
Animals that use personal names - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/blog/these-animals-use-personal-names-but-never-gossip
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Amorymeltzer
>Unlike human names, which aren’t usually unique, parrotlet and dolphin
signature calls typically are. “Every call is different, which suggests there
is no additional meaning except to signal, ‘This is my identity,’” says Janik.
On the other hand, there are almost 45,000 humans named John Smith in the US
alone—so we need additional information, like social context or that person’s
voice, to figure out who they are.

But hearing a person say "I am John Smith from Anytown, State, USA" would
readily identify them and be a more similar comparison to the dolphin calls.
If we take their assumption that there's no information content other than the
sound, then sure, the comparison would be every John Smith singing a
particular song.

Either way, that's just saying dolphins are better at hearing than us, which
is less interesting.

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panglott
There's a certain bias in that assertion that "human names aren't unique",
especially in the John Smith example. A legal name is at least partly social
construct meant to interact with a government bureaucracy. Compare the surname
situation in Japan, which had most people come up with their own surnames a
scant century and a half ago and consequently has a huge diversity of
surnames, with China, which has been undergoing surname extinction for
millenia. Ultimately this has more to do with large legal and kinship systems
more than purely social identification.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_name](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_name)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galton%E2%80%93Watson_process](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galton%E2%80%93Watson_process)

Human names in an oral culture on the smaller family-and-friends scale seem
like they'd be much more diverse, unique, and informal, with names that are
more like nicknames than legal names. But certainly humans use them for gossip
;)

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abruzzi
My favorite surname detail is that in Iceland you surname is derived from your
father. So Björk Guðmundsdóttir is the daugher (dóttir) of Guðmund. Her
brother would have the last name Guðmundson. I'm not sure if any of the other
nordic countries do the same. Russia put the patronymic in the middle name.
Anyway is interesting in that it carries genealogy info without having a long
established family name.

~~~
pavel_lishin
The patronymic is also frequently used - to address someone respectfully,
you'd use their first name and patronymic, not their first-and-last name.
(e.g., Dmitriy Alekseyevich Kuznetsov would typically be addressed as Dmitriy
Alekseyevich in just about any non-informal context.)

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bruu_
Yeah big news there, I've been calling my pet capybara "swegsweg" for like 3
years now and he's started to say "swegsweg" like he's a pokemon or some shit

