7 ms·

There's an analogous problem for Russians, and presumably folks from other Slavic-language countries. Our last names are gendered; if Ivan Kuznetsov marries Ele

There's an analogous problem for Russians, and presumably folks from other Slavic-language countries. Our last names are gendered; if Ivan Kuznetsov marries Elena, her last name becomes Kuznetsova. (And their children would have gendered last names, too - little Borya Kuznetsov and little Masha Kuznetsova.) 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.

nradov 1y ago
As a related issue, some Slavic language countries require foreign documents to be transliterated into the Cyrillic alphabet, which doesn't contain exact equivalents for certain English alphabet letters. They usually end up using the closest phonetic equivalent but this often causes bureaucratic hassles.
- pavel_lishin 1y ago
  Now I'm trying to figure out how one would write out Matthew in Cyrillic, which has two phonemes that are as much of a nightmare for Russian-speakers as "ы" and "р" are for English-speakers. "Мэтью", maybe?
  - bombcar 1y ago
    Do you go with the phonetic option, or do you just use the Cyrillic for the name of the writer of the Gospel? (It's a more general question, too, is John Juan when he's in Mexico?)
    - QuantumNomad_ 1y ago
      > is John Juan when he's in Mexico? 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.
      - jltsiren 1y ago
        It's simpler than that. The Koine Greek transliteration became established long before that particular Jesus was born. It was a common name in a region that belonged to various Greek-speaking empires for centuries, at least nominally. The transliteration was based on the pronunciation used at the time, with a masculine suffix to make the name less awkward in Greek. And then people wrote the texts that would become the New Testament in Greek, because it was the dominant language around the Eastern Mediterranean.
        bombcar 1y ago
        It’s also something uniquely modern that we consider a person to have “one true and real name” - something completely unheard of until quite recently.
        tliltocatl 1y ago
        > one true and real name 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.
  - AndriyKunitsyn 1y ago
    Let's not equate Cyrillic to Russian. Cyrillic is also a script of multiple other languages, including Ukrainian, Bulgarian and Serbian (when Serbs feel like using it). Answering your question - basically, this comes down to the traditions of the languages. https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Макконахи,_Мэттью https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Макконахи,_Мэттью https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Метью_Макконагі https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Метью_Макконагі https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Матю_Макконъхи https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Матю_Макконъхи https://sr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Метју_Маконахи https://sr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Метју_Маконахи https://mn.wikipedia.org/wiki/Мэттью_Макконехи https://mn.wikipedia.org/wiki/Мэттью_Макконехи
  - ajxs 1y ago
    My given name is Anthony, and I have this problem. I grew up in Australia, and visit some family in Poland every other year. The Australian pronunciation of my name is particularly incompatible with Polish, so I change it from 'ænθəni' to (something like) 'ɑːntɒni'. The 'æ' sound at the start of my name is totally foreign, and if I start introducing myself in Polish, then say my name the way an Australian would, the entire sentence just sounds too weird. Obviously Polish people are familiar with Western culture, and have probably seen the name before, but it just sounds too strange when used in spoken Polish.
    - int_19h 1y ago
      The sound [æ] is not entirely foreign to Polish and some other Slavic languages. It often shows up as an allophone of /a/ when it's between two "soft" (palatalized) consonants (e.g. the first /a/ in the word "niania"). The problem for us learning it is that it's not a separate phoneme, and worse yet, the environment in which it occurs in Slavic languages doesn't correspond to anything in English - and, conversely, in English it appears in environments where it could only be [a] or [ɛ] in Slavic languages. 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.
      - stratocumulus0 1y ago
        This doesn't happen in my speech, I certainly pronounce both <a>'s as [a] in "niania". [ɛ] is different, it certainly becomes [e] after palatalized consonants. I agree that people cannot tell the difference intuitively, though.
        int_19h 1y ago
        It happens more in fast speech. If you draw out the vowel - as people tend to when they are trying to get a better feel of it - it will end up at [a] even if it doesn't start there. I suspect you'd need to actually record it and then look at the formants to tell for sure.
- VTimofeenko 1y ago
  The transliteration conventions also change over time. Double "e" in my last name has been transliterated into English as "eye" in the past. As a bonus - add permutations with and without patronym. I use up all the fields for alternative names on all the forms.
- int_19h 1y ago
  This is a general problem whenever there's an alphabet mismatch. Unless there's a 1:1 mapping between phonemes in different languages, one always need to come up with some scheme that will necessarily be imperfect, as seen e.g. when transliterating Slavic or Indian names into English. So long as there is a consistent government-mandated or at least government-blessed system, though, they can work things out fine. (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.)
  - lIl-IIIl 1y ago
