Musk wasn’t the first to try to use weird names, but he didn’t quite succeed with that one. Quoth wiki:
"""the name would have violated California regulations as it contained characters that are not in the modern English alphabet,[321][322] and was then changed to "X Æ A-Xii". This drew more confusion, as Æ is not a letter in the modern English alphabet.[323] The child was eventually named "X AE A-XII", with "X" as a first name and "AE A-XII" as a middle name.[324]"""
> 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.
Any 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.
Leonardo 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.
Last 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.
Having a name with "of Region/city/former kingdom/..." is often their last name. Unless you want to claim that these people do not have a last name.
I can understand that in some cultures this might seem weird or antiquated but here in Germany these names are reality. Sometimes people with such names are descendents of royalty and sometimes someones last name "from family-name" is thier last name and happens to historically correspond to one of germany's state names or city names or just a little town.
One a side note: In Germany in 1919-1920 royalty was no longer a legal aspect that changed how laws applied to you[1]. When that happened titles that were reserved for ruling functions (king, grand duke) were removed and all other titles were moved to be part of the persons name (such as prince etc.) and could not be decreed on anyone new. These titles still exist in Germany but are simply naming "conventions" in a formerly royal family.
Correct: his full name as given was "Lionardo di ser Piero da Vinci," meaning more or less Piero's son Lionardo from Vinci. Deriving a childs name from their lineage was incredibly common.
Documents 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!
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.
In 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.
One 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.
The 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").
The 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.
Small 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.
> 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.
Is 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...
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.
And 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.
No. 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.
The EU — which doesn’t include all European nations — has 24 official languages and 3 official character sets. The Danish name for the EU contains an æ (“Den Europæiske Union”). Prior heads of state of current members include Μακάριος Γ΄, with the gamma translating as “III” (i.e. “the third”). The UK has a very relaxed attitude to name changing, hence the story of Mr. Yellow-Rat Foxysquirrel Fairydiddle.
Unless Musk tries to name future kids in Emoji, European nations can probably already cope with any of this sort of thing.
There's actually an increasingly common naming pattern that I think is very weird, but in the end, I just let them do whatever. In the grand scheme of things, having a unique name can really help you stand out, and they can always go by a nickname. It doesn't hurt anything, and it could very well help.
I'm glad California regulators are focusing on the critical issue of what characters may appear in children's names. Does it ever occur to people in government that some things may not be their problem?
That's definitely a reasonable thing for governments to care about, since governments generally need to keep track of people's names in some way or other.
It's probably a good idea if government computers can keep track of the name, so a minimum requirement would probably be "can be represented by unicode glyphs". So attempts like Prince's should probably be disqualified. And even in the unicode set there are characters that may be problematic - Record Separators, Zero Width Space, Pile of Poo emoji springs to mind as examples, even if the later one might be doable. It's hard to address a letter to a person whose name just consists of a mix of different whitespace characters (especially when their neighbor is a different mix whitespace characters). So, yes, government probably should care about this, at least a little bit.
That said, Æ should probably be allowed. It's a standard character in several living languages.
The reason I think that maybe Æ should qualify is that it's not entirely unlikely to occur in immigrants' names anyway (or at least the lower case version). There are systems for transforming such characters to something that appears in passports - my own name has an umlaut, and I've obviously got a passport. I'm not American, so my passport is of course not issued in USA, but I suspect few countries would see a name diversity as great as USA so it can't be a new problem for the authorities there.
Does it occur to you that changing a database schema across an entire state government might incur significant costs and take multiple years to implement? Every courthouse, DMV, hospital, etc. might be running different, decades-old proprietary software, and who knows if the disparate, original contractors are still around.
Why is it my problem to make my children conform to government tracking and enumeration, rather than their problem that my children are hard for them to easily assimilate? Government exists for my children, not my children for government. Their technical problems are their problems, not mine.
And practically, in a world where people cross borders, where people come to this country for refuge and opportunity, how does it make sense to force them all to have only basic English characters in their names?
I'm not asking what is, but why it should be that way. Why should I name my children for the government's convenience? Why are Jürgen, Hafþór, Renée, or Noël unacceptable names?
