But what happens next generation? When a partner named ABC with two surnames should be combined with my name. Should a kid then be named DBCKS? And then it doubles every generation? Or should both parents pick one and pass on? And then which one? The father line as always?
Look to Hispanic countries. They've been dealing with this for a very long time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_naming_customs
Generally, if a parent has two surnames, the child will take the first of them, so you normally will have two surnames, the first or only from your father, and the first or only from your mother. (Note that this algorithm does eliminate matrilineal names, because a child will effectively be receiving their two surnames from their grandfathers.
From what I understand, if the genetic lineage is particularly elite, you might keep more. My wife grew up in Latin America among the Hispanic elite, and apparently some of her friends had more than two surnames because their bloodlines were extremely blue and they wanted to preserve reference to the lineage.
This is a bit like how Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's kids have the surname Mountbatten-Windsor. The former is a cadet branch of the German House of Hesse, and the latter is a rebranding of the extremely German Haus Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha (and of course right there is a triple-barrel name, Sachsen-Coburg-Gotha.
You mean like Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso
The rest are given names and nobody uses more than two. It was in the baptism record where all the saints of the days used to be added. I have a similar record with a dozen names, but only two given names in the civil record, of which I only use the first.
And then her parents are from another country with different surname rules, throwing a crazy wrench in things when she has to deal with her other citizenship documents, which adhere to that other country's rules.
I had an uncle who was very proud of the fact that his birth certificate, passport, and the spelling he actually used for his first name all disagreed.
“Tax Agencies hate this one trick…”
Yup. Quite common with kids with one parent from a country using, say, the roman characters and another from an asian country (like say a France / Japanese mixed kid). If the (french) father goes to the french embassy or to France to declare the kid under one name and then the (japanese) mom goes to declare the kid with a japanese name, the kid literally has two identities. Not just two passports (which is highly common) but two identities.
In less common case it can happen with just the given name being different in two countries: I know a dude who as a Portuguese given name on his Portuguese passport and the french version of that name on his french passport. They're considered by the authorities to be two different persons and he already got into trouble (administrative stuff) so now he's careful.
Also note that it's a documented fact that for fraud there have been people caught declaring a kid that wasn't their: kid born at the hospital, quickly "rent" the kid to friends from the community, declare the kid as if he was born at home (by having a doctor come). Profit from welfare (in the EU) money due to the fact that you now "have" one more kid. One such case was uncovered when the doctor who gave birth to the kid was then sent later in the day to witness a "born at home" kid.
I'm sure there are other cases: the world is big.
I am bringing this up because I had to read your comment several times before I realized it was a comment about language use rather than about the role of doctors in England.
Finally, to be completely pandemic, doctors can give birth to other people‘s kids. My wife, a doctor, gave birth to my sons; there was another doctor there who delivered them.
Or in Python:
```
from itertools import chain
fathers_surnames: list[str] = ["Ruiz", "Blasco"]
mothers_surnames: list[str] = ["Picasso", "López"]
kids_surnames: list[str] = list(chain.from_iterable(zip(fathers_surname, mothers_surname)))
```
Pablo Picasso's example is also a good way to touch upon your comment on how elites have used naming customs differently (I guess to distinguish themselves): Pablo's parents are listed in Wikipedia as "José Ruiz y Blasco" and "María Picasso y López", as opposed to the standard "José Ruiz Blasco" and "María Picasso López" (which I chose above). Similarly, Pablo was given the pompous birth name "Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso", instead of the more humble one (or maybe two) names that has been custom in Spanish.
Tangentially, I would say piling up names like this is more of a Catholic tradition than a Spanish one, e.g., the Archduchess Maria Theresa of Austria-Este, born Maria Theresia Beatrix Gaëtane, Erzherzogin von Österreich-Este, Prinzessin von Modena [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Ruiz_y_Blasco
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archduchess_Maria_Theresa_of_A...
[0] "People have exactly N names, for any value of N." --https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
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.
I only know one person who's done that. In some ways there's been less future shock than we expected.
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.)
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.
I also know two people who have done this, but they're also not married.
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.
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.
That said, it does also feel a bit more chaotic and potentially subject to widespread adoption of surnames that are trendy in popular culture.
He was originally Zach Weiner, and he married Kelly Smith[1] and they concatenated both their names together and adopted that as their last name.
There's something I love about that.
If A marries B, then either both keep their names, both will be A or both will be B or one or both will be A-B or B-A. No other outcomes are possible, and if one of them was B-C before then the kids can't be A-B-C.