    Interesting, I thought Russian did that for the same reasons as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihon-shiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihon-shiki system does, which also uses "si" instead of "shi" for シ.
    - int_19h 1y ago
      AFAIK Nihon-shiki is designed to reflect the Japanese kanas and their traditional regular arrangement as close as possible - note that it also uses e.g. "tu" for ツ. 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).
xg15 1y ago
This sounds as if it could slowly erode the whole "gendered surname" concept even in the origin countries (e.g. Russia) 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.
- pavel_lishin 1y ago
  Yep. One thing I forgot to mention is that kids born to Americans here typically inherit the father's last name - so an Elena Kuznetsov is a very real possibility. 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.
- watwut 1y ago
  Gendered name is grammatical construct, literally. But the strong "Elena Kuznetsov" cant exist rules are bad idea, because a.) foreigners exist b.) minorities exists c.) people with strong opinions over how they want to be named exist. They can exist, but sound weird in the language.
  - hiatus 1y ago
    > people with strong opinions over how they want to be named exist. is a total non-issue. You can't, in any country I'm aware of, choose absolutely any name you want.
    - feoren 1y ago
      People's own opinions about what their name is is not a "non-issue", shitty-ass governments or not. Declaring a people's opinions about names stupid and irrelevant (or even illegal) is one of the many ways majorities oppress or even commit slow genocide against minorities.
dale_glass 1y ago
This sometimes also causes problems for the authorities themselves for a change. 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.
- wheybags 1y ago
  There was a hilarious one in Ireland where we were desperatly searching for a prolific polish criminal named "Prawo Jazdy". Which means... driving license. https://www.joe.ie/news/garda-spent-two-years-searching-for-a-criminal-who-didnt-even-exist-838761 https://www.joe.ie/news/garda-spent-two-years-searching-for-...
  - BonoboIO 1y ago
    Same in Germany, the „guy“ was wanted for hundreds of offenses
- pavel_lishin 1y ago
  It's not even necessarily corruption; we address each other by different names depending on context. 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?
  - someuser2345 1y ago
    To be fair, that can be a problem with English too. The short form of Robert is Bob, the short form of Richard is Dick.
Asooka 1y ago
That's a problem within the EU already, no need to travel across the globe. A Bulgarian family moving to Germany would face that exact problem. I hope we can eventually lobby the EU to recognise and allow gendered surnames across the Union, since it is part of our language and culture.
- em-bee 1y ago
  most EU countries if not all of them should already recognize different family names for both partners. where it gets tricky is the children. 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.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
adolph 1y ago
@patio11, I realize "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" [0] does disclaim comprehensiveness, but gendered last names seem a worthwhile inclusion. 0. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
nneonneo 1y ago
Chinese people rarely change their surnames after marriage; kids usually inherit the father's surname and that's it. This has never caused any issues; systems I've interacted with have been totally OK with the idea that the parents can have different surnames from each other.
- cortesoft 1y ago
  Yep, none of the women in my family have changed their name when the got married. Long marriages, kids, and no issues so far.
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  Chinese living in the west also will sometimes adopt a western name.
  - decimalenough 1y ago
    Many Singaporean Chinese IDs have an English name, the dialectal Chinese name, and the Mandarin readings of the same characters, resulting in "Harry Lee Kuan Yew (Li Guangyao)".
  - throwaway2037 1y ago
    > will sometimes adopt a western name Do you mean first name or family name?
    - SoftTalker 1y ago
      A given name/first name, at least in the cases I directly know.
cortesoft 1y ago
> who assume that married couples, and parents/children all have the same last name and hit roadblocks when that expectation does not match reality 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.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- trallnag 1y ago
  I have experienced visa issues due to name differences in papers while traveling between Belarus and Russia. Monetary arguments were necessary to get through. But this was also over a decade ago.
  - poizan42 1y ago
    If the border guards are just looking for an excuse to take a bribe then it doesn't really matter what you do, they'll surely find something anyways.
  - cortesoft 1y ago
    Differences between your name on your passport and your name on your visa? That is completely separate thing. 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.
    - inejge 1y ago
romanhn 1y ago
Funny enough, my wife and her parents all ended up with different variations of their last names in English when immigrating: ending in -ky, -kiy, and -kaya.
DanielHB 1y ago
Me and my wife are from different countries and we didn't change our names specifically because of these kind of problems. Name changes across border-boundaries are a huge pain. (In Sweden the man sometimes adds his wife's last name to his own)

nradov 1y ago

As a related issue, some Slavic language countries require foreign documents to be transliterated into the Cyrillic alphabet, which doesn't contain exact equivalents for certain English alphabet letters. They usually end up using the closest phonetic equivalent but this often causes bureaucratic hassles.

