Czech (his passport) changes endings all over the place. It's how our grammar works. Nouns and adjectives have different endings depending on their contextual gender associations. Czech last names are either adjectives (rarer), in which case the male form ends with ý and the female form ends with á (the latter generally denotes femininity), or nouns, in which case the female form gets turned into an adjective with the ová ending. For example, if your last name is Kovář == Smith, your wife's or daughter's last name would be Kovářová, which could be loosely translated as "of Smith" or "of Smith material" (Kovářka would be the Czech noun for "a female Smith", but female noun surnames don't turn up in formal Czech -- though they make reasonable abbreviations/nicknames among friends). Czech has also the very similarly sounding ova ending (as opposed to ová) which literally denotes possession in addition to the female gender (Kovářova == a (male) Smith's). This doesn't turn