What's also fun are alphabet differences. Try to interact with the Greek government and they might ask you to spell your name using only their characters. An interesting challenge when your name contains sounds that don't exist in the local language (sh, hu).
One falsehood I just ran into myself when booking a parking spot at the airport: "all parts of a name start with a capital letter". This isn't true for Dutch names with "van de", "van der" etc, which this site "corrected" to start with capitals. So silly to have a system "correct" my own name and get it wrong.
This happens to Irish/Scottish names too, such as McDonald, Mc being 'son of' in Gaelic language; the capital letter after Mc is wrongly changed to a lowercase letter.
Another very frustrating issue I run into, is hyphens not being allowed. My firstname and surname both have hyphens, and they are very common even in English based names.
A Russian friend living in Japan noted that, at least as of a decade ago, a decent number of government services (for citizens) allowed something like 6 characters max for the entire name. This is because Japanese names are normally written compactly in Kanji, but it becomes a problem when your name is 15 Katakana or 25 Latin characters long.
"Константин Константинович Константинопольский" is a somewhat popular example of what one's design (graphical, computer system, whatever) should realistically allow for.
When I moved to Japan in 1983, not much was computerized and I was able to use my preferred short version of my name--eight letters or five katakana, surname last in both cases--for nearly everything. But over the years more and more places started requiring that names be input into labeled fields, which would reverse the given-name surname order. And many places started to insist on the same name as on my passport--nineteen letters, eleven or twelve katakana, depending on how I wrote it. Many input forms don't allow so many characters, none that I have encountered distinguish first from middle names, and there's usually no way to link that long name to the short name that I have been using for work and in daily life for more than forty years. It's a constant annoyance, not just for me but for other people.
This also usually applies to bank accounts, they have a character limit of around 16 characters for the whole name in most banks.
Of course it's not explicited in most places as 16 chars for a standard Japanese name is an exception, and some applications will silently cut when sending to their backend.
It has always been ridiculous, but getting more and more since everything much match each other perfectly. MyNumber, bank, credit card, residence card and passport... There are a few services I outright can't use because my name doesn't fit in their system, and this is after weeks of phone calls with real people. (Note, it's Rakuten iDeco I'm talking about here)
Yeah. Slavic names are fun here. Polish names are already long due to their di- and tri-graphs, and transliterated Russian and Ukrainian names can easily eat up the "maximum character count" if you have a lot of sibilants in your name. And that's before you meet with someone who has to try and stumble over the various zh, sh and sch sounds.
> As someone who also has two family names, I always dread questions for my "last name".
I feel the same about anything that doesn't ask about my middle name. I end up constantly see emails with 'Hi/Dear First-Name Middle-Name', which nobody calls me, but if you want my full name as written in my passport, it's got to be there somewhere.
It'd be much better if they instead asked for 'Legal name (what's written in your passport)' and 'Nickname (what you want us to call you)', although I suspect many would fill in an actual nickname in that second box and be mad that the service 'needs' that, or doesn't treat them with the proper respect, when you could just fill in Dr. Robert Smith there and it wouldn't matter in the slightest.
I've considered changing my name to a more simplified version with just two names, but I'm expecting it to be a hassle, and there's a social aspect to it, which I'm not sure I want to deal with. But with every day that passes, the sunk cost becomes bigger.
Yeahhh currently considering going through the legal name-change process to move one of my family names to a middle name or something. It's made all the worse by the fact that my parents didn't always use both family names when I was growing up, so some legal documents disagree on what my "last name" is.
I can sympathize, the Spanish naming system makes things legitimately complicated sometimes. My wife has a Spanish style name Firstname(s) Fathername Mothername. But very very often she just goes by Firstname Fathername but it's not technically her legal name and is confusing in the non Spanish world because people assume otherwise that Mothername is her last name.
So for our son we decided to try to skip any confusion by doing what you are alluding to, and making her Fathername into his middle name, and giving him just my last name, in the English style.
And it worked, sort of, but then we discovered it was absolutely not legal to do that in my wife's country of origin. So kind of hilariously his registration in that country is: Firstname Mothername Fathername Mothername.
They forced us to repeat the middle name as part of his last name too. Just ridiculous. I thought at the least they would allow us to reverse them, but no.
The author there reads the point "Two different data entry operators, given a person’s name, will by necessity enter bitwise equivalent strings on any single system, if the system is well-designed" by thinking in terms of erroneous spelling, but also relevant is encoding issues such as lookalike characters.
"Sh" to "s" is simple enough. Sounds horrible to my ears, but maybe not to someone named Stavros ;). I've also been told that the double-p of Boppre looks alien in Greek.
