In the most pragmatic sense, as in "what should you put in the family name field in legal contexts", then "Guðmundsdóttir" is her family name
E.g. her passport will have that value under "Surname".
And if she found herself in Iceland, in any paper where Björk would write down "Guðmundsdóttir", Taylor Swift would write "Swift", not "Scottsdóttir".
However, if she moved to Iceland, at a time when they still used phone books, people would look in the phonebook under "T" for "Taylor", as they'd look under "B" for "Björk", as in Icelandic society the "surname" doesn't have the same importance, given it changes every generation and isn't passed on like it is in other societies.
That their phone book chooses to use a different name for sorting doesn't change this, and given the nature of the second name, it would hardly be more efficient to use one or the other.
https://en.ja.is/?q=bj%C3%B6rk%20gu%C3%B0mundsd%C3%B3ttir&pe...
Obviously, there are a lot more John Smiths...
Checking Google.com autocomplete, Bjork is returned for the substring "bjo" and Swift is returned for the substring "t". Making her the eponymous global entity for that entire letter. Her father should renaming himself Scott Taylorsdad.
This seems unlikely. Taylor is a popular-enough millennial name that there must be many women (and more than a few men) named that. If we all ran around using only first/given names, we would certainly discover the need for disambiguation. Even Bjork is nowhere near unique. You didn't think they were the only people to have those names, did you? Disambiguation isn't about whether Google returns the most popular search for a given name, it's about what you need when you're not looking for the most popular target. This is plainly obvious, and a little disturbing that you could find cause to argue about it. The redditification of HN marches onward inevitably.
By the way, you are misspelling the name. The dots are not decoration, it's a different letter.
Edit: But I guess you know that, and o is just easier to type.
Compare French é and è, different vowels with different spellings, to pinyin é and è, identical vowels with different diacritically-marked tones. The French vowels don't have diacritics any more than i and j do.
That's a graphemic definition of "letter". There is an alternative, collation order, but in Icelandic that will also tell you that o and ö are two different letters, and ö sorts after þ while o sorts before it.
This is apparently different in Icelandic, where indeed ö is considered a separate letter, not an o with an umlaut/two dots. But this is simply a convention of Icelandic typography - German for example also uses ö in certain words, but they do consider it an o with an umlaut.
Some examples (please correct me if I've mistaken anything):
(Modern) English: 26 letters; A-Z. ÆÐÞŒǷȜſꝛ are no longer letters, replaced with alternative letters or digraphs
French: 26 letters; A-Z. ÀÂÇÉÈÊËÎÏÔÙÛÜŸ are letters with diacritics. Æ and Œ are digraphs
German: 26 letters; A-Z. ÄÖÜ are letters with diacritics. ẞ is a ligature
Dutch: 26 letters; A-Z. IJ is a digraph
Spanish: 27 letters; A-Z + Ñ. LL is a digraph
Danish, Norwegian: 29 letters: A-Z + ÆØÅ
Swedish, Finnish: 29 letters; A-Z + ÅÄÖ. Finnish Š and Ž aren't letters and are replaced with digraphs
Icelandic: 32 letters; A-Z - CQWZ + ÁÉÍÓÚÝ + ÐÞÆÖ (all letters)
Hungarian: 44 letters; A-Z + ÁÉÍÓÖŐÚÜŰ + Cs, Dz, Dzs, Gy, Ly, Ny, Sz, Ty, Zs (all letters)
My own language has several diacrititics that completely change the pronunciation (ă for schwa, â and î for a vowel that has no equivalent in English, ș for sh, ț for the zz from pizza), and is otherwise very phonetically written. Still, when writing in informal contexts on English keyboards, people generally just use a/i/s/t and rely on context to make it clear which word is meant. In old SMS writing, they would sometimes use sh and tz, but still a/i. So even though the diacritics fundamentally change pronunciation, and make a few words indistinguishable, they are not critical to the understanding of a text and local readers don't fully require them.
