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> with "X" as a first name and "AE A-XII" as a middle name It sounds as though they allowed the middle name to contain a space, which doesn't match my mental m
by bloak 5y ago
> with "X" as a first name and "AE A-XII" as a middle name
It sounds as though they allowed the middle name to contain a space, which doesn't match my mental model but perhaps that's how they do it in California. It invites the question: do they allow a first name to contain a space, so that ("X", "AE A-XII", "Last Name") and ("X AE", "A-XII", "Last Name") are different names?
EDIT: The funny thing isn't allowing spaces in a middle name; it's have a separate field for middle name(s) at all. Modern passports have just two name fields: "surname" and "given names". Both may contain spaces. But according to images on the web, Californian birth certificates really do have three name fields.
- codetrotter 5y agoMultiple middle names are common in Sweden.
- 0x000000001 5y agoHad a set of twins in my town whose parents were Greek and they had two middle names and I was so fascinated about it as a kid I'll never forget.
- samhw 5y agoIs it that rare? I have two middle names (William Howard) and I never thought much of it. As a kid, I was more amused by a friend of my sister's who had a quadruple-barrelled surname...
- tatersolid 5y agoGeorge Herbert Walker Bush wasn’t a familiar name in your youth?
- hibbelig 5y agoIs "middle name" a separate concept in Sweden? In Germany, there is no middle name, but people can have more than one first name. So, Heinrich August Schmidt has a last name / family name (Schmidt) and two first names / given names.
- n99 5y agoThere are two different definitions of "middle name". Almost every American middle name is a given name or a surname used in the middle.
- wink 5y agoSmall nitpick, if you are* in Germany but have an e.g. Spanish name (e.h. Hector Garcia Gonzalez) then... that's 2 surnames without a dash. I have no idea what happens if you marry or have children, but your example is just the -most basic- version. *"you are" meaning you'd be a German citizen with a German passport.
- rglullis 5y ago> I have no idea what happens if you marry or have children When you marry, you get to define what is going to be the family name and then children born from that marriage get to be registered with that family name. In the case of foreign-born people, they can keep the naming rules from their original country. In the case of the marriage between foreigners from two different countries, you have to choose which rules are you going to follow, but the family name stays fixed. To us (Brazilian marrying a Greek) it was a very interesting process. I have two last family names, and Greek names are gender-conjugated (i.e, the last name changes whether you are a boy or a girl). It the end the simplest thing to do was to just keep only one my last family names.
- jannes 5y agoMy German children have a last name with a space in it (ie. 2 last names, but not with a dash). This also shows up in their German passport. This is possible because you can make a “name declaration” where you choose to apply the naming law of another EU country.
- Pinus 5y agoThe Swedish situation is... confusing. :-) There are first names ("förnamn"), possibly more than one. The one in daily use — not necessarily the first one! — is called "tilltalsnamn" (something like "addressing name"), and is traditionally marked in official paperwork by underlining or with an asterisk. (You know someone has not done their homework when you get junk mail that starts with "Dear <Wrongname>!) Then there used to be middle names ("mellannamn"), which was something put between the first and last names. These were typically used e.g. by people who wanted to have both their own and their spouse's name. These are no longer issued, though those who have them can keep them. Instead, you can now have a double last name, which used to be impossible. (People have sported "double-barrelled surnames" for ages, but they have not, as far as I can understand, been officially recognised, but functioned more like "stage names").
- pjmlp 5y agoNot really, it is quite similar to sourthern countries. Typical Portuguese names have around 5 names, two first names and three surnames from both parents. In fact your description fits quite well how they are used in Portugal, plus a few other nuances.
- Pinus 5y agoThe confusing bit is that the rules about middle names and double surnames have changed at least twice in... my lifetime, which is becoming much longer than I care to think about. :-) I didn't do a very good job of conveying that in my comment.
