The government ate my name(slate.com) |
The government ate my name(slate.com) |
*: Not 100% sure I'm spelling that correctly. Grok suggests that Oleshargegilgilololdeleroi may be more plausible.
What? No love for Paul Fenech from "Fat Pizza"?
So Russian families who move to America have a choice - either deal with people and systems who assume that married couples, and parents/children all have the same last name and hit roadblocks when that expectation does not match reality, or change one partner's last name to match the other's.
But that second option has problems too, because that name change doesn't retroactively apply in Russia - so now you might have American documents that say you're a Elena Kuznetsov, but your Russian documents say that you're Elena Kuznetsova - so any legal dealings that involve the two countries (like, say, traveling) become significantly more complicated because you need to prove that the two names actually point to the same person.
At least middle names aren't a big issue - patronymics mean something in Russia, but here in America it's just a string you pop into the "middle name" field, and maybe you get asked what it means, and get to teach someone what patronymic means.
Speaking as someone whose mom didn't change their name when marrying my dad, with a sister who didn't change her name when marrying my brother in law, with a wife who also didn't change her name when she married me, I think this problem is overblown. I have yet to encounter any actual issues with this.
Sometimes people will assume we aren't married and/or divorced, and people will often call me by my wife's last name and vice versa, but it has never caused any actual problem. Never had any system that assumes we have the same last name. So many people live in blended families anyway, that very few systems/people make these assumptions any more.
People getting the issues live in different systems and/or have different needs, and it also changes with our world getting more digital. One part that doesn't much depend on locality this days would be international travel and money.
For international travel, small kids having a different name is surprisingly painful and can get you stuck in an office for hours until it's somewhat clear you're not kidnapping them (proving you're a parent not being enough). Depending on how it goes your plane could be gone by that time.
Money is the same, there;s a lot less check if you send to yourself or family than to a random stranger. Having a different name can mean your transfer getting stuck for days of back and forth.
Then again, if you're just staying in your town never dealing with anything outside of it, you might never have to think about your name in your whole life.
I was eventually able to sort this out with the manager but it made me laugh that in San Francisco of all places, they would judge my wife for not changing her last name.
But this was also over a decade ago.
And no, US authorities won't make it easy for you or her.
I had a Greek friend born in America who was assigned her father's masculine gendered surname. Her birth was not registered in Greece. When she went to register in Greece as an adult, it created loads of issues due to her surname being incorrect from a Greek perspective. It required a lot of paperwork and fees be cause the Greek system was not set up at the time to handle that correctly.
On the flip side, her mother had a number of issues in the US having an almost identical yet different surname as her husband and daughter. Less extreme but frequently people would mess up the mom or the child's surname when entering records because they'd give the surnames a quick glance and incorrectly assume they were identical. She said there were often times where systems were designed with the faulty assumption that the child would have the same name as a parent.
Now, she effectively has two surnames depending on which passport she uses. Because it's easier for her to maintain names that correspond with the different systems.
Nevertheless, the issue is real in the sense that many countries will e.g. "anglicize" your name when issueing you documentation, e.g. if your name includes characters they do not know how to handle. Having a single person with mismatching documentation _can_ cause issues. E.g. consider having two passports, with different names in them, and it's easy to see how this can cause problems.
I recall some TV program long ago mentioning the police had trouble with Russians because sometimes they think there's a whole gang and it's really just one guy whose name got corrupted in 5 different ways.
Depending on the Russian name and the local language there can be many ways to screw things up. Like Elena might get written down as Helen somewhere and Lena somewhere else. And that's just for viable normal names.
To acquaintances, I might be a Pavel; to close friends, I might be Pasha. To my mom, I'm Pavlik. In a business or other more formal setting, I would be Pavel Dmitrievich.
I think it's a common complaint when reading Russian novels, non-Russians get confused about who's who because of these types of shifts. And it totally makes sense; at least my various nicknames start with the same letter, but many Russian "short" names don't particularly resemble the full name. Who would expect Aleksandr to be Sasha, if you didn't grow up in the culture?
https://www.joe.ie/news/garda-spent-two-years-searching-for-...
0. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
(There's a separate issue here where a system for a specific pair of languages might get codified and become "frozen in time" even as either or both languages evolve. For example, the Russian Polivanov system for transliterating Japanese uses "си" for "シ" because the standard pronunciation of "щ" at the time was more like "шч", similar to Ukrainian, so it was clearly the wrong choice back then - and yet clearly the right choice now if not for backwards compatibility concerns.)
I use up all the fields for alternative names on all the forms.
what we really need to recognize globally is that languages change names. and that Kuznetsov in german or english is equivalent to Kuznetsova or Kuznetsov in russian or bulgarian and for example 库兹尼佐夫 or 库兹内佐娃 in chinese. in china i had to get a notarized translation of my name for official purposes.
passports could contain name entries in multiple languages to cover the most important differences. your native version, and english/western version and any others if you live in a foreign country where a translation of your name is necessary.
If you can treat the gendered name simply as a grammatical construct, things are easy - and a "name" like "Elena Kuznetsov" would simply be a grammatical error and never occur as a real name.
However, now people from abroad visit the country or possibly even (re-)immigrate and suddenly you do have real-live "Elena Kuznetsovs" - in addition to the regular gendered names. This sounds pretty complicated to keep track of.
Coincidentally, this actually makes it possible to have names that don't conform to the standard gender patterns without much confusion, because as soon as you start talking about what the person is like or what they're doing, you have to specify the gender anyway, so the marker on the noun is mostly redundant.
But also Russia in particular has a long-standing cultural tradition of Russifying foreign names of immigrants. For example, Americans don't have patronymics, but when you get Russian citizenship, they will ask you for the name of your father and assign one accordingly - so e.g. John, son of Donald, would become Джон Дональдович. Similarly last names are often modified by appending -ов or -eв, although this is less common today. Anyway, a name of clearly Slavic origin like "Elena Kuznetsov" would almost certainly be nativized if that person immigrate.
This usually doesn't apply to non-immigrants, though. Thus e.g. Barbara Liskov is still Барбара Лисков in Russian, not Лискова. Which makes it very confusing when a native speaker first sees the last name and confidently decides that it's male.
There are also some weird cases where names with obvious Slavic patterns are not re-nativized for political reasons. For example, Isaac Asimov is originally Исаак Озимов, which has very clear markers of a Russian Jewish name. When his stories were translated to Russian in late Soviet era, though, his name was rendered as Айзек Азимов (i.e. a direct transliteration of English), and it's been said that this was a conscious choice by translators because that way it didn't sound Jewish, which helped get it past censors when "anti-Zionism" was particularly prevalent in USSR.
In fact, that's one way to guess/cold-read some information about a person. If you meet an Elena Kuznetsov in America, odds are pretty decent that she was born to Russian parents here.
So now we have a few hundred thousand people with the last name Andersson, despite most of them not being Anders's son.
They can exist, but sound weird in the language.
(In Sweden the man sometimes adds his wife's last name to his own)
When my wife and I married, she changed her name to [Her First Name] [Her Maiden Name] [My Last Name], like from
First: Jane
Middle: Ann
Last: Smith
First: Jane
Middle: Smith
Last: Mylastname
First: Jane
Middle: [none]
Last: Smith Mylastname (no hyphen, just a space)
Given names: Jane Smith
Last: Mylastname
"Notice is given that Jane Smith Mylastname is changing her name to Jane Smith Mylastname"
for which privilege we get to pay $75.
Good grief.
I was born in France, I then had my last name changed to add my mother’s maiden name to my last name, and I can legally use either, my French id shows my name and my “usage name”.
Fast forward a few years, I settled in the UK, got naturalised, they dropped all the diacritics and kept only my “usage name” as my last name. You can also change name as many times as you like in the UK, they really don’t care, they’re pretty good at tracking it.
I then got my Italian citizenship by ancestry and there they’re the exact opposite of the British: only under very specific circumstances can you change your name, it has to be a matter of life and death pretty much. So they took my original French name, including the diacritics that nobody knows how to type on an Italian keyboard.
Now I live in Italy, with a different name than my British name, or my French “usage name”, and I have to explain to the clerks how to find me on their system (with my tax code) because they can’t type my name properly.
The government being this sloppy at getting accents right is surprising, I would expect them to value accuracy and a clean paper trail when handling names.