And the "hu" syllable (like the sound an owl makes) was a genuine challenge. I think we went with χού. And now that my name is in the system, that's forever with this spelling, I guess.
It's just a syllable of the whole name, which is a German surname in a certain old dialect. And its pronunciation has been mangled after 150 in a country that can't pronounce it properly, so it's a mess all around.
I ask because usually hu is two sounds, so it would be transliterated as two letters. If you mean it used to be hü, then yes, you'd lose the umlauts in the transliteration, and it would just become "χου", with a hard h, not an aspirated one.
A question for any Portuguese or Spanish speakers here, which I think are languages and cultures in which these sorts of name patterns are common - when you see a name like "Roberto Antonio Ferreira De Almeida", is it obvious where the "given" name stops, and the "family name" starts?
I'm guessing in this case it's fairly obvious, since I'm guessing Ferreira is analogous to something like Smith, but are there names where it's not obvious?
And are things like middle names even a thing there? Or is it all "given name consisting of several words"?
Brazilian here. Around these parts, middle names are not a thing. They don’t show up in forms, and also aren’t expected to exist.
When the names before the family names are multiple, we call them “nomes compostos” (composed/combined names). There are very common combinations, such as “Carlos Eduardo” and “Maria Clara”.
If someone named “Maria Clara Guimarães Schindhelm” fills out a form, they’ll say their given name is “Maria Clara”, with the rest being the surname.
Knowing where the given name ends is an exercise in pattern recognition. We have a sense of what’s a given name, and a sense of what’s a surname. It’s an imperfect system, though: some families have surnames that are also used as first/given names (a common one is “Francisco”).
Not ambiguous really. You know it's <first> (<second/middle>) (<third (rare)>)? (<dad's surname>) (<mom's surname>) and names are typically a single WORD, but may (rarely) have a prefix like De/Della (except for the first name).
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Well, this guys mentions they treat "Roberto Antonio" as a single name, and not as a first and second/middle name. I don't see it that way (Spanish, Chile). Here there's a lot of way too common first names (María, José), so most go by both or just he second one, but legally they just have a common first name (and thus, many systems use both names to avoid confusion over mail and email).
Yes. Having 4 names are quite common in Portugal, specially in certain areas. The names are usually structured like this: G1 G2 FM FF
G1 and G2 are given names. Usually 2 "first names" that you see in english, but there's common combos and sometimes there's a word joining them. Examples: "Maria Jesus" vs "Maria de Jesus". Some names are more common to be put first, but almost every name can be put in any order, example: "José António" vs "António José".
FM and FF are easy. FF is the family name of your father (your father's FF), and FM is the family name from your mother (your mother's FF).
Where I was raised 99% of my friends had 4 names structured like this, I only knew a few that didn't. When I moved to Lisbon the 3 name structure was much more common, dropping the second given name.
In Portugal there's rules for naming your kids (at least there were when I lived there), but I think in Brazil such rules don't exist. The author is brazillian but his name seems to follow the traditional portuguese naming style, as you guessed his name in english could be translated to "Robert Anthony Smith of Almeida" (Almeida is a portuguese town).
FF is your "first last name" and FM is your "second last name".
FF is your father first last name (his FF).
And FM is your mothers first last name (hers FF).
The FF FM order was how it used to be (at least in Chile). Now, when the first kid of a given couple is born, that couple choose the order (FF FM or FM FF). In any case, is always the first last name of the parents, and the chosen order must be used for all kids in common between them.
In my experience, every compound given name is made of very traditional names (with some specific combos like Roberto Antonio and Maria Eduarda being especially popular), so it has always been clear where the given name stops.
Though I wouldn't completely rule out a name being ambiguous, either because the family name is strangely casual, or because the parents made a bold choice.
Usually it is obvious, but sometimes you'll find weird combinations (or surnames that are usually names) that can throw you off.
The trick (both for Portuguese and Spanish) is to treat the last two words as the family name and whatever precedes it as the name. That works fine until you find an Argentinian :P
I have this weird thing about a birthday -- for some reason, I was assigned a different birth date in NHS records in the UK compared to the one I have in my native Finland. I want to believe it has something to do with electronic systems transacting with different countries' systems (I noticed this difference soon after I exchanged my driver license) -- and I would have indeed born on a different day if it'd been the UK. But, I would assume this to be such a well-known issue with people who migrate, that it must just been just a typo. Doesn't stop me from believing though.
My German residence permit cut 10 centimeters off my height. Typos on the address registration form (which is printed by the resident, then typed back into a computer by a civil servant) frequently has typos too.