- hollowcelery 5y agoAny name can contain a space. For example "Ana Maria" is a common first name which contains a space. On official documents, generally a name will be separated into a given name and surname. In this case "<A> <B C>" and "<A B> C" are considered separate names. Source: I have a space in my name and some of my different identity documents have the name as "<A> <B C>" or "<A B> C", which causes all sorts of administrative problems.
- hunter2_ 5y agoDocuments aside, do you consider <B> to be a given name (parent came up with it) or a surname (parent already had it)? If given, do you consider it optional (i.e., middle rather than first)? Sorry in advance for any shortsighted assumptions about the possibilities here!
- CydeWeys 5y agoLeonardo da Vinci is another famous example of a last name with two words in it. It's very common in romance languages. Plus, lots of people in the American south just flat out have two first names or two middle names.
- addingnumbers 5y agoDa Vinci isn't his last name, just like Jesus's last name isn't "of Nazareth" and Cato the Elder's last name isn't "the Elder"
- an_ko 5y agoLast names in many places evolved from that same need to disambiguate between people though. Attach some marker of connection to a place (common in Finland, e.g. Joensuu meaning "mouth of river"), profession (common in Germany and UK, e.g. Müller, Cooper, meaning mill worker and barrelmaker), lineage (common in Iceland, e.g. Grímsson meaning "son of Grímur"), or some other culturally relevant characteristic. Nowadays the meanings of our last names have largely disappeared, so you have countless Coopers who have never touched a barrel in their lives, whose children will be called Cooper also, despite that. I think it's a little sad that so much of what people call us is semantically equivalent to a random UUID with tons of namespace collision. With that in mind, I'd say "da Vinci" is more a last name than most of us have.
- oriolid 5y agoIs there a limit that a person can have only one middle name?
- denton-scratch 5y agoIn practice, yes. I have two middle names; most financial service providers decline to recognise my second middle-name. Same goes for the taxman and my pension provider. It seems that a "full name" is no longer a canonical identifier for a person, just really a kind of nickname; the canonical identifier is now an account-number, employee-ID or whatever.
- michaelt 5y agoThanks to marriage, names were non-canonical before the computer was even invented.
- IIsi50MHz 5y agoAnd thanks to people moving house, or even changing profession, or acquiring some defining trait or accomplishment. With most people being undocumented throughout history, names could be much more fluid, like the way a person's "nickname" may change many times with or without consent.
- IncRnd 5y agoNo. There is not limit. That can by proven by seeing people with multiple middle names or by naming your child with multiple middle names. How could there possibly be a limit? Even with the case where systems can not store or recognize the length of such a name, the middle names themselves are not limited. People's names are not entries in a compiler's symbol table.
- bityard 5y agoMy son has two middle names (one for each grandfather), but he's still very much a minor and so not in very many "systems" yet. (Although probably a lot more than I know about.)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mdaniel 5y agoRelevant and almost as horrifying as the address one: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
- bloak 5y agoWhile we're on the topic... A UK passport has a "surname" field and a "given names" field. But a recent UK birth certificate has a single name field in which the "surname" part is distinguished by being written in capitals, so "Peter James ADAM SMITH" would have a surname consisting of two words. But what if a word consists of a single letter? For example, some Irish surnames look like "O Briain", and I think there is a Vietnamese name that consists of a single vowel, so presumably you can't always tell from the birth certificate which part is the surname.
- occamrazor 5y agoIn Italy there is First Name, Other Names, and Family Name on the birth certificate. All fields can contain spaces (as well as hyphens, apostrophes, and some other diacritics). The legal name however consists of First and Family names only, without the other names. Therefore many people have two names in the First Name field, usually separated by a space. The disadvantage is that in all official forms they have to spell out all the first name(s), no omissions or abbreviations are generally admitted.
- jhugo 5y agoOne nice side-effect of this is that you can have a bit of fun with the Other Names since they're "unofficial". If the child wants to use those names later, they can, if they don't, they can pretend they don't exist. Some friends of ours put "Danger" in their kid's "other names", for example.