My Dad used to own a liquor store back in the 70s, with his name on the sign (let's call it "Arthur's Liquor"). It was in a rough part of town. One day when I was a teenager, in the 90s, we were driving by and he saw the sign was still there, so he stopped and we went in. There's a Korean guy and his wife behind the counter.
Dad: Just wondering, who's Arthur?
Wife points to her husband.
Shop owner: Me. I'm Arthur.
Dad: No, I'm Arthur.
I'm just like, Dad, can we get out of here now?
So many people refuse to understand this. It's a fact they simply reject.
> I was born in Mexico City, and my parents named me Leonel Giovanni García Fenech. It might sound a little baroque to Americans, but having four names is standard in Spanish-speaking countries.
I'm as Anglo as they come, and I have four names. In practice, yeah, I often have to choose a middle name if a form has space for one (1) middle initial or middle name.
But all this hits upon something I don't like about the "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" article: Programmers usually don't believe things, programmers implement things, and those things will believe what the client believes, on pain of the client finding someone who will go along with their vision, no matter how grand, blinkered, purblind, or otherwise constrained that vision may be. Blaming programmers is, therefore, very often wrong.
This is the morally correct solution, but governments run on forms and forms run on fields and fields were created by people who knew, as a matter of absolute ontological certainty, that names are FIRST MIDDLE-INITIAL LAST with a possibly blank MIDDLE-INITIAL. As for letters, if it isn't on Ethel's typewriter it doesn't exist.
If you want to protest the form, line forms over there, face-down, nine-edge first.
These lists are called “Falsehoods programmers believe about...” because ultimately, when the rubber meets the road, it’s a programmer who makes the decision to type it in, implement it, and ultimately cause the problem. Maybe, to be more accurate, the lists should be called “Falsehoods programmers perpetuate by not pushing back against clients and product managers.”
When I moved to the US I could have dropped one or hyphenate them. I decided to keep it as-is, and use "Garcia Garcia" as my last name (space and all).
Besides confusing amongs americans and people always confusing one Garcia for middle name and one for last name, I had almost no problems. One time an airline messed up my plane ticket (again by dropping one of the Garcias) but that's it.
I appreciate other people have different experiences, I definitely met folks who have changed their names to conform to american customs and make things easier.
For anyone reading this...this isn't true. It finally actually went into effect on May 7, 2025.
EDIT: I HAVE witnessed someone at a TSA checkpoint at an airport get turned away because they didn't have a REAL ID.
Of course, it's not fun to give up your identity and nobody should have to do that, but it might make it easier to exist in the American "you must have 3 names" world.
Most interesting case I've come across was a guy who just had one name. No surname or anything. He was once questioned by police (regarding a theft in the shop he worked in) and explained that his parents were "a bit weird". He was originally American, so apparently that's also a possibility there? And apparently the Dutch system allowed it, although the police seemed to struggle with it and may have duplicated his name.
It can go the other extreme too of course: https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/360848808/worlds-longest-nam...
Some US bureaucrats seem to like FNU (First Name Unknown) or LNU (Last Name Unknown). So one encounters mononymous Americans whose first name is Fnu or last name is Lnu. A while back I had a coworker whose surname was Fnu – I believe her legal paperwork had Fnu as her first name, but she got IT to swap her firstname and lastname in our corporate systems, because she didn't want people addressing her as Fnu.
source: gave my children fancy names
My parents gave me two middle names. It's not that uncommon in the UK, but due to the length of my names, they don't all fit on a US passport. They force you to choose to truncate or omit some of them. OK, no problem.
But I also hold a UK passport, and the UK passport has a rule that your name must be the same on any other foreign identification, or they won't issue or re-issue a passport. Due to the US length limitation, this was impossible.
Renewing my UK passport wasn't impossible, but it was annoying. None of the automated methods worked, and I had to actually get someone on the phone so I could explain the problem.
Example (not my real names): born as Alexander William Harry Smith, and having been called Alexander Smith all my life, people here in Spain unilaterally decide to call me William Harry or Don Harry all the time.
Thanksfully I have no need nor plan to apply for citizenship.
I subsequently learned that many folks faced with the same problem simply didn’t bother and instead left intentionally erroneous/incomplete (but consistent, and thereby validating) data in the registers.