The government(s) will be happy to receive & evaluate your generous donation of upgrades to the myriad existing record keeping systems, and further generous donations of your time to train all staff on how to enter and search for the additional written characters, so long as the process does not significantly disrupt operations. "Patches welcome!" (^o^)/
But in seriousness: it is their concern because changes that seem minor can require major changes to electronic systems, and allowing special cases that necessitate lookup in ways the electronic systems can't handle (perhaps even requring manual search through hardcopy!) really throw a star-mangled spanner in the works.
Naming is already a special case problem in Japan, where people are accustomed to having no idea how to pronounce most people's names because the parents used non-standard readings of the kanji characters and/or used kanji from a special exempted list of archaic kanji that almost nobody can read. If you're wondering why the government doesn't require people use only the official "common use" kanji, at least just for this one problem, then I should tell it has been tried — enough people raised a fuss about being unable to register their child's "perfect name" that gradually a list of "allowed only in names" kanji was created and expanded.
And if I recall correctly, when registering a name, you can specify a totally unrelated pronunciation using the simpler non-kanji phonetic characters, so even just "common use" kanji are almost "all bets off". A relative few kanji have such common pronunciation in names that they can 'usually' be guessed.
And the problem is the same with many Japanese place-names, having little or no correlation between written form and pronunciation or meaning.
So, why is the spelling of a chosen name any concern to a government? It gets crazy out there, in Name Land. How mäný variatǐons of spelliñg cån ße ællowèd before people give up on pronouncing it?
Why is everyone trying to convince me that handling names is hard for computer systems? That's obvious to everyone, even me.
What's fascinating to me is that none of you consider that government might not need to have a list of everyone it governs, or that such a list might not need to be centralized or computerized. When faced with a facet of humanity that's too complex to be easily reduced to consistent data, private groups either do their best and work with what data they can extract, or else have people handle it, with our flexible, tolerant minds. When government is involved, though, the immediate response is, "We have to force people to be less complex!"
I'm beginning to see technocracy as the biggest threat to a diverse, human, and humane society.
This is actually probably good. My wife has a hyphen in her first name and the amount of government systems including Social Security itself will most of the time result in some validation error when the hyphen is included and it even adds confusion for employees when in an office and their ancient software doesn't even result in an error, it'll just straight up not work and not give them any context on what could be wrong.
My wife and I changed our last names in California when we got married.
There are quite specific rules:
The new name must be in the format {substring of original name 1}{?-}{substring of original name 2}, or you have to go through the much more arduous and expensive full name change process (though you get a 2 for 1 discount).
> as Æ is not a letter in the modern English alphabet.
That specious, meaning appearing true but actually false. It is a diphthong expressed by a ligature of two letters. The claim was never made that a diphthong is a single letter, and it is easily expressed in modern English, in a computer using ascii and outside on a piece of paper.
In latin, æ or ae was a (di)graph for the /ae/ diphthong. In English, it is typically pronounced using the /i/ phoneme, which isn't a diphthong. I have heard it pronounced as /ai/ dipthong, but only rarely.
In English, I'm pretty sure the ae digraph is always pronounced as /i/, so calling it a dipthong would probably confuse most people.
Agreed. That is a very good point about it possibly being just a digraph and not always a diphthong. This depends, however, on the use, since it does sometimes slide and other times is just a ligature. The issues seem to stem from the pronunciation changes and the great vowel shift. As you point out, language is a messy business.
You're correct about that, sort of but not in the sense of language - only for computer definitions. A ligature in language is "a printed or written character (such as æ or ff) consisting of two or more letters or characters joined together" [1]
Need to be careful with that. There was a guy in California a few years back that decided the license plate "NULL" would be a fun joke, and he ended up being charged every ticket issued in the state where the license plate wasn't entered.
I recall pondering the mechanics of this back when I first read about it. Is some software actually replacing an input of "" (empty string) with "NULL"? Or is some comparison so loosely typed that a value of type null is considered equal enough to the string "NULL"?
'' when assigned to a char(1) becomes ' ' (char types are blank padded strings).
'' when assigned to a varchar2(1) becomes '' which is a zero length string and a zero length string is NULL in Oracle (it is no long '')
The conflation of empty string with a real null isn't great, but it doesn't also imply conflation of the string "NULL" which is what I'm trying to figure out. The four-character sequence shouldn't ever be considered something other than a four-character string, except for particular non-user-facing situations such as when actually writing code. Even spreadsheet software, which does all kinds of heuristics to find numbers in strings for example, doesn't treat the string "NULL" as anything other than a four-character string, to my knowledge.
