"""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]"""
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelsrecht
[edit] In Leonardo's case perhaps not but still i wish to elaborate a litte on the situation here.
Seriously, though, it just feels apropos.
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.
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.
Typical Portuguese names have around 5 names, two first names and three surnames from both parents.
In fact your description fits quite well how they are used in Portugal, plus a few other nuances.
So, Heinrich August Schmidt has a last name / family name (Schmidt) and two first names / given names.
*"you are" meaning you'd be a German citizen with a German passport.
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.
This is possible because you can make a “name declaration” where you choose to apply the naming law of another EU country.
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.
(Although probably a lot more than I know about.)
Someone tell the Encyclopædia Britannica.
Or that æ is a character formed by combining two separate letters?
Both support the idea that Æ is not a letter in the modern English alphabet.
Unless Musk tries to name future kids in Emoji, European nations can probably already cope with any of this sort of thing.
Good question about the partner; I guess that a narcissist can pair well with a very passive person (or maybe another narcissist).
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.
> That said, Æ should probably be allowed
This may cause all sorts of issues, from typing a letter to issuing a passport.
Else than that, exactly what I was thinking.
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?
You’ve never interacted with the government or a large corporation, have you?
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?
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.
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).
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 English, I'm pretty sure the ae digraph is always pronounced as /i/, so calling it a dipthong would probably confuse most people.
[1] merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ligature