If you're AC and your partner is BD, then on marriage you choose a new name X. You become AXC and your partner BXD. Your child is EX. Then each child has equal connection to both parents. The cost is that you lose the deep history of names, but that history only existed for a single lineage anyway, so it's not as important as it seemed.
(1) https://nothingismere.com/2013/11/12/solve-surnames-with-uni...
When you think of it, women live forever, men die. 4B or whatever years ago, life arose. The cells which divided then, are the same cells as now. Women come from an egg, which divided over and over, cells specializing, including dividing and specializing as her eggs/ova which she is born with.
The end result is that those cells are a continuous line, billions of years old. Men contribute sperm, genetic material, but no living cell.
In a sense, women are immortal. Men die.
So, maybe the name change is to honour those soon dead?
(Yes, I know, weird take on it. It's Monday, I'm allowed.)
- Sperm is as alive as ova: not alive. What is alive is the combination of the two, after some development.
- Both gametes contribute genetic material the same way.
- Their respective lines are as continuous.
> So, maybe the name change is to honour those soon dead?
Of course, the name change has sociological / political reasons. It cannot have such biological roots since the policies around names were there way before we discovered this stuff. I'm afraid the reasons why we keep the male name in many places are simpler and way less poetic.
One's a full cell with mitochondria, cell wall, and so on. The other just delivers genetic information. There's no symmetry.
For example, all your mitochondria and its dna come from the female line. None from the male.
But this part:
> The cells which divided then, are the same cells as now
Seems quite wrong. Ova of one woman obviously contains part her DNA, not her mother's unchanged.
Now, I didn't know about the mitochondria part, interesting, thanks for teaching me!
The sperm is absorbed, the dna integrated, but the cell itself, all of the cell aspect is from the woman.
Our DNA is certainly there, but that's not the same as a continuous line of cells.
Anyhow, it's one way to view things.
For sons it's easy, as the surname doesn't change, it just ends in a masculine ending. Most commonly -as, but less common are -is, -ys or -ius.
For daughters, the masculine ending is replaced with a feminine ending such as -aitė, -ytė, -utė, or -ūtė.
I'm not aware of cases where the father and son have different endings, but technically you could.
However where it gets interesting is marriage. Typically married women take the husband's surname, but they change the ending to -ienė to indicate they are married.
So a family with a daughter would result in everyone having a different surname, for example:
Father: Tomas Žukauskas
Mother: Eglė Žukauskienė
Daughter: Gabija Žukauskaitė
Divorced women typically take their father's surname, but use the married -ienė ending as it appears more sophisticated. Well known people may keep their father's surname even when married, but change the ending.
Gendered suffixes are used for first names too (typically Lithuanian's only have two names), but they don't change for married/unmarried. For example Paulius for a man and Paulina for a woman.
Lithuanian's love diminutives though, so a parent may refer to their children as Pauliukas (the son) or Paulytė (the daughter). And to make things even more fun, the suffix of names changes depending on gramative case.
In the media foreign names are usually converted to their Lithuanian counterpart, for example Donaldas Trumpas.
I am Lithuanian, and I never heard of that happen. This [1] also concurs: "Sons inherit their father's surname, with no changes."
[1] https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Lithuania_Naming_Custom...
What's going on in the name "Sven Magnus Øen Carlsen"?
I've heard similar things with certain eastern European countries (Bulgarian has different forms for males vs females: Ivanov vs Ivanova), and also with various Indian populations where the child's last name is just the father's first name.
Meanwhile I have the more mundane option where my father's first name is just my middle name.
Source: https://tidsskrift.dk/sin/article/download/17070/15768/
(Incidentally, one of my great-great grandfathers was Swedish and the last one in that branch to take his fathers name + son. All of his children kept his last name; my own last name comes from a farm in Norway)
So whenever I meet a woman with a "-ski"-name, I wonder how many generations ago that name got stuck with just the male form.
==See also==
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oeconym
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_modernism#Standardized_le...
I guess the tradition of it being the man's name passed on means that's why there is no common surnames with *dottir as it is with *son? (Not sure what the english version for a daughter is).
Had some Icelandic friends in school (which still has patronymic names, moved here after they were born), and it was for them somewhat problematic at times that the siblings had different surnames (Björnsdottir and Björnsson), as people don't assume they're family, and especially not that the parents both had different surnames again. Like school pickup with a teacher not knowing the situation.