I mentioned both phenomena. On the fundamentals, the letters are separate; that is the conclusion you'd come to, for French éè or Icelandic oö, by studying the writing system. According to formal authority, the two French letters are one and the same. This is a mistake of fact, but that happens all the time. (Compare French aà, where they're formally identical letters and the fundamentals tell us that the formal statement is correct. You might also compare 20th-century Spanish, in which "ch" and "ll" were formal letters that collated differently from the sequences "c-h" and "l-l". Again that agreed with the facts of the language; I believe the collation order was changed for the benefit of computers.)
And as I mentioned and you agreed, in the case of Icelandic the facts on the ground and the formal statement by authority are in agreement, so there isn't a case to be made that o and ö might be considered the same letter.
This is the part we most disagree on. In my opinion, there is no fundamental definition of a letter, or at least the fundamental definition is graphical, entirely unrelated to pronunciation. By my definition, é è ö are fundamentally combinations of diacritical marks applied to a base letter (e, for the first two; o for the second).
And the reason I don't think there is any link between letters and their pronunciation is that letters are just not pronounced in a single way, regardless of any extra marks on them. In French in particular, e can be pronounced ə, such as in "sucre"; it can be pronounced œ such as in "me"; it can be pronounced "ɑ̃" such as in "Rouen"; it can be pronounced "e" such as in "chanter" (which is the same sound that é usually marks); or it can be pronounced as ɛ such as in "elle" (the first e). All of these are extremely common, not some obscure phonetics of one particular word.
Also, another reason we can see the accents are diacritical marks and not separate letters is the history of how they came about. French orthography has a bunch of rules about how different other letters modify the pronunciation of "e". The accents were added in those places where the regular rules aren't otherwise followed. So we spell the infinitive "chanter" and the second person indicative "chantez", because with the final "r" or "z" it's clear that the "e" is pronounced as "e", but we spell the participle "chanté" (pronounced identically) to distinguish it from "chante".
Why is it Travissdottir but not Travissson?
son = male child
But I should've checked, because I've looked it up now, and "daughter of Magnús" should be Magnúsdóttir. So we'd get Travisson / Travisdóttir.
That is also why passports have a surname field but not a family name field. Not everyone has a surname but conventions to deal with this vary.
Similarly, passports use the terminology given name because not everyone has been christened and not everyone has a first name - for example I don't.
> E-Mail is first name at my domain.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/first-na...
the name that was given to you when you were born and that comes before your family name
If given name or surname comes first is regional. Where I come from (Bavaria) traditionally the surname comes first, so even by that metric I wouldn't have a first name.
Source:
Die Reihenfolge der Vornamen stellt keine Rangfolge dar. Nach höchstrichterlicher Rechtsprechung (BGH, Beschluss vom 15. April 1959 – IV ZB 286/58) steht es in Deutschland dem Namensträger frei, zwischen seinen standesamtlich eingetragenen Namen zu wählen.
[..]
Die in der Geburtsurkunde eingetragenen Vornamen dürfen von den Namensträgern im privaten Rechts- und Geschäftsverkehr nach Belieben genutzt werden und sind gleichberechtigt.
I don't see how changing "first" to "given" lessens the insult to those N - 1 godfathers.
And having "multiple first names" is not that rare.
But by these definitions a middle would also be a first name, which is confusing.
[1] the name that was given to you when you were born and that comes before your family name
Example: https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F882?la...
Can you give your child several first names?
There is no rule on the number of first names of the child.
However, the registrar may consider that the multiplicity of first names is contrary to the best interests of the child.
FYI Any first name entered in the birth certificate can be selected as common first name, whatever his order.
Try telling that to Queen Victoria.
Perhaps in genealogy circles your definition applies. But it's certainly not how the word (well, expression?) is used in common language in English, and I bet in other languages either.
(Granted, maybe there was a communication gap there; maybe it would only be required of any children we had there?)
But as sibling comment says, that’s been dropped.
For surnames, anyone (including Icelanders) is allowed to use a family name if they have a claim to one, which is defined as having a parent or a grandparent carrying that name as a surname. So foreigners with family names can pass those to their children if they like and skip the patronym.
> E.g. her passport will have that value under "Surname".
Icelandic passports don't have a separate field for "Surname": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_passport#/media/File...
I may be missing your point but there is a "Surname" field in that photo, just above "Given names".