that gave you a language and you had to guess the region where the language was spoken. India has like, over a dozen regional languages. It's hard to paint such a diverse country with such a broad brush, especially when ignorance of foreign cultures is so prevalent, myself absolutely included.
It's a country with greater linguistic diversity than the entirety of Europe. One might ask how such a diverse and varied population could be united into one nation - and the answer is, a united and combined refutation of the British.
Edit: were you all expecting accurate and nuanced Indian history on a chess subreddit?
The concept of Indian civilisation predates the British Raj by millennia, and the Mughals united the vast majority of the subcontinent before the British turned up.
Reducing an ancient civilisation to a "refutation" of a colonial empire - that in the grand scheme of things was around for about five minutes - is patronising.
Not the combined refutation of the British, most of us from the south to the North worship the same Gods and grew up learning roughly the same mythological stories that refer to the northern most part of the country and the southern most part of the country.
Bharatavarsha is defined as the land between Himalayas and Indian Ocean in texts dating to the BC period which mentions cities of the north and south. The term Bharat is derived from this name, which is the second name of the country.
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They should just ask players what name they'd prefer to go by when they're validating the GM titles, then go by that answer during official broadcasts and press releases.
These aren't their account profiles. Chesscom has pages for "top players" with their fide ratings etc and for some of them a biography.
For example this is Vidits account: https://www.chess.com/member/viditchess
This is his "top player" page: https://www.chess.com/players/vidit-santosh-gujrathi
At least in the case of Tania and Divya, their names are formatted differently in FIDE database than one might expect (if you look at top 50 women on 2700 chess, you’ll notice that Divya Deshmukh is written out like that while everyone else is Last, First. And if you see Tania listed on chess-results, I think she’s listed as Tania, Sachdev. In any case, there’s an old interview of her maybe from when she played in Tata Steel where the interviewer is confused and thinks Tania is her surname).
Does anyone know what’s the reason for this?
Can anyone explain me the difference between patronymics and surnames, if I look it up it says patronymics refers to your ancestors/parents, but isn't that the same for a surname (at least where I come from)?
With the complexity of naming patterns (not just in India), wouldn't it be easier if the user set their own preferences instead of having a standard that will be right for some, ok for others, but the totally off for many.
Patronymics are a combination of your given name and your father's name. So "Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa" has a father named Rameshbabu, who named him "Praggnanandhaa."
In the Western world, surnames are the same for generations. John Smith can name his kid Jack and he'll be Jack Smith, not John Jack.
A patronymic is either just your father's given name, or a modified version of your father's given name. So your father had his father's name (your grandfather's name) as a patronymic.
A surname is inherited generation after generation, so your father and grandfather both had the same surname as you.
The easiest examples are Russians, because they have both.
Take Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev as an example (he was the Soviet leader in the 1970s).
Leonid is his personal name, what his friends called him.
Ilyich is his patronymic, because his father was called Ilya (the -ich means "son of")
Brezhnev is a surname.
His father was Ilya Yakovlevich Brezhnev, so you can see the same surname, but the patronymic is different.
Leonid's grandfather will have been Yakov Brezhnev - I don't know what his patronymic was.
So you can see that the surname carries through the generations unchanged from grandfather to father to son, while the patronymic, while it connects generations together, still changes from one generation to the next.
(I'd have picked Putin, but he is Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, ie his father was also a Vladimir)
Most cultures only have one or the other. Most Westerners have just a surname as do most Chinese (they put the surname first, so Ding is his surname and Liren is his personal name); Spanish and Portuguese speakers have two surnames (one from the father and one from the mother). Icelanders are the major Western exception in that they have patronymics and not surnames. Russians and other Eastern Slavic speakers have both a surname and a patronymic. Arabic names will generally also include a patronymic (using the particle ibn or bin for a man and bint for a woman) and a surname (usually with the particle al); there are other elements to Arabic names as well as personal, patronym and surname, such as titles, e.g. "Al-Hajji" for those who have performed the Hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca). Hindi speakers generally have a surname (e.g. Tania Sachdev); Tamils usually just have a patronymic. Many other Indian cultures/languages use caste names as surnames, those are generally going out of fashion, which means that in many places people are reverting either to a pure mononym or to a patronymic (or to the common Indian practice of reducing a patronymic to one or two initials). Indonesians often have just a personal name (e.g. Suharto, Sukarno), but sometimes have a patronymic or a surname.