pavel_lishin 1y ago
Now I'm trying to figure out how one would write out Matthew in Cyrillic, which has two phonemes that are as much of a nightmare for Russian-speakers as "ы" and "р" are for English-speakers. "Мэтью", maybe?
- bombcar 1y ago
  Do you go with the phonetic option, or do you just use the Cyrillic for the name of the writer of the Gospel? (It's a more general question, too, is John Juan when he's in Mexico?)
  - QuantumNomad_ 1y ago
    > is John Juan when he's in Mexico? 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.
    - jltsiren 1y ago
      It's simpler than that. The Koine Greek transliteration became established long before that particular Jesus was born. It was a common name in a region that belonged to various Greek-speaking empires for centuries, at least nominally. The transliteration was based on the pronunciation used at the time, with a masculine suffix to make the name less awkward in Greek. And then people wrote the texts that would become the New Testament in Greek, because it was the dominant language around the Eastern Mediterranean.
      - bombcar 1y ago
        It’s also something uniquely modern that we consider a person to have “one true and real name” - something completely unheard of until quite recently.
        tliltocatl 1y ago
        > one true and real name 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.
- AndriyKunitsyn 1y ago
  Let's not equate Cyrillic to Russian. Cyrillic is also a script of multiple other languages, including Ukrainian, Bulgarian and Serbian (when Serbs feel like using it). Answering your question - basically, this comes down to the traditions of the languages. https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Макконахи,_Мэттью https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Макконахи,_Мэттью https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Метью_Макконагі https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Метью_Макконагі https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Матю_Макконъхи https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Матю_Макконъхи https://sr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Метју_Маконахи https://sr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Метју_Маконахи https://mn.wikipedia.org/wiki/Мэттью_Макконехи https://mn.wikipedia.org/wiki/Мэттью_Макконехи
- ajxs 1y ago
  My given name is Anthony, and I have this problem. I grew up in Australia, and visit some family in Poland every other year. The Australian pronunciation of my name is particularly incompatible with Polish, so I change it from 'ænθəni' to (something like) 'ɑːntɒni'. The 'æ' sound at the start of my name is totally foreign, and if I start introducing myself in Polish, then say my name the way an Australian would, the entire sentence just sounds too weird. Obviously Polish people are familiar with Western culture, and have probably seen the name before, but it just sounds too strange when used in spoken Polish.
  - int_19h 1y ago
    The sound [æ] is not entirely foreign to Polish and some other Slavic languages. It often shows up as an allophone of /a/ when it's between two "soft" (palatalized) consonants (e.g. the first /a/ in the word "niania"). The problem for us learning it is that it's not a separate phoneme, and worse yet, the environment in which it occurs in Slavic languages doesn't correspond to anything in English - and, conversely, in English it appears in environments where it could only be [a] or [ɛ] in Slavic languages. 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.
    - stratocumulus0 1y ago
      This doesn't happen in my speech, I certainly pronounce both <a>'s as [a] in "niania". [ɛ] is different, it certainly becomes [e] after palatalized consonants. I agree that people cannot tell the difference intuitively, though.
      - int_19h 1y ago
        It happens more in fast speech. If you draw out the vowel - as people tend to when they are trying to get a better feel of it - it will end up at [a] even if it doesn't start there. I suspect you'd need to actually record it and then look at the formants to tell for sure.
VTimofeenko 1y ago
The transliteration conventions also change over time. Double "e" in my last name has been transliterated into English as "eye" in the past. As a bonus - add permutations with and without patronym. I use up all the fields for alternative names on all the forms.
int_19h 1y ago
This is a general problem whenever there's an alphabet mismatch. Unless there's a 1:1 mapping between phonemes in different languages, one always need to come up with some scheme that will necessarily be imperfect, as seen e.g. when transliterating Slavic or Indian names into English. So long as there is a consistent government-mandated or at least government-blessed system, though, they can work things out fine. (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.)
- lIl-IIIl 1y ago
  Interesting, I thought Russian did that for the same reasons as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihon-shiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihon-shiki system does, which also uses "si" instead of "shi" for シ.
  - int_19h 1y ago
    AFAIK Nihon-shiki is designed to reflect the Japanese kanas and their traditional regular arrangement as close as possible - note that it also uses e.g. "tu" for ツ. 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).

