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My question may not be related with English language. It might be more of correct usage.

Which one of the following is correct?

Your name, please?

or

Your good name, please? // as if there is a bad name.

FumbleFingers
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RandomUser
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  • Where did you encounter the latter phrasing? – l0b0 Jul 03 '14 at 12:13
  • Some have asked me the latter quite some time – RandomUser Jul 03 '14 at 12:14
  • Not Your name good sir? – terdon Jul 03 '14 at 12:17
  • Definitely not 'Your name good sir?' – RandomUser Jul 03 '14 at 12:17
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    This link says that "your good name" is an Indian English phrase. I have never heard it in the UK. So the first question is definitely and globally correct English but the second looks like a local idiom and best avoided IMHO unless your audience is Indian. http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/96300/may-i-know-your-good-name – Rupe Jul 03 '14 at 12:42
  • @Rupe thanks for the link, apologies for not mentioning what's said in the link you posted, 'It's an Indian way of.." – RandomUser Jul 03 '14 at 12:47
  • By the way, I think if you asked someone for their "good name" in the UK, there's a chance they'd take it for sarcasm, negating any "honorific" intent. – Rupe Jul 03 '14 at 12:51
  • @Rupe I don't understand the negating any "honorific" intent part of your comment. – RandomUser Jul 03 '14 at 12:52
  • @RandomUser From the link I posted, "May I know your good name is a typically Indian way of honouring the other person". I was just trying to make the point that if you said it to a Brit, you not only run the risk of their not "getting" the point that you were "honouring" them, but rather it could have the opposite effect of at least making them wonder if you are being rude. (I think I probably used the wrong word with "honorific") – Rupe Jul 03 '14 at 12:57
  • @Rupe: In my experience, most first-generation Indian immigrants in the UK are quite keen to discard features of their diction which mark them out as IE speakers (second-generation immigrants definitely avoid them, and may even mock their own parents' usage). So "established" Anglophones don't actually often hear forms which are common in IE, even though we now have lots of people who used to use them. – FumbleFingers Jul 03 '14 at 14:22

2 Answers2

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From Text Types and the History of English (Manfred Görlach, 2004)...

One of the best-known modern parodies [of Indian English] is R. Parthasarathy's “What is your good name, please?” which makes fun of almost all the features in which IndE deviates from the proclaimed British model, such as (apart from the localising function of of names):

1) tense and aspect confusion
2) irregllar use of articles
3) invariable tags (isn 't it? no?)
4) questions marked by intonation only
5) pleonastic uses (headache pain, discussing about)
6) local idioms (inter-caste, matric fail, foreign-returned, put up) and wrong uses of BrE idioms (make the two ends meet)
7) erudite diction (eschew, opine, purchase)

I won't include the full text of the parody here (it's in both the above links), but obviously the implication of the title is that this usage is archetypally IE (it's totally "normal" to speakers of IE, but totally "weird" to most other Anglophones). But the list of other IE features is useful to know.

Regarding the specific insertion of good in OP's example, it's worth noting this from Bilingualism in Schools and Society (Sarah J. Shin, 2013)...

Politeness in Indian society is highly conventionalized and is part of the conversational style of Indian English. The strategy of maintaining a positive face can be seen in the example: What is your good name, please?

...and this from Art And Science Of Translation (Centre of Advanced Study in Linguistics, Osmania University and Booklinks Corporation, 1994)...

In a Hindi situation with a high degree of formality, one would tend to ask: H. apka subh nam (kya hai)? The items in parenthesis may or may not be used. This is translated very frequently in English in India as : E. What is your good name?

FumbleFingers
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It seems this is a direct translation of the Hindi “Aap ka shubh naam?” But even Google didn´t return too many results, so I would take it with a grain of salt.

The first one is “correct” in the sense that it is very likely to be understood by anybody with basic English usage. And as others have pointed out, a formal version of that would be “Your name good sir?”, although I suspect that is archaic by now.

After living in the UK for some time as a non-native English speaker, I have never heard anyone use either “Your name good sir?” or “Your good name, please?”

l0b0
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