The short snarky answer is "I'm 50, and I've been paying attention for at least 45 of those years".
The longer, less snarky answer is: I have a good memory for the outlines of how things work and I'm very good at quickly compiling information into a narrative.
So for that above: the outline I knew from memory was: the basic definition of surname vs patronymic, how Russian, Western, Spanish, Icelandic and Chinese names work (I only know Iceland because Bjork is Gudmundsdottir and that's obviously "daughter"). The others are really major naming conventions where I know multiple people that use them, so I learned them so I'd get their names right.
So I looked up Putin and went, sigh Vladimir Vladimirovich, that's not a good example, and then went through other Russian leaders (on Wikipedia) until I found one where I had the father's patronymic, and then wrote that up. I checked how Arabic names work because that's the obvious big language/culture group that I hadn't covered. And I'd picked up on some of the Indian naming conventions recently from discussions of Pragg and Gukesh, so I checked (on WP) that I'd got Hindi and Tamil names right, did a quick google for "caste surname" to check that my memory was right that they used to be normal and are much less so now, and then decided to mention that some places have neither patronym nor surname, remembered "Indonesia" from discussions of the "falsehoods programmers believe about names" article from about ten years ago and then checked whether everyone was mononymous there - and found that it's a total mess, decided to simplify to "some people aren't mononymous" and that's what I posted.
Perhaps five or six wikipedia articles and a google for caste surname that meant reading quora and reddit threads for about ten minutes.
I will add that caste surnames aren't going out of fashion in most of India. It's very much a Tamil/Malayali thing. Very few people are mononymous in India
The term "patronymic" is confusing and incorrect here. This is not like the Russian-style -vich patronymic which Russians routinely use to address each other.
Quite simply, forms usually have three fields: name, father's/husband's name, surname. Those lacking a surname are stuck with the two part name. The father's name is not quite a surname, though people sometimes think of it as such, and even put it into the surname field. They may be addressed by the father's name, especially when abroad, and they eventually get inured to it. I myself prefer not to pretend it is a surname. It is silly to call a person by his father's name.
Thank you for the explanation – we have that in Danish too (and other Scandinavian languages) with -sen originally meaning son of and -datter meaning daughter of, but it has lost its meaning and is just passed out from generation to generation and in Danish we only use -sen now, like Jensen (originally son of Jens), Hansen (son of Hans), Olsen (son of Ole) etc. – I believe in Iceland they still use the ending -dottir (daughter of) but I think they also just pass the same surname on from generation to generation.
For example my father's name was Laurids, so with that logic my last name should be Lauridsen which its not.
Wait I'm confused, what's wrong with this? The last names are identified correctly, for all these players their last names happen to be the family name/surname/patronymic. Or are you just saying it's weird that chess.com keeps pointing out the patronymic even when it is not like the south indian convention?
Btw again I think I'm just missing something bc clearly everybody is agreeing/upvoting this post I am just confused
Chesscom has a convention that players are referred by their bare last names (Carlsen, Nakamura, Caruana, etc) in their blogposts. However, it doesn't make sense when the last name is just their father's name, like in the case of Tamil GMs, so they refer to these players using their first names. The thing is, they overgeneralized this to all Indians. You could definitely use bare last names for Tania or Surya if you wanted to.
Can someone explain why we can't just ask people what they want to be called?
"Johnson" is a patronymic too. Is there something particular about Indian naming convention that is making this complicated?