xg15 1y ago

This sounds as if it could slowly erode the whole "gendered surname" concept even in the origin countries (e.g. Russia) 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.

pavel_lishin 1y ago
Yep. One thing I forgot to mention is that kids born to Americans here typically inherit the father's last name - so an Elena Kuznetsov is a very real possibility. 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.
watwut 1y ago
Gendered name is grammatical construct, literally. But the strong "Elena Kuznetsov" cant exist rules are bad idea, because a.) foreigners exist b.) minorities exists c.) people with strong opinions over how they want to be named exist. They can exist, but sound weird in the language.
- hiatus 1y ago
  > people with strong opinions over how they want to be named exist. is a total non-issue. You can't, in any country I'm aware of, choose absolutely any name you want.
  - feoren 1y ago
    People's own opinions about what their name is is not a "non-issue", shitty-ass governments or not. Declaring a people's opinions about names stupid and irrelevant (or even illegal) is one of the many ways majorities oppress or even commit slow genocide against minorities.

dale_glass 1y ago

This sometimes also causes problems for the authorities themselves for a change. 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.

wheybags 1y ago
There was a hilarious one in Ireland where we were desperatly searching for a prolific polish criminal named "Prawo Jazdy". Which means... driving license. https://www.joe.ie/news/garda-spent-two-years-searching-for-a-criminal-who-didnt-even-exist-838761 https://www.joe.ie/news/garda-spent-two-years-searching-for-...
- BonoboIO 1y ago
  Same in Germany, the „guy“ was wanted for hundreds of offenses
pavel_lishin 1y ago
It's not even necessarily corruption; we address each other by different names depending on context. 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?
- someuser2345 1y ago
  To be fair, that can be a problem with English too. The short form of Robert is Bob, the short form of Richard is Dick.

Asooka 1y ago

That's a problem within the EU already, no need to travel across the globe. A Bulgarian family moving to Germany would face that exact problem. I hope we can eventually lobby the EU to recognise and allow gendered surnames across the Union, since it is part of our language and culture.

em-bee 1y ago
most EU countries if not all of them should already recognize different family names for both partners. where it gets tricky is the children. 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.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

adolph 1y ago

@patio11, I realize "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" [0] does disclaim comprehensiveness, but gendered last names seem a worthwhile inclusion. 0. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

nneonneo 1y ago

Chinese people rarely change their surnames after marriage; kids usually inherit the father's surname and that's it. This has never caused any issues; systems I've interacted with have been totally OK with the idea that the parents can have different surnames from each other.

cortesoft 1y ago
Yep, none of the women in my family have changed their name when the got married. Long marriages, kids, and no issues so far.
SoftTalker 1y ago
Chinese living in the west also will sometimes adopt a western name.
- decimalenough 1y ago
  Many Singaporean Chinese IDs have an English name, the dialectal Chinese name, and the Mandarin readings of the same characters, resulting in "Harry Lee Kuan Yew (Li Guangyao)".
- throwaway2037 1y ago
  > will sometimes adopt a western name Do you mean first name or family name?
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    A given name/first name, at least in the cases I directly know.

cortesoft 1y ago

> who assume that married couples, and parents/children all have the same last name and hit roadblocks when that expectation does not match reality 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.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
trallnag 1y ago
I have experienced visa issues due to name differences in papers while traveling between Belarus and Russia. Monetary arguments were necessary to get through. But this was also over a decade ago.
- poizan42 1y ago
  If the border guards are just looking for an excuse to take a bribe then it doesn't really matter what you do, they'll surely find something anyways.
- cortesoft 1y ago
  Differences between your name on your passport and your name on your visa? That is completely separate thing. 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.
  - inejge 1y ago

romanhn 1y ago

Funny enough, my wife and her parents all ended up with different variations of their last names in English when immigrating: ending in -ky, -kiy, and -kaya.

DanielHB 1y ago

Me and my wife are from different countries and we didn't change our names specifically because of these kind of problems. Name changes across border-boundaries are a huge pain. (In Sweden the man sometimes adds his wife's last name to his own)