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At the very least names should be unique strings, preferably pronouncable


In The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin, the anarchists have names assigned at birth by a computer, guaranteed to be unique. They are gender-neutral (I think their artificial language doesn't have the possibility for gendered names) and monomial.

(I highly recommend reading the book, it's one of my favourite novels.)


They are not guaranteed to be unique as I recall, at one point the main character gets in a fight with a guy who demanded he change his name since he was tired of getting confused.

Ursula Le Guin didn't sugarcoat anarchism, at least, though I still think the depiction of the main planet system is a lot more depressingly plausible.


Those two names, IIRC, are unique but similar. (Shevek and Shevet, or something like that.)


Correct horse battery staple


“That’s amazing! I’ve got the same combination on my luggage!”


Pronounceable by *someone* or by you? Try getting together a native Cantonese speaker, Arabic speaker, and Inuktitut speaker and find a name all three of them can pronounce without noticeable issues.


Great! Everyone can get named a combination of Papa and Pizza, which are the only 2 words I've heard consistently pronounced everywhere I've traveled.

On second thought, I think the Japanese say "piza", so we're back to a unary sequence now. I call dibs on Papa¹


Well, Papa, if you've only ever heard pizza being pronounced correctly you haven't played Mystery of the Druids.


Great point. Touché


You need to have a restricted set of allowed syllables to prevent attackers from having names with similar pronounciation to common ones.

In unique name world I would totally for a scammer telling me "Hello, my name is Marck Zuckaberg, give me all your data".





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