>> 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).

Seen from the other side, a friend of mine called Γωγώ (short for Γεωργία, i.e. Georgia) spelled her name "Roro" when she went to France. The standard transliteration would be "Gogo" but the French would pronounce that like "go-go", whereas they pronounce the "R/r" like Greeks pronounce the "Γ/γ".

And how about all the Greek women who take on their father's spelling of the family name in English-speaking languages (as have I)? E.g. Olympia Dukakis: that's a male form (Δουκάκης); the female is "Doukaki" (Δουκάκη). But, try to explain that to speakers of a language without grammatical genders. Sounds more like a spelling error.

I understand that Icelanding families have a similar problem, with surnames that name the parent, so that if the father's first name e.g. Bjorn, the son's surname would be Bjornsson and the daughter's name would be Bjornsdottir, with the father and mather's surname being whatever -son or -dottir reflects their ancestry. Can cause trouble when going through passport control as a family with underage kids all with different surnames.

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.

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.

> 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 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.

Eh you just replace those with the closest analog(s). "Sh" becomes "s", for example.

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).

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

Very American actually. A significant amount of Americans have a surname that was changed or transliterated from another European language.

I think many people are scared of "being reduced to a number" but I wonder if, psychologically, codes like p7jn8-h would go over better.

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 knew two hyphenates who got married. They picked one non-hyphenated last name.

It can go the other way. My partner has no middle name and recently got a formal letter from the HSE (Irish national health service) addressed to "Sorcha No Name Ní Shúilleabháin"*

*not her actual first and last name to be clear, not doxxing her on HN.

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.

It's a nickname: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pel%C3%A9