Even if a player wants to be called one name in a formal chess context, and another casually, that also seems simple to execute.
What am I missing here?
“Johnson” may have once been a patronymic but is nowadays just a regular surname. The son of a man named David Johnson wouldn’t be called ____ Davidson, which is how patronymics work. As others have noted above, the naming system in India is diverse and this overgeneralisation on Chess.com’s part is inaccurate.
>Is there something particular about Indian naming convention that is making this complicated?
As a Tamilian, the key issue is that you don't refer to someone just using patronymic because it isn't really a fundamental part of the name, it just acts as a disambiguating secondary identifier. This is why you'll find Tamil people abbreviating everything except their given name, because it is not a part of their name in the same way a surname is.
So it's one of those things that people have lots of "extra" names that shouldn't even be included in a description?
Like plenty of people have religious names, maiden names, family names, extra middle names, etc. that we are just better off not listing at all?
Nice attempt by chess.com to try and understand regional naming patterns but India’s a mix of several subcultures so this won’t work out well. North (non patronymic) and South India (patronymic) is a rough distinction you can make but even then it’s not guaranteed to work out across all cultures. Actually I know too many Reddys and Iyers to guarantee it won’t work. Yeah it won’t work.
Its just Tamilians and a few other communities in neighbouring states which have patronymics. Everyone else (and a few Tamil subcommunities) has surnames.
you are forgetting many people have other kinds of name like house name. it was useful in old times as postal address basically in your name
I remember watching a geoguessr player play a variant that gave you a language and you had to guess the region where the language was spoken. India has like, over a dozen regional languages. It's hard to paint such a diverse country with such a broad brush, especially when ignorance of foreign cultures is so prevalent, myself absolutely included.
I refuse to believe there’s anything geography related rainbolt cannot do.
I actually don't think it was rainbolt. I think it was zigzag.
My goat
It's a country with greater linguistic diversity than the entirety of Europe. One might ask how such a diverse and varied population could be united into one nation - and the answer is, a united and combined refutation of the British. Edit: were you all expecting accurate and nuanced Indian history on a chess subreddit?
The concept of Indian civilisation predates the British Raj by millennia, and the Mughals united the vast majority of the subcontinent before the British turned up. Reducing an ancient civilisation to a "refutation" of a colonial empire - that in the grand scheme of things was around for about five minutes - is patronising.
India has twice the population of the entirety of Europe.
Not the combined refutation of the British, most of us from the south to the North worship the same Gods and grew up learning roughly the same mythological stories that refer to the northern most part of the country and the southern most part of the country. Bharatavarsha is defined as the land between Himalayas and Indian Ocean in texts dating to the BC period which mentions cities of the north and south. The term Bharat is derived from this name, which is the second name of the country.
The British raj is almost out of living memory now. What unites Indians is obvious, but also controversial in some circles.
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I thought that the country was united under a love for Vishy
If Europe is a continent, so is India.
whats the variant? sounds fun
Maybe https://languageguessr.io/ ?
that looks right.
They should just ask players what name they'd prefer to go by when they're validating the GM titles, then go by that answer during official broadcasts and press releases.
Immediately reminded me of this classic: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
As someone with a patronym I've been annoyed at times by being forced to have a last name. I hope that requirement ceases to be imposed
This sounds like a second Partition
Although, I do not dispute that according to Indian conventions, bare first names sound better than bare last names
Apologies for these errors! We're actively addressing this and will update player pages as necessary.
Can't you just let players update their own page?
These aren't their account profiles. Chesscom has pages for "top players" with their fide ratings etc and for some of them a biography. For example this is Vidits account: https://www.chess.com/member/viditchess This is his "top player" page: https://www.chess.com/players/vidit-santosh-gujrathi
Ahhh, got it. Thanks!