Even perfect APIs won't solve this. Names carry cultural context that gets lost in translation between bureaucratic systems. We need identity architectures that embrace semantic ambiguity rather than eliminate it.
What would a name system look like if it was designed for a multicultural world from the ground up?
Keep your official documents, guys. Even if you think they're obsolete.
I've been asked to verify my identity only when setting up bank account, sorting out visa/tax with my sponsoring employer. After that it's only when leaving/entering country.
For my own convenience I use an english name to save barista butchering my name and feeling bad about it.
Naming kids was an exercise in linguistics. In Lithuanian we have some fun accidents like Justinas (just in ass) and Arminas (arm in ass)...
As for legally renaming yourself, I really don't know if the same rules apply. Probably the title-related ones, or ones that could be offensive, but I'd expect that's about it.
But just getting called whatever you like isn't a problem. I know quite a few people who don't go by their legal first name.
Like normally if you changed your name (in America) you'd have a wedding certificate or a document from the court that you could use to show continuity but instead you're just allowed to put whatever you want on the citizenship form?
- I have acute (é) accents in my first and last name. This seems to create different problems for each system my name is interacting with. Sometimes the letters just disappear, sometimes it's replaced with 'e or e' because the clerk didn't know how to type é, sometimes the accent is just missing and becomes e, sometimes the clerk tries to be fancy and copy paste é in their system, but it only works locally and I then I'm named with �.
- French usually have a primary first name, 1 or 2 secondary first names, and a last name. In practice the additional first names are more or less used like American middle names, but legally speaking they are first names, there are no middle names in France. That means for most foreign countries where you can only have a single first name, it becomes the concatenation of all your first names. You are not "John" anymore, you are "John Bob Max", this is your first name from now on.
- Obviously concatenating first names creates stupidly long first names, so you will not really be "John Bob Max", but rather "John BM".
- I France when you have kids, you can decide for them to bear the father's name, the mother's name, or a concatenation of both. That concatenation can only be done with a space though, as hyphen-separated names are considered a single word. Most countries (e.g. Canada) have conflicting rules on this, meaning they will forcefully replace hyphens with spaces and vice versa.
- Overall clerks (in Europe especially) are not careful with inputting names in their systems. I would estimate 60% of the time, my name is spelled wrong (typo, character swap, localization, etc). This of course becomes ridiculous as countries are more and more trying to automate a lot of processes, but a single letter mismatch sends you to administrative hell.
My strategy of recent years, which seems to work, is to be *relentless* of having your name right every single time. Drop the accents and non latin1 letters systematically, don't accept any typo, imprecision or shortening, have your full first, middle and last names everywhere.
99% of the time the issues are because the operator/clerk don't want to bother, and think it won't be a huge deal. That's wrong, the snowball effect is real and painful. Once your name is wrong anywhere, it cascades in a nightmare quite quickly.
My names have been consistently misspelled regardless.
I vaguely remember a story of a family migrating though different writing systems all ending up with different names.
Obligatory read: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
Are you sure?
SSA has administrative offices that deal with data errors. Generally in a GSA high rise in a big city. NOT the offices where you go to get benefits.
Someone doing data entry for the SSA fat fingered some info about me back when I was born, and I only found out in the 2010s thanks to the IRS rejecting a tax filing (I had to pay a 50 cent late fee!!!).
Went in-person to their office in the Metcalfe Federal Building in Chicago and the lady spent a few minutes examining documents, typed on her computer for about 20 seconds, and that was that. All fixed.
For anyone else curious about the legal name change process in the US, this varies depending on state.
I legally changed my name doing it the court process way. My state didn't require the newspaper thing. Was just $83 to file and show up at the hearing, and it was done.
Where it gets really fun is I have an apostraphe in my last name, and in 2025 we still can't make web forms that handle it. Some allow it, some don't, and it causes mismatch issues all of the time.
I know this pain.
What's great is when some systems allow it, but other systems--that are connected to the first system and should work together--don't. Suddenly you go from John F. O'Malley to John O Malley. Or worse, you end up with backslash escape quotes showing up. Sometimes the ordinary ASCII single-quote gets auto-corrected by something, and now it's a proper single curly quote, and nobody knows how to type that in, so they can't find you.
