On Tue, 2 Dec 2014 10:53:44 +0200, Mikko Parviainen <xxxxxx@kapsi.fi>
wrote:

>Most systems have potentials for collisions... I don't know of any
>people with all the same names (in Finland you can have 1-3 first names,
>I'm Mikko Ville Iisakki Parviainen), but as we usually use only one first
>name and the surname, collisions are easily possible.

>When I worked at the Helsinki University of Technology, there was one
>other Mikko Parviainen working there. Once I got the flight tickets to a
>conference in internal mail, with the note "are you the correct one?" on
>them. I know of at least a third Mikko Parviainen in the genreal area,
>and a Google search turns up more of us.

And there are at least five people with G+ profiles that share my name,
and only two of those profiles are mine. Ditto LinkedIn, and only one of
those _may_ be mine (I may have joined a long time ago, and just never
did anything with it afterward).

>Also, there are only a bit over five million people in Finland. I would
>imagine name collisions are more common in larger cultural areas and
>if you only have one first name.

Not necessarily - there are other factors that will have a major
influence: for example, in a number of European countries - I believe
that _all_ of the Scandinavian countries other than Finland (I don't
know about Finland) have restrictions on what names may be given a
child; in fact, there was just recently a news article about an
Icelandic girl who is now 18, who _just_ got the right to use the name
her mother wanted to give her ("Bailey", though I believe the spelling
was conformant to Icelandic orthography). When there's a limited
name-set, the chance of collision is increased, in inverse proportion to
the size of the name-set. Other countries outside Scandinavia have
similar restrictions. Immigrant cultures, like most of the Americas,
tend not to restrict names, and in the United States, there isn't even a
bar against "nonsensical" or "offensive" names - which is how the
children of a certain performer ended up with "Dweezil" and "Moon Unit"
- or names that are guaranteed to turn the child into a target of
ridicule as he enters school, which is how one of the project managers
at my job ended up with "Kent Clarke".

Certainly, when you have "middle names", "Confirmation names", "second
names", and so on, you reduce the chances of "hard" collisions - but
when you're looking at a culture that tends not to use fixed family
names, but only patronymics (like Iceland, or medieval Judaism), _and_ a
limited set of names, whether by tradition or by law, you dramatically
increase the opportunity for collision. My note was simply to indicate
one way that such a situation has been handled in the real world, so
that the idea was available for Traveller "culture-heads" to quickly
grab if they "needed" it for a culture being built.

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