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Comment by dakdak | Hacker News Reader

This is unrelated to the actual link, but I am always surprised by the English language tendency to - for the lack of a better word - smash names together.

Yann LeCun is called Yann Le Cun [0] in French, but "Le" and "Cun" are smashed together in English. Lafayette [2] is of course called La Fayette [3]. Du Pont becomes DuPont, and so on.

[0] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yann_Le_Cun

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yann_LeCun

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_du_Motier,_Marquis_de_...

[3] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_du_Motier_de_La_Fayett...

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Two word surnames are unusual in English, and the "Le", "La" etc. could easily be misinterpreted as a middle name, leading to wrong names like "Yann Cun". English surname prefixes like "Mac", "Mc", "Fitz", "O" [1] are generally attached to the name that follows (sometimes with the second part capitalised, sometimes not), so there is an old and widespread convention being followed here. Nowadays it's easier to search for or use as a username too.

Yann LeCun spells his own name like that: http://yann.lecun.com/

[1] These are actually Celtic originally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_onomastics#Surnames

Yann Le Cun modified the spelling of his name to Yan LeCun in English by himself.

[No, Your Name can't possibly be pronounced that way] http://yann.lecun.com/ex/fun/index.html#gellman

Well there's about 1.5M Portuguese nationals and/or descendants in France and the French still can't figure out our naming system or account for it in their bureaucracy, so I'm not sure that the anglos stand out in that regard. Only 200 years ago a Pedro became Pierre upon moving to Paris then Piotr after a couple days in Moscow and everybody was fine with that.

My wife and I decided to have our kid in Portugal so he could get both of our surnames without adding hyphens or changing our own surnames. If we had opted to have him in Germany we would have all had to adopt a single (probably hyphenated) "family name".

I'm sorry, Mr Firstname Lastname, you can only have two names and you cannot have spaces in your names.

this is a good opportunity to revive this [1], for the people who haven't had the fun of reading it yet! :)

[1]: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

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