I get this problem happening in 1968, but it still happens now, with things that were built a year ago.
Maybe we should have never computerized any of this and we should have stuck with ink and quill and professional scribes.
I can only imagine the "fun" you're having dealing with that, Mr. O'DropTables.
In the local language of one of the countries, they say the family name first. For example, "Smith Mary". The passport & visa offices had gotten confused, and this poor guy ended up with a passport with their first and last names around the wrong way. And they got a visa to Australia with the names the right way around. The problem was only discovered a day or two before they travelled. And of course, you can't use a visa if the name on the visa doesn't match your passport. Even if the name on the visa is correct!
It was a huge headache. My friend managed to escalate the problem through DFAT (Australia's state department) and they managed to issue a new visa in time which matched their passport. Ie, they issued a visa which also had this guy's name wrong.
My favorite part of the whole thing is that their colleagues thought it was the funniest thing in the world. Apparently they kept making fun of the guy for it and started calling him the wrong name on purpose. Pacific islanders are the best. I think they were from Kiribati or Samoa.
When I moved to California and got a drivers license (easiest test process of my life, as a European, but that's another story), they dropped the space in my two word last name. Reads quite odd now. I always figured it was an all round America quirk to not have spaces in last names.
Source: I pretty much ran into the exact same thing.
If you try spelling your name over the phone to an American government employee, the vast majority would have no idea what a eszett was or how to enter it. Even if you wrote ß on a form, most wouldn't be able to enter it. Nor would most know how to pronounce it.
Even for accented letters like ä which at least have a form someone might recognize, the sheer number of different accent marks used across languages and the difficulty in reading someone's handwriting and general unfamiliarity with foreign names is just asking for some clerk to enter in wrong.
And that's just names with Latin letters. It becomes infinitely worse once you start including all the other character in world languages.
Instead, US government databases usually have first and last names transliterated into uppercase non-accented letters and they match against the transliterated name. Middle names are often only for display purposes. If you're lucky, they'll be display versions of first and last as well where you might sometimes be able to stick an accented character.
This isn't really limited to the US either. If you look at any passport, you'll notice the machine-readable section does the exact same thing, so on German passports ß becomes SS and Ä becomes AE.
Ü isn't even a special character or utf-8 - ü is part of ascii. How does this even fail? Is their database a 7-bit database?
Ascii is 7 bits. What people think of as 8-bit ASCII is actually code page 437, the alternate characters added to the PC BIOS in the original IBM PC. Like UTF-8 it uses the most significant bit in a 1 byte ASCII char to determine if it should use a character from ASCII if 0 or the extended 437 characters which includes ü if 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437
That is not true. Type “man ascii” on macOS or Linux to see everything that is part of ascii.
That tells me you're German, I didn't even need to see the ä and ß.
Even in the UK I encounter websites that won't accept my Norwegian address because it begins with Å. English speaking countries generally are pretty bad at this sort of thing.
My Spanish girlfriend has an ñ in her last name, and as does our son. To the people here in Norway, I just tell them to put a plain n when typing the last name. It’s easier to just go with that than to try and get people to understand how to type ñ on the keyboard (even though our computers can do it), and to avoid extra back and forth with people who have systems that don’t handle it.
Likewise, when I’m in Spain I don’t bother to say that my last name has ø in it. I don’t even bother to rewrite the o in my last name as oe. I just put it as o.
The only situation where I put it as oe is indirectly when an airline converts ø to oe on my airline ticket, or where the airline system doesn’t handle ø and I put it as oe for them when making the booking. To me my name looks worse with oe in it, and seems harder to pronounce for people if I write it as having oe in it than just putting it as o.
My understanding is that they are still phonetically entirely equivalent. How does it feel to have to substitute them into your name? (Or do you have a different recourse?)
It does not directly bother me but can lead to downstream inconveniences. Public services (in Germany) ime don't like mismatches in identifiers, especially inconsistent ones. If it is required then it might sometimes take more than one application (with a small explanation on why the mismatch is there).
As another example, if ä is substituted for ae in shipping addresses then automatic tracking for packages by DHL via my customer account breaks (as the address is not identical anymore).