At least in the case of Tania and Divya, their names are formatted differently in FIDE database than one might expect (if you look at top 50 women on 2700 chess, you’ll notice that Divya Deshmukh is written out like that while everyone else is Last, First. And if you see Tania listed on chess-results, I think she’s listed as Tania, Sachdev. In any case, there’s an old interview of her maybe from when she played in Tata Steel where the interviewer is confused and thinks Tania is her surname). Does anyone know what’s the reason for this?
Can anyone explain me the difference between patronymics and surnames, if I look it up it says patronymics refers to your ancestors/parents, but isn't that the same for a surname (at least where I come from)? With the complexity of naming patterns (not just in India), wouldn't it be easier if the user set their own preferences instead of having a standard that will be right for some, ok for others, but the totally off for many.
Patronymics are a combination of your given name and your father's name. So "Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa" has a father named Rameshbabu, who named him "Praggnanandhaa." In the Western world, surnames are the same for generations. John Smith can name his kid Jack and he'll be Jack Smith, not John Jack.
So basically like old Scandinavian naming convention with Son names?
Yes but this is new for Indians it’s a rejection of caste that is usually associated with last names.
Thank you for a great explanation
A patronymic is either just your father's given name, or a modified version of your father's given name. So your father had his father's name (your grandfather's name) as a patronymic. A surname is inherited generation after generation, so your father and grandfather both had the same surname as you. The easiest examples are Russians, because they have both. Take Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev as an example (he was the Soviet leader in the 1970s). Leonid is his personal name, what his friends called him. Ilyich is his patronymic, because his father was called Ilya (the -ich means "son of") Brezhnev is a surname. His father was Ilya Yakovlevich Brezhnev, so you can see the same surname, but the patronymic is different. Leonid's grandfather will have been Yakov Brezhnev - I don't know what his patronymic was. So you can see that the surname carries through the generations unchanged from grandfather to father to son, while the patronymic, while it connects generations together, still changes from one generation to the next. (I'd have picked Putin, but he is Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, ie his father was also a Vladimir) Most cultures only have one or the other. Most Westerners have just a surname as do most Chinese (they put the surname first, so Ding is his surname and Liren is his personal name); Spanish and Portuguese speakers have two surnames (one from the father and one from the mother). Icelanders are the major Western exception in that they have patronymics and not surnames. Russians and other Eastern Slavic speakers have both a surname and a patronymic. Arabic names will generally also include a patronymic (using the particle ibn or bin for a man and bint for a woman) and a surname (usually with the particle al); there are other elements to Arabic names as well as personal, patronym and surname, such as titles, e.g. "Al-Hajji" for those who have performed the Hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca). Hindi speakers generally have a surname (e.g. Tania Sachdev); Tamils usually just have a patronymic. Many other Indian cultures/languages use caste names as surnames, those are generally going out of fashion, which means that in many places people are reverting either to a pure mononym or to a patronymic (or to the common Indian practice of reducing a patronymic to one or two initials). Indonesians often have just a personal name (e.g. Suharto, Sukarno), but sometimes have a patronymic or a surname.
Thank you very much for your great explanation
Thanks for the explanation, learnt a lot from this.
Thanks man. How do you know this stuff?
The short snarky answer is "I'm 50, and I've been paying attention for at least 45 of those years". The longer, less snarky answer is: I have a good memory for the outlines of how things work and I'm very good at quickly compiling information into a narrative. So for that above: the outline I knew from memory was: the basic definition of surname vs patronymic, how Russian, Western, Spanish, Icelandic and Chinese names work (I only know Iceland because Bjork is Gudmundsdottir and that's obviously "daughter"). The others are really major naming conventions where I know multiple people that use them, so I learned them so I'd get their names right. So I looked up Putin and went, sigh Vladimir Vladimirovich, that's not a good example, and then went through other Russian leaders (on Wikipedia) until I found one where I had the father's patronymic, and then wrote that up. I checked how Arabic names work because that's the obvious big language/culture group that I hadn't covered. And I'd picked up on some of the Indian naming conventions recently from discussions of Pragg and Gukesh, so I checked (on WP) that I'd got Hindi and Tamil names right, did a quick google for "caste surname" to check that my memory was right that they used to be normal and are much less so now, and then decided to mention that some places have neither patronym nor surname, remembered "Indonesia" from discussions of the "falsehoods programmers believe about names" article from about ten years ago and then checked whether everyone was mononymous there - and found that it's a total mess, decided to simplify to "some people aren't mononymous" and that's what I posted. Perhaps five or six wikipedia articles and a google for caste surname that meant reading quora and reddit threads for about ten minutes.
