The government ate my name (opens in new tab)

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.

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-...

(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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

I technically mispronounce my own name, and always have. Same thing happened, just a generation or two up.

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.

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.