Imagine you are an American designing a system. What about non-Latin alphabets? Yeah, these should probably be converted, nobody's going to bother with those. What about Hungarians, should we care about their O / Ó / Ö / Ő and U / Ú / Ü / Ű? And Icelanders - should we allow their Ð / Þ?
I understand that seeing your name misspelled hurts, but pretending ASCII is enough for everyone is an understandable simplification.
And yes absolutely we should bring Ð / Þ back for English use and drop those ridiculous digraphs.
There was a case of some German bank treating ü as "ue", its typical ASCII transliteration. A customer complained under GDPR and won.
I have a nasal vowel in my name that, so far in my life, only French and Portuguese speakers have pronounced properly.
I learned English in the US young enough that no one guesses I'm not native, and I anglicized my name so that it could be pronounced easily. It is what I go by.
I introduce myself with this adopted pronunciation. People often ask me how to pronounce it in French, so I tell them, but reiterate that I go by the anglicized pronunciation.
Inevitably, those folks start using their wrong attempt at French and I have to correct them and tell them I go by the anglicized pronunciation.
Edit: strong feelings had, obviously.
Protip: it seems to help if you stick an accent on "a": "Pável". In US, people have usually seen enough Spanish to interpret this more or less correctly, and of course it also doubles as a stress marker.
That said, personally, I often don't bother and also go with the default [ˈpei.vɪl] just because it's easier to go with the flow.
But I grew up around a lot of Polish families, and my classmates had the annual fun of explaining to our teachers that "Salchow" is pronounced like "Sargrow". I won't complain to much about people "mispronouncing" mine.
I technically mispronounce my own name, and always have. Same thing happened, just a generation or two up.
I would note that in Spanish-speaking countries, it’s generally the case that a woman does not take her husband’s surname, but simply keeps her own. She might add de + her husband’s name to her own after the marriage,¹ but this is less common than women in English-speaking countries retaining their name after marriage.
⸻
1. When my ex-wife’s green card was processed after our marriage, the attorney had added “de Hosek” to her name which she didn’t want and had to have the attorney change everything to keep her name as it was.
As for picking up kids, every place I take my kids to (school, camps, daycare, etc) require you to specifically list who is allowed to pick up their kid, no matter what their last name is. Even if you have the same last name, they aren’t going to hand the kid over unless you are on the list.
It would be crazy to let anyone pick up any kid with the same last name. Think about all the Garcias and Smiths and Kims in the world… they could pick up so many kids! Plus, most kidnappings are done by family members; any institution who hands over a kid just because the name is the same is going to open themselves up to so much liability.
If you mean different last names as your travel partner, I don’t understand why you having different last names would matter? Doesn’t each person have their own visa?
It sounds like you were just being shaken down. It didn’t matter what your name was, they just picked something bullshit to shake you down with.
It's not precisely stated in the GP, but most probably that one. Background: Russian and Belarusian spelling of names are slightly different, the latter being orthographically closer to the phonetic value. (The current Belarusian president-for-life is globally known as "Alexander Lukashenko", which is a transliteration from Russian; the Belarusian spelling, again transliterated, is "Alyaksandar Lukashenka". For the originals, see his Wikipedia page.)
N.B. I'm writing this as a non-expert in either of the languages, but I can read Russian.
My point was that someone who can type it will often have it rejected by a website. I was using a hotel booking site and when I booked a room it asked me for my address so I typed Å... The web page rendered it correctly but when I hit the button to complete the transaction it told me that my address contained an illegal character (or some similar wording). And this site handles bookings for hotels that themselves have names with umlauts, tildes, cedillas, etc.
Yep.
I've told people that my name has been mangled sufficiently, that when people discuss gravel, I snap my head in their direction.
It makes more sense to group by ticket group: buy 4 tickets then this keep them grouped
A 20 euro-plus per seat each-way tax on people with insecure partners.
OTOH Polivanov seemingly tried to reflect actual pronunciation, thus ツ is "цу" (tsu), ふ is "фу" (fu), を is "о", は is "ва" (va) when it's a particle, the syllabic nasal is "m" in environments where it is so pronounced etc.
The only real mystery about Polivanov system from this perspective is why ち is "ти" (ti) and not "чи" (chi).
> will sometimes adopt a western name
I don't know if my local healthcare catchment just has their software setup wrong, but it's a continual annoyance.