Did they really take the time of birth into consideration? I suppose that could be an issue with poorly made electronic data exchange, passing along the time and timezone for a field which should be just for the date.
I've always wondered about a woman, Mary Jones, marrying Tom Smith and deciding to hyphenate her last name with Mary Jones-Smith. But then she has a daughter Sally Jones-Smith who meets and marries John Alexander-Wabasha and wants to hyphenate her name as Sally Jones-Smith-Alexander-Wabasha.
As problematic as national IDs and related things are are, I do someone wish my country would just assign me a universal identity number and let me use that for all government documents.
Names are just too deeply personal to impose someone else's rules on them.
When we named our daughter, we decided to ensure that she’d have a simple FirstName LastName with no middle name. My wife’s middle name is frequently stapled onto her first and it causes no end of pain.
There is some affordance available for representing various family members: her Chinese name can easily have different characters for them that have nothing to do with her actual name.
Sweden actually removed middle names. I believe now you can have 1–2 last names, 1+ first names and 0 middle names. You can choose a given name that you are called which can be different than the first names but usually isn’t.
This causes problems with forms and at airports that don’t allow for Swedish name rules.
Seems about as complex as time zones - that is to say, it requires far more thought than any of us realistically put in.
Apparently the Japanese just… chose family names at some point in the late 1800s. They all had to, basically overnight as far as these things are considered.
I'm obliged to mention Falsehoods Programmer Believe About Names: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... . As someone who also has two family names, I always dread questions for my "last name".
What's also fun are alphabet differences. Try to interact with the Greek government and they might ask you to spell your name using only their characters. An interesting challenge when your name contains sounds that don't exist in the local language (sh, hu).
One falsehood I just ran into myself when booking a parking spot at the airport: "all parts of a name start with a capital letter". This isn't true for Dutch names with "van de", "van der" etc, which this site "corrected" to start with capitals. So silly to have a system "correct" my own name and get it wrong.
This happens to Irish/Scottish names too, such as McDonald, Mc being 'son of' in Gaelic language; the capital letter after Mc is wrongly changed to a lowercase letter.
Another very frustrating issue I run into, is hyphens not being allowed. My firstname and surname both have hyphens, and they are very common even in English based names.
A Russian friend living in Japan noted that, at least as of a decade ago, a decent number of government services (for citizens) allowed something like 6 characters max for the entire name. This is because Japanese names are normally written compactly in Kanji, but it becomes a problem when your name is 15 Katakana or 25 Latin characters long.
"Константин Константинович Константинопольский" is a somewhat popular example of what one's design (graphical, computer system, whatever) should realistically allow for.
When I moved to Japan in 1983, not much was computerized and I was able to use my preferred short version of my name--eight letters or five katakana, surname last in both cases--for nearly everything. But over the years more and more places started requiring that names be input into labeled fields, which would reverse the given-name surname order. And many places started to insist on the same name as on my passport--nineteen letters, eleven or twelve katakana, depending on how I wrote it. Many input forms don't allow so many characters, none that I have encountered distinguish first from middle names, and there's usually no way to link that long name to the short name that I have been using for work and in daily life for more than forty years. It's a constant annoyance, not just for me but for other people.
This also usually applies to bank accounts, they have a character limit of around 16 characters for the whole name in most banks.
Of course it's not explicited in most places as 16 chars for a standard Japanese name is an exception, and some applications will silently cut when sending to their backend.
It's as fun as you can imagine it to be.
Even something as simple as buying a movie ticket can require submitting a name using only Japanese characters.
It has always been ridiculous, but getting more and more since everything much match each other perfectly. MyNumber, bank, credit card, residence card and passport... There are a few services I outright can't use because my name doesn't fit in their system, and this is after weeks of phone calls with real people. (Note, it's Rakuten iDeco I'm talking about here)
> What's also fun are alphabet differences.
Yeah. Slavic names are fun here. Polish names are already long due to their di- and tri-graphs, and transliterated Russian and Ukrainian names can easily eat up the "maximum character count" if you have a lot of sibilants in your name. And that's before you meet with someone who has to try and stumble over the various zh, sh and sch sounds.
> As someone who also has two family names, I always dread questions for my "last name".
I feel the same about anything that doesn't ask about my middle name. I end up constantly see emails with 'Hi/Dear First-Name Middle-Name', which nobody calls me, but if you want my full name as written in my passport, it's got to be there somewhere.
