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Comment by adrian_b | Hacker News Reader

If everyone had two family names, one from mother and one from father, then the two names of child would be chosen one from the two names of the mother and one from the two names of the father. The choice could be random or by preference.

This would match the way how chromosomes are passed from the parents. Neglecting the crossover (whose effect is only that the sequence pairs between which a random choice is made are smaller than the chromosomes), for each pair of chromosomes one is taken from the mother and one from the father. The choice of which of the two chromosomes of the mother and of which of the two chromosomes of the mother are taken, is random.

I believe that this would be a better system for naming people. A random choice of which family name to take from each parent might be preferable, to avoid the reduction in number of the possible family names, if some would be preferred much more often than others.

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There was a 70s science fiction future where customarily both parents adopted a new last name when they married. Seemed the obvious sensible policy for women's lib without a 2^N name-length scaling with the generations.

I only know one person who's done that. In some ways there's been less future shock than we expected.

I know a couple who combined half each of their original surnames to create a new surname. I thought it was a cool idea, but of course won't work for everyone's names. Their "invented" name turned out to be a fairly reasonable surname that is probably in not-uncommon use in general, so that worked well for them.

I feel like that could kinda work for my wife's name and my name, but the possible new combinations still sound a little off to me. (We both kept our original surnames.)

Reminds me of the O’Whielacronxes! Though I'd be surprised if that was ever their legal name.

Villaraigosa did this - the former mayor of LA. He got divorced and kept the name, so hard to say what happens down the line there.

I tried supremely hard to merge my partner's last name and my own but each iteration sounded multiples worse than our own last names. We've kept our original surnames and given our kiddo a hyphenated one.

My wife and I did this. Seemed like an elegant solution to the problem.

My partner and I did exactly that. She let me choose. Ended up with the surname from one of my favorite literary characters. Changed my first name to match as well. Happened to be a childhood nick name anyway, so I've always answered to it.

How come you know one person, not two?

I also know two people who have done this, but they're also not married.

They divorced before I met the one. Whatever the reason might've been, it'd be something like this, so why ask? Eh, anyway. It's cool that more of these cases have come up here.

And so we could follow the sex chromosome and mitochondrial DNA convention—you’d inherit the grandma’s surname from your mother and the grandpa’s surname from your father.

This is indeed a possible variant of the system.

This variant could lead to a split of the set of existing family names into two disjoint subsets, one that is passed through females and one that is passed through males.

I do not think that this split could create problems, unless at the date when the system would be introduced there would happen to be a serious imbalance between the number of family names carried by females and the number of family names carried by males, which might be then preserved by the system.

Alternatively, you can make the choice to have matrilineal, patrilineal or both lines.

My first wife and I hyphenated our names after we committed to naming any son we had with my last name and any daughter with hers. We only had 1 child (a daughter) before we divorced, but that daughter carries her mother's family name only, not mine.

Are we considering mitochondrial DNA? Because that is always passed down from the mother's line, so maybe we should always use the mother's maiden name as the "last" name to preserve this trait.

Interesting thought , tying to chromosomal inheritance. Since one of the chief uses of surnames historically was to track family (financial) inheritance

Courtney Taylor-Taylor, American songwriter and musician, hyphenated both of his parents' (married) last names as a joke on this.

You could also pass the father's name to boys and the mother's name to girls. Or all children get the same combined name based on the father's father's name and the mother's mother's name. So both matrilineal and patrilineal lines would be propagated.

I've always thought, in a single-surname system, it would be most fair to give girls their mother's surname and boys their father's (throw a dice for intersex children).

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