Currently I'm living in Indonesia, where a surprisingly large number of people have just one name (plus, when they have many, they're more often than not completely arbitrary).
This was very common practice up to the '90s. If you have a single name, they duplicate it in your passport, and you end up like "Soekarno Soekarno". Which STILL raises eyebrows in several western countries' ignorant airline employees (and sometime even immigration officers, though they're admittedly more well educated about such issues).
Nowadays they proactively give at least two names to their children to match the western(-ized) system assumptions.
By the way, the accents can often be used to force the right pronunciation of a foreign name on native speakers (at least in US, where Spanish names are so widespread). So e.g. use "á" if you want it to be pronounced [a] etc.
I never experienced any of what you say as a child. We travelled internationally a number of times, never had anyone tell us she wasn't my mom or anything.
I am not sure what you mean about the money thing. My mom was on my accounts when I was a kid (with different last names) so she could send me money. As an adult, I can't see how sending money would be an issue. My mom and I transfer money to each other fairly often still ($70k recently, went through fine).
I did not stay in my home town. Not sure how they would be relevant.
Again, most people would assume (if they assumed anything) that my parents were divorced, which is incredibly common. Half my friends had different last names from their siblings and/or parent. Blended families are incredibly common.
I am now a dad of two. They have my last name, while my wife (their mom) has a different name. Again, never a problem at doctors or school or anything. They always make you fill out your full name and relationship. Again, super common to have different last names here im California.
I think part of it was because the hospital I was born at was renamed just before I was born, and then demolished not too long after. I've had it trip things up before remembering to mention the original hospital name. Everyone seems generally familiar with the bullshit now, just a matter of remembering to bring it up because they're expecting it.
The kidnapping thing has nothing to do with names, if you only have one parent every country has their rules and you should check them out ahead of time.
As you point out, being the parent doesn't really matter in that case, it needs to be proven that both parent agree on the kid leaving the country.
Passports have your parents name, this might cause the clerk to do a double check to make sure but unless losing you or your children documents you will never run into this. Or if you are travelling without passports (which is okay between some countries) and using documents (like birth certificates) in different languages
But most people moving in don't cut all ties with their home country nor never touch their passport again I think.
Again, a huge percentage of the population has divorced parents, plus all the kids born out of wedlock. That is like half the population that already don’t have the same last name as at least one of their parents. Everyone who deals with the population is going to encounter this situation every day. They aren’t going to be surprised or confused by a kid with a different name as their parent.
But I wouldn’t bother memorising that and every other possible way that the other person has to press the keys depending on their keyboard layout and operating system. I’d just tell people to put u instead.
Many countries don't let you change your name at all unless you have an extremely strong reason to do so. Others have strict requirements on what an acceptable name is, and foreign-sounding names are often not allowed. Denmark straight up gives you a whitelist of allowed names to choose from.
My first name is an old family name. I’m the 8th to have it. My kid’s the 9th. I go by my middle name. My mom and dad and sisters call me that. My wife calls me that. My doctor calls me that. My first name would be an AKA, an alias. Literally no one calls me by that name.
And that’s why my credit union is one that would issue me a debit card in my legal name, which is to say my legal name. Other banks have strict rules to call me by my alias, so I don’t use them.
Side note: I’m way sympathetic to people who’ve changed their names and want to be called something else. Use my first name with me and I know you’re someone who doesn’t know the first thing about me. You’re a stranger. I don’t identify with it at all.
I will say though, I'm perfectly fine with people not being able to pronounce my name, and I do expect the same courtesy in return. I'll give it my best shot, but if it's not happening, it's just not happening.
Whatever the outcome, I'm just pleased that that particular conversation has come to an end.
It's hard to square this with all of the frustration you're expressing in your other comments.
But that’s not really the point. No matter how many keyboard shortcuts the clerk at the DMV memorizes there is always going to be some text that they just cannot reproduce accurately. Whether it’s an accented character from the exotic land of Spain or some real Zalgo, something is going to get lost. No individual human can correctly deal with all possible textual forms.
Answering your question - basically, this comes down to the traditions of the languages.
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Макконахи,_Мэттью
https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Метью_Макконагі
https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Матю_Макконъхи
(It's a more general question, too, is John Juan when he's in Mexico?)