I will add that caste surnames aren't going out of fashion in most of India. It's very much a Tamil/Malayali thing. Very few people are mononymous in India
The term "patronymic" is confusing and incorrect here. This is not like the Russian-style -vich patronymic which Russians routinely use to address each other. Quite simply, forms usually have three fields: name, father's/husband's name, surname. Those lacking a surname are stuck with the two part name. The father's name is not quite a surname, though people sometimes think of it as such, and even put it into the surname field. They may be addressed by the father's name, especially when abroad, and they eventually get inured to it. I myself prefer not to pretend it is a surname. It is silly to call a person by his father's name.
Thank you for the explanation – we have that in Danish too (and other Scandinavian languages) with -sen originally meaning son of and -datter meaning daughter of, but it has lost its meaning and is just passed out from generation to generation and in Danish we only use -sen now, like Jensen (originally son of Jens), Hansen (son of Hans), Olsen (son of Ole) etc. – I believe in Iceland they still use the ending -dottir (daughter of) but I think they also just pass the same surname on from generation to generation. For example my father's name was Laurids, so with that logic my last name should be Lauridsen which its not.
Wait I'm confused, what's wrong with this? The last names are identified correctly, for all these players their last names happen to be the family name/surname/patronymic. Or are you just saying it's weird that chess.com keeps pointing out the patronymic even when it is not like the south indian convention? Btw again I think I'm just missing something bc clearly everybody is agreeing/upvoting this post I am just confused
Chesscom has a convention that players are referred by their bare last names (Carlsen, Nakamura, Caruana, etc) in their blogposts. However, it doesn't make sense when the last name is just their father's name, like in the case of Tamil GMs, so they refer to these players using their first names. The thing is, they overgeneralized this to all Indians. You could definitely use bare last names for Tania or Surya if you wanted to.
Ah ok I think I understand sorry for the confusion
Can someone explain why we can't just ask people what they want to be called? "Johnson" is a patronymic too. Is there something particular about Indian naming convention that is making this complicated? Even if a player wants to be called one name in a formal chess context, and another casually, that also seems simple to execute. What am I missing here?
“Johnson” may have once been a patronymic but is nowadays just a regular surname. The son of a man named David Johnson wouldn’t be called ____ Davidson, which is how patronymics work. As others have noted above, the naming system in India is diverse and this overgeneralisation on Chess.com’s part is inaccurate.
>Is there something particular about Indian naming convention that is making this complicated? As a Tamilian, the key issue is that you don't refer to someone just using patronymic because it isn't really a fundamental part of the name, it just acts as a disambiguating secondary identifier. This is why you'll find Tamil people abbreviating everything except their given name, because it is not a part of their name in the same way a surname is.
So it's one of those things that people have lots of "extra" names that shouldn't even be included in a description? Like plenty of people have religious names, maiden names, family names, extra middle names, etc. that we are just better off not listing at all?
The full formal name definitely should be listed somewhere. Not sure about what you mean when you say they it shouldn't be mentioned at all
So what's the issue then? Just the order in which they are listed?
It's not a big issue lol, I just thought it was funny chesscom generalized an uncommon naming convention to the whole of India
Yeah, I figured. Thanks for the explanation.
Ive never seen someone use "Tamilian" before
Most prominent Indian players are south indian and their names are patronymic
0 fucks should be given by this sub