It'd be much better if they instead asked for 'Legal name (what's written in your passport)' and 'Nickname (what you want us to call you)', although I suspect many would fill in an actual nickname in that second box and be mad that the service 'needs' that, or doesn't treat them with the proper respect, when you could just fill in Dr. Robert Smith there and it wouldn't matter in the slightest.
I've considered changing my name to a more simplified version with just two names, but I'm expecting it to be a hassle, and there's a social aspect to it, which I'm not sure I want to deal with. But with every day that passes, the sunk cost becomes bigger.
Yeahhh currently considering going through the legal name-change process to move one of my family names to a middle name or something. It's made all the worse by the fact that my parents didn't always use both family names when I was growing up, so some legal documents disagree on what my "last name" is.
I can sympathize, the Spanish naming system makes things legitimately complicated sometimes. My wife has a Spanish style name Firstname(s) Fathername Mothername. But very very often she just goes by Firstname Fathername but it's not technically her legal name and is confusing in the non Spanish world because people assume otherwise that Mothername is her last name.
So for our son we decided to try to skip any confusion by doing what you are alluding to, and making her Fathername into his middle name, and giving him just my last name, in the English style.
And it worked, sort of, but then we discovered it was absolutely not legal to do that in my wife's country of origin. So kind of hilariously his registration in that country is: Firstname Mothername Fathername Mothername.
They forced us to repeat the middle name as part of his last name too. Just ridiculous. I thought at the least they would allow us to reverse them, but no.
I find this follow on article really helpful: https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers...
It contains concrete examples of each of the ideas listed in the first article.
The author there reads the point "Two different data entry operators, given a person’s name, will by necessity enter bitwise equivalent strings on any single system, if the system is well-designed" by thinking in terms of erroneous spelling, but also relevant is encoding issues such as lookalike characters.
Peter Biľak gives a story on bumping into this for the accent in his name. https://www.typotheque.com/articles/lcaron
Eh you just replace those with the closest analog(s). "Sh" becomes "s", for example.
"Sh" to "s" is simple enough. Sounds horrible to my ears, but maybe not to someone named Stavros ;). I've also been told that the double-p of Boppre looks alien in Greek.
And the "hu" syllable (like the sound an owl makes) was a genuine challenge. I think we went with χού. And now that my name is in the system, that's forever with this spelling, I guess.
Yeah, it'd be χου. Which language is this from?
It's just a syllable of the whole name, which is a German surname in a certain old dialect. And its pronunciation has been mangled after 150 in a country that can't pronounce it properly, so it's a mess all around.
I ask because usually hu is two sounds, so it would be transliterated as two letters. If you mean it used to be hü, then yes, you'd lose the umlauts in the transliteration, and it would just become "χου", with a hard h, not an aspirated one.
A question for any Portuguese or Spanish speakers here, which I think are languages and cultures in which these sorts of name patterns are common - when you see a name like "Roberto Antonio Ferreira De Almeida", is it obvious where the "given" name stops, and the "family name" starts?
I'm guessing in this case it's fairly obvious, since I'm guessing Ferreira is analogous to something like Smith, but are there names where it's not obvious?
And are things like middle names even a thing there? Or is it all "given name consisting of several words"?
Brazilian here. Around these parts, middle names are not a thing. They don’t show up in forms, and also aren’t expected to exist.
When the names before the family names are multiple, we call them “nomes compostos” (composed/combined names). There are very common combinations, such as “Carlos Eduardo” and “Maria Clara”.
If someone named “Maria Clara Guimarães Schindhelm” fills out a form, they’ll say their given name is “Maria Clara”, with the rest being the surname.
Knowing where the given name ends is an exercise in pattern recognition. We have a sense of what’s a given name, and a sense of what’s a surname. It’s an imperfect system, though: some families have surnames that are also used as first/given names (a common one is “Francisco”).
Not ambiguous really. You know it's <first> (<second/middle>) (<third (rare)>)? (<dad's surname>) (<mom's surname>) and names are typically a single WORD, but may (rarely) have a prefix like De/Della (except for the first name).
---
Well, this guys mentions they treat "Roberto Antonio" as a single name, and not as a first and second/middle name. I don't see it that way (Spanish, Chile). Here there's a lot of way too common first names (María, José), so most go by both or just he second one, but legally they just have a common first name (and thus, many systems use both names to avoid confusion over mail and email).
Yes. Having 4 names are quite common in Portugal, specially in certain areas. The names are usually structured like this: G1 G2 FM FF
G1 and G2 are given names. Usually 2 "first names" that you see in english, but there's common combos and sometimes there's a word joining them. Examples: "Maria Jesus" vs "Maria de Jesus". Some names are more common to be put first, but almost every name can be put in any order, example: "José António" vs "António José".
FM and FF are easy. FF is the family name of your father (your father's FF), and FM is the family name from your mother (your mother's FF).
Where I was raised 99% of my friends had 4 names structured like this, I only knew a few that didn't. When I moved to Lisbon the 3 name structure was much more common, dropping the second given name.
In Portugal there's rules for naming your kids (at least there were when I lived there), but I think in Brazil such rules don't exist. The author is brazillian but his name seems to follow the traditional portuguese naming style, as you guessed his name in english could be translated to "Robert Anthony Smith of Almeida" (Almeida is a portuguese town).
Funny, when I saw "FM" and "FF" I interpreted it as "Family Male" and "Family Female." But Father and Mother are those characters gender swapped!
So what happens when father's or mother's last name is already in FF FM form?
FF is your "first last name" and FM is your "second last name".
FF is your father first last name (his FF).
And FM is your mothers first last name (hers FF).
The FF FM order was how it used to be (at least in Chile). Now, when the first kid of a given couple is born, that couple choose the order (FF FM or FM FF). In any case, is always the first last name of the parents, and the chosen order must be used for all kids in common between them.
In my experience, every compound given name is made of very traditional names (with some specific combos like Roberto Antonio and Maria Eduarda being especially popular), so it has always been clear where the given name stops.
Though I wouldn't completely rule out a name being ambiguous, either because the family name is strangely casual, or because the parents made a bold choice.
Usually it is obvious, but sometimes you'll find weird combinations (or surnames that are usually names) that can throw you off.
The trick (both for Portuguese and Spanish) is to treat the last two words as the family name and whatever precedes it as the name. That works fine until you find an Argentinian :P
Pretty normal. My Chinese name is Chinese. Much less friction to pick a 21st-century English name in the anglosphere.
Very American actually. A significant amount of Americans have a surname that was changed or transliterated from another European language.
e.g. President Drumpf.
I have this weird thing about a birthday -- for some reason, I was assigned a different birth date in NHS records in the UK compared to the one I have in my native Finland. I want to believe it has something to do with electronic systems transacting with different countries' systems (I noticed this difference soon after I exchanged my driver license) -- and I would have indeed born on a different day if it'd been the UK. But, I would assume this to be such a well-known issue with people who migrate, that it must just been just a typo. Doesn't stop me from believing though.
My German residence permit cut 10 centimeters off my height. Typos on the address registration form (which is printed by the resident, then typed back into a computer by a civil servant) frequently has typos too.
Did they really take the time of birth into consideration? I suppose that could be an issue with poorly made electronic data exchange, passing along the time and timezone for a field which should be just for the date.
There are plenty of older Polish people living in countries like Belgium who are born in a city that's can be translated to "Blue".
How comes? For the color of the eyes used to be present on Polish ID cards / official documents (maybe still is, dunno).
And a great many people in non-polish speaking countries read the wrong line for "place of birth".
I've always wondered about a woman, Mary Jones, marrying Tom Smith and deciding to hyphenate her last name with Mary Jones-Smith. But then she has a daughter Sally Jones-Smith who meets and marries John Alexander-Wabasha and wants to hyphenate her name as Sally Jones-Smith-Alexander-Wabasha.
Then she has kids that marry.
I knew two hyphenates who got married. They picked one non-hyphenated last name.
As problematic as national IDs and related things are are, I do someone wish my country would just assign me a universal identity number and let me use that for all government documents.
Names are just too deeply personal to impose someone else's rules on them.
When we named our daughter, we decided to ensure that she’d have a simple FirstName LastName with no middle name. My wife’s middle name is frequently stapled onto her first and it causes no end of pain.
There is some affordance available for representing various family members: her Chinese name can easily have different characters for them that have nothing to do with her actual name.
Sweden actually removed middle names. I believe now you can have 1–2 last names, 1+ first names and 0 middle names. You can choose a given name that you are called which can be different than the first names but usually isn’t.
This causes problems with forms and at airports that don’t allow for Swedish name rules.
The general complexity of name changes will never cease to intrigue me.
Seems about as complex as time zones - that is to say, it requires far more thought than any of us realistically put in.
Apparently the Japanese just… chose family names at some point in the late 1800s. They all had to, basically overnight as far as these things are considered.
How do they handle this in Brazil? Is there a standard for which portion of a name shows up on credit cards and ID cards and such?
What would your name be if your father had not named you that?
So Pelé is just a handle then, eh?
It's a nickname: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pel%C3%A9
Great article!, Beto is otherwise an amazing programmer great to see him here.