Although it's not quite that simple because the original version of Cyrillic actually has a bunch of extraneous letters that are there solely to represent the distinctions in Greek; in some cases, distinctions that were themselves historical in Greek by that time even. For example, three letters for /i/: I (corresponding to iota), И (corresponding to eta), and Ѵ (corresponding to upsilon), all of which were already pronounced the same in contemporary Greek, and this carried over to Slavic languages as well.
In other cases the distinction became nativized though. E.g. Greek theta, already pronounced as /θ/ in Greek, became the Cyrillic Ѳ - but the closest they could get to pronounce it was [f], and so it came to have the same meaning as Ф, and eventually Ѳ was just dropped as unneeded. Thus e.g. transliteration of Matthew is Матфей, and a bunch of other words where most European languages have "t" or "th" sounds have "ф" in East Slavic languages: e.g. "arithmetic" is "арифметика". But then some words were borrowed into Russian from Latin as well, or from other languages that borrowed them via Latin, and so sometimes theta became /t/: "mathematics" - "математика".
For the biblical Jesus, the situation is even worse. His name was probably originally יֵשׁוּעַ, and should therefore have been Yeshua to us users of the modern day Latin alphabet. But instead his name was adapted to Greek linguistic conventions as Ἰησοῦς (Iēsoûs), and from there transliterated into Jesus.
And then people wrote the texts that would become the New Testament in Greek, because it was the dominant language around the Eastern Mediterranean.
The name itself is, of course, originally Roman, and it's also the name of many Christian saints, so basically every Christian country (not even necessarily a Western one) will be aware of it and have some version of it; for Polish that's be "Anton", I think, same as in Russian.
Till the '90s at least there was an unofficial convention of anglicizing our surnames using the masculine form, ending up with things like Eleni (Helen) Papadopoulos, which in Greek sounds like a grammatical monstrosity.
Other surnames were commonly mangled in weird ways - Nicholas Metropolis (of the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm) surname was Μητρόπουλος (Mitropoulos). Metropolis is quite near phonetically but grammatically makes no sense in Greek.
Slovene, which has roughly the same gender and case as other Slavic languages manages to not have gendered surnames. So, e.g., Pirc Musar and her husband Aleš Musar have identical surnames. Czech, on the other hand, will cheerfully rename Hillary Clinton to Hillary Clintonová, applying their rules for gendered surnames to foreigners when writing in Czech.
is a total non-issue. You can't, in any country I'm aware of, choose absolutely any name you want.
Want a name that is offensive in your language? Your country probably won't let you do that, but some other one might, and yours still needs to accept that name as valid.
You can't just go to another country and change your name there, but if you have dual citizenship, you can usually change it in either one, and the other one needs to respect that.
For example, if you're male, and decide to change your name to Sarah, you totally can - but don't be surprised when people assume you're a woman.
And there are many countries, of which you are unaware, that do have pretty strict laws about what you are and aren't allowed to name your children. Iceland is the one that springs to mind off the top of my head. As I recall, Germany also has some limitations.
> You can't, in any country I'm aware of, choose absolutely any name you want.
Like in Germany can you name your kid "The Holocaust Didn't Happen"? No right?
My point was governments do this all the time and it is a far cry from fascism. Elsewhere in the thread, it is mentioned that often times you have to compromise when registering a name in a different country (for instance, if the language does not contain a phoneme used in your name). In that case, you have to conform to the country's culture and language. Under that lens, banning names that violate cultural norms is not so crazy.
Yes, people (specifically women) with strong opinion on the suffix of their name exist and proper solution of government is to butt off that decision. This is no the norm worth keeping by force.
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1. Or maybe the Vetus Latina, I can’t claim enough authority over early Biblical translations to say with any certainty. And perhaps some other non-Western translation would have priority in making the Joshua/Jesus distinction.
2. My grand strategy for making these sorts of cross-lingual comparisons is to use the “other projects” links from Wikipedia which is also a great way of getting more accurate translations for somewhat niche terminology than machine translation or dictionaries can offer.
Egyptian mythology would like a word with you. Specially the part where Isis created a snake to bite Ra so that she could learn his true name. But yea, adapting names to foreign languages was a normal thing until recently.