Skip to content

Should Prince Harry read Harry as a given name? (prince, princess, lord, lady are titles but not given-name titles) #519

Description

@derek73

All four words are in TITLES but not in GIVEN_NAME_TITLES, so a title-plus-one-word input folds the word into the family name by rules.md#H1:

parse("Prince Harry")      # title='Prince',   family='Harry'
parse("Princess Anne")     # title='Princess', family='Anne'
parse("Lord Byron")        # title='Lord',     family='Byron'
parse("Lady Diana")        # title='Lady',     family='Diana'
parse("Lady Gaga")         # title='Lady',     family='Gaga'
parse("Dame Judi")         # title='Dame',     given='Judi'     # dame IS a given-name title

The membership criterion (rules.md H Background) is how the title addresses: a title that precedes and addresses by the given name belongs, whether or not the tradition keeps family names. sir, dame, king, queen are in on that basis.

Where the criterion lands

  • prince, princess: address by given name. "Prince Harry", "Prince Charles", "Princess Anne" are the royal forms and there is no surname reading of the word that follows. These look like straightforward additions, the same shape as king/queen.
  • lord: mostly addresses by peerage or surname. "Lord Byron", "Lord Tennyson", "Lord Voldemort" name the family or the title, not the person. "Lord Chancellor" and "Lord Mayor" are compound titles that H3 already chains. Membership looks wrong here.
  • lady: split. A peer's daughter is addressed by given name ("Lady Diana", "Lady Jane Grey"), a peer's or knight's wife by surname ("Lady Thatcher"). The set has no way to say "sometimes", which is the same reason venerable stayed out (titles.py comment on Renunciate honorifics (Swami, Guru, Baba) put the monastic name in last #346).

What membership changes and what it does not

Membership only decides which field the one remaining word lands in. It does not change whether the word is read as a title, so it cannot fix the given-name collision:

parse("Prince Fielder")    # title='Prince', family='Fielder'  — Prince is his given name (#348)
parse("Robert Prince")     # given='Robert', family='Prince'   — unchanged either way

Two sites read the set: H1's fold and P5's bound-given join licence. After #489 lands, a title run addresses by its last title, so Her Royal Highness Princess Anne would move from family Anne to given Anne with princess added. Corpus census today: Prince Charles is the only affected name; Lord ... names are compounds or the fork guard His Excellency Lord Duncan, which must keep family Duncan.

Proposal

Add prince and princess; leave lord out; decide lady by which usage dominates the inputs callers actually hand the parser (the same relative-frequency test the 2.3.0 suffix-acronym collisions used). Each addition is a classified behavior change against 1.4.0, which reads Prince Harry with family Harry.

Split out of the #489/#316 title-run bundle, where it came up as vocabulary scope rather than run mechanics.

Activity

  1. added this to the v2.3 milestone on Sep 11, 2026
  2. self-assigned this
    on Sep 11, 2026
  3. added a commit that references this issue on Sep 11, 2026
  4. derek73 commented on Sep 11, 2026

    @derek73
    OwnerAuthor

    Shipped in #523 (merge c1152ac), for 2.3.0.

    • prince and princess are given-name titles: Prince Harry reads given Harry with an empty family, Her Royal Highness Princess Anne given Anne, and Prince abdul Rahman given abdul Rahman through the bound-given licence.
    • lord and lady stay out, decided rather than deferred, and the frequency test proposed above was not run. Both split the same way, by the bearer's rank, which the name text does not carry: Lord Firstname / Lady Firstname is a courtesy style for children of the senior ranks only (younger sons of dukes and marquesses, daughters of dukes, marquesses and earls), and every peer and every wife takes the title or surname. Debrett's and Bratman's peerage primer agree on that boundary and are cited in the H1 entry of docs/design/decisions.md. Lord Byron and Lady Gaga are pinned as negative controls.
    • The entry is fenced to the two words. emperor, tsar, sultan, pharaoh, archduke, maharani and their pairs were not weighed and still read the one word behind them as the family.
    • Prince Fielder now reads given Fielder, wrong either way; that is Should a word that is both a title and a given name report an ambiguity? (Baron Davis → title 'Baron', no given name) #348's collision.
  5. added 2 commits that reference this issue on Sep 22, 2026
    0122875
    d6e40cd
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

Labels

Projects

No projects

    Milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions