From a Muggle point of view, maybe. From a Wizard point of view, that’s probably the least obvious answer.
Your name is your name, and no piece of paper can grant it or take it away.
If I were to venture a guess, I’d say that a person’s name would be something like “$givenName $familyName”, such as “Harry Potter” or “Albus Dumbledore”. The givenName is the name your parents gave you when you were a baby. The family name is the name of your Noble House (“Malfoy”, “Potter”, etc.), or simply the last name which your parents share (“Granger”). This is the naming convention that (as per my guess) wizards and witches have been using since the time of Merlin, so it’s reasonable to assume that the creators of the Map imbued it with the same rules.
As to the question, “yes, but how does the Map compute the values of givenName and familyName for any specific person”, the answer is, “Magic”.
When he was alone in the room, the old wizard looked down at the map, which had now written upon itself a fine line drawing of the Gryffindor dorms in which they stood, the small handwritten Albus P.W.B. Dumbledore the only name left therein.
Ah, yes, good catch. Though we could probably count middle initials as part of the given name, since they are granted to the baby by its parents at the same time as the givenName… aren’t they ? I’m actually not entirely sure how middle initials work in Britain.
Your name is your name, and no piece of paper can grant it or take it away.
If the world of HPMOR is some sort of simulation, as you claim, then this is true and significant; your name exists as a fixed value that can be referenced by a program like the Map. But if the world of HPMOR is more like our own, then to say “your name is your name” is pretty empty; like most everything else, there is an explanation of why your name is your name. In our world, what makes it true that we bear the names we do is not that we all have own values for the variable $name. Rather, what makes it true is some other fact; one possibility (one that I don’t believe myself) is that what makes it true that my name is Alex is the fact that my birth certificate reads ‘Alex’.
So I think our disagreement arises from what we think the world of HPMOR is like.
If the world of HPMOR is some sort of simulation, as you claim, then this is true and significant; your name exists as a fixed value that can be referenced by a program like the Map.
I think these are two separate issues.
One issue is concerned with the wizards’ concept of names. The wizards who created the Map would seek to imbue it with whatever naming convention felt right to them.
The other issue is concerned with how the HP:MoR universe works, and which resources the Map can tap in order to implement its functionality.
These issues are somewhat related, but they aren’t identical. We could very easily envision a world where names are stored on birth certificates, and yet the wizards still believe that, even if Mr. Harry Potter goes through life calling himself “Mr. Spoo”, his name is still Harry Potter, because that’s what his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Potter, called him. On the other hand, we could envision a world where names are stored in some underlying data structure in the simulation, and yet the wizards believe that what a person calls himself is more important than whatever name parents gave him. Or we could envision some combination of the two.
That said, IMO no wizard would conceive of actually perusing the birth certificate database for anything; nor would he deliberately enchant a map to do anything of the sort. For all we know, wizards and witches don’t even have any birth certificates. It’s pretty likely that, even if they do have birth certificates, they don’t have any centralized databases that store them; we never seen any wizard use one, IIRC, neither in canon nor in MoR.
So, “how does the Map work ?” Well, it works the same way Harry’s Mokeskin Pouch works: by magic.
From a Muggle point of view, maybe. From a Wizard point of view, that’s probably the least obvious answer.
Your name is your name, and no piece of paper can grant it or take it away.
If I were to venture a guess, I’d say that a person’s name would be something like “$givenName $familyName”, such as “Harry Potter” or “Albus Dumbledore”. The givenName is the name your parents gave you when you were a baby. The family name is the name of your Noble House (“Malfoy”, “Potter”, etc.), or simply the last name which your parents share (“Granger”). This is the naming convention that (as per my guess) wizards and witches have been using since the time of Merlin, so it’s reasonable to assume that the creators of the Map imbued it with the same rules.
As to the question, “yes, but how does the Map compute the values of givenName and familyName for any specific person”, the answer is, “Magic”.
Also middle initials, apparently:
Ah, yes, good catch. Though we could probably count middle initials as part of the given name, since they are granted to the baby by its parents at the same time as the givenName… aren’t they ? I’m actually not entirely sure how middle initials work in Britain.
If the world of HPMOR is some sort of simulation, as you claim, then this is true and significant; your name exists as a fixed value that can be referenced by a program like the Map. But if the world of HPMOR is more like our own, then to say “your name is your name” is pretty empty; like most everything else, there is an explanation of why your name is your name. In our world, what makes it true that we bear the names we do is not that we all have own values for the variable $name. Rather, what makes it true is some other fact; one possibility (one that I don’t believe myself) is that what makes it true that my name is Alex is the fact that my birth certificate reads ‘Alex’.
So I think our disagreement arises from what we think the world of HPMOR is like.
I think these are two separate issues.
One issue is concerned with the wizards’ concept of names. The wizards who created the Map would seek to imbue it with whatever naming convention felt right to them.
The other issue is concerned with how the HP:MoR universe works, and which resources the Map can tap in order to implement its functionality.
These issues are somewhat related, but they aren’t identical. We could very easily envision a world where names are stored on birth certificates, and yet the wizards still believe that, even if Mr. Harry Potter goes through life calling himself “Mr. Spoo”, his name is still Harry Potter, because that’s what his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Potter, called him. On the other hand, we could envision a world where names are stored in some underlying data structure in the simulation, and yet the wizards believe that what a person calls himself is more important than whatever name parents gave him. Or we could envision some combination of the two.
That said, IMO no wizard would conceive of actually perusing the birth certificate database for anything; nor would he deliberately enchant a map to do anything of the sort. For all we know, wizards and witches don’t even have any birth certificates. It’s pretty likely that, even if they do have birth certificates, they don’t have any centralized databases that store them; we never seen any wizard use one, IIRC, neither in canon nor in MoR.
So, “how does the Map work ?” Well, it works the same way Harry’s Mokeskin Pouch works: by magic.