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Somewhat related and worth pointing out is that the whole world does not use family names, or the family name as a last name. My wife was annoyed when she came
by alexmingoia 6y ago
Somewhat related and worth pointing out is that the whole world does not use family names, or the family name as a last name.
My wife was annoyed when she came to the US and every form has a “first” and “last” field, but she doesn’t have a last name. Her passport for example, only has a “name” field.
- pmiller2 6y agoIndeed, when I clicked through, I expected one of the comments to already have linked to https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
- aeyes 6y agoSimilar to this, some countries have two first and/or two last names. I had my share of trouble with government forms requiring to input the second names I don't have.
- muzani 6y agoI think it's an "exhaustive" list under the limitations for those who do have a first and last name. Once you expand it to surnames and given names, it's a lot more complex.
- gspr 6y ago> I think it's an "exhaustive" list under the limitations for those who do have a first and last name. It is not. I have a single first and a single last name, both ASCII-safe. I am not on the list.
- OJFord 6y agoNo, 'Ford' is missing.
- simiones 6y agoIt is not exhustive in any sense. There are enormously famous people, like Charles de Gaulle or Jaques Chirac whose last names are apparently not part of the exhaustive list.
- pyuser583 6y agoWhere is she from?
- packet_nerd 6y agoI know Myanmar is one country where basically everyone has just one name, but there are probably others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burmese_names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burmese_names
- alexmingoia 6y agoShe is from Myanmar. In addition to not having family names, people from Myanmar typically have names consisting of 2-4 words. Her name is 4 words. This causes additional issues as many people and systems assume that names are single words. Many web forms won't allow multiple words as first or last name. It's maddening.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- packet_nerd 6y agoI feel for her. My wife was in the exact same situation, like almost everyone in her home country she had just one given name. When we moved here to the states she found it highly annoying and even limited some opportunities. Recently she decided to legally change her name to something that fits in better here. Although it has been an emotional decision for her, she felt she had to as it's very hard to live in the US without a first and last name. Edit: "Annoying" doesn't even begin to cover her experience. Everything from getting a bank account, to buying a car, to getting a marriage license was a whole process of explaining until we were blue in the face, escalating to a manager, being told basically to get lost, etc. etc.. It left her in tears more than once.
- Thorentis 6y agoWhy wouldn't she just use your last name when you got married? Seems like a pretty simple solution.
- packet_nerd 6y agoBurmese women (she's Burmese) aren't used to changing their names at marriage and she found the practice demeaning. We never really considered it beforehand. But, I think if she had fully realized at the time how hard it would be to live here with one name, then yes, she would have taken my last name. You live and learn.
- wtmt 6y agoI don’t get why people still take it for granted that a woman should change her name on getting married and use the husband’s name. People should have the names assigned to them at birth or whatever they’ve changed it to as per their wish. I personally find the changing of names on marriage as an erasure of identity, even if the person is ok with it because of internalization or cultural conditioning.
- Uberphallus 6y agoI find it actually demeaning, but people often couldn't care less. There are laws in France from revolution times [0] that basically set your name in stone because anyone using whatever name they liked without need for any paper trail basically cause administrative and bureaucratic hell. But nowadays even the administration works around that to comply with the tradition with things like "nom d'usage" (you can see it as "lastname nickname"), which is basically allowing you to use another name for non-legal purposes, but people still think it's legal and shove it in every form as regular "nom". I repeatedly heard from people working in HR that a significant amount of the questions they get the first few months of employees are just (married) women complaining about their last name "being wrong" on their payslips simply because they think that's no longer their legal name though it is. [0] Loi du 6 fructidor an II (August 23rd 1794), liberal translation of article 1: no citizen will carry any other name than that of the birth certificate.
- kumaranvpl 6y agoI am from Tamilnadu, India. We don't have a common family name as last name. And our names mostly have single word. Here children add their father's name as last name. And women once get married will have their husband's name as last name. My name is Kumaran and my father's name is Rajendhiran. So, my full name is Kumaran Rajendhiran.
- wtmt 6y agoOne word names are called “mononyms”. Your example is again an example. You may have others around you with the same name but write it as Kumaran R (the initial derived from the first letter of the father’s name or the place of origin). Some may not even use an initial. These naming schemes, which are as valid as any other on the planet, have already caused a lot of trouble for people with PAN cards and Aadhaar (I recommend you read up on those if you aren’t aware).
- Terretta 6y agoThis case isn’t that uncommon! Worldwide, two of the most common naming conventions are: 1. Given name + group descriptor (profession, locality, tribe, etc. such as Jim Baker or Joan Rivers) 2. Given name + parent’s given name and gender (such as Dwayne Johnson or Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir) Iceland is especially fun, as they not only append a parentage name, but alongside -son and -dottir they’ve introduced a gender neutral suffix (-bur), and they don’t want you to make up first names out of the blue! “[Iceland’s] Personal Names Committee maintains an official register of approved Icelandic given names and governs the introduction of new given names into Icelandic culture.” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_Naming_Committee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_Naming_Committee
- wtmt 6y agoIt is quite annoying to see that insistence on last names or family names in most places. In India, which is a single country but has many different languages (22 official and nearly a 1000 unofficial, including dialects) and cultures, I see the same insistence on last name/surname. There are states and districts where mononyms are quite common, but governments insist on first and last name in many forms. I’ve come to believe that those who make up the rules and are in the majority decide everything for others. In India, it’s the people around the national capital who assume that everybody has a last name or that everybody in the country knows Hindi (India has no national language, much to the chagrin of Hindi speakers who seem to believe it is the one). Funnily, I’ve also noticed that the U.S. consulates have a system where they deal with a last name not being available, even when the name has more than one word separated by spaces in it. In such cases, they add “LNU” (Last Name Unknown) in the last name field in visas. In some cases I’ve seen “FNU” (First Name Unknown) too.
- ClikeX 6y agoRelated anecdote. Long ago, lot of forms from American websites wouldn't let me fill in my last name. As it technically contains 3 words. I had to concat "van der" to my last name to finish registration.
- Uberphallus 6y agoAnother anecdote. Colleague last name: O'Donnell. You can already see where this is going. Bonus points: has an email address as "FirstName.O'Donnell"@domain.com which basically works in <1% of the sites though it's completely legal, just because nobody cares about specs. Obviously he has other email addresses. The good thing is he gets 0 spam in that inbox.
- soneil 6y agoI had a similar email address for many years. I kept putting in tickets asking if we could change it, or at least create an alias sans-apostrophe, but never got a reply. Eventually they came to me and asked if I'd mind changing it. I pointed out I'd requested this roughly 10 times by that point, and we discovered their ticket system had been eating it. For bonus points, I'm in Ireland, the one place on earth you'd expect o'names to be handled gracefully.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- MrOxiMoron 6y agothe Netherlands has the reverse, we have last name prefixes (Van, De, Van Der, Van De, ...) which are separate and when sorting on last name they shouldn't be counted, because de V and D become very crowded then.
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- netsharc 6y agoA friend also has the same issue with his passport, but he had survived many years believing his first of 2 names was his first name, and the 2nd name his last. It worked okay until he moved cities (in Germany) and the authorities decided, "According to your passport, these 2 names is your last name, and your first name in our system should be '-'". Luckily, like everything in Germany, there was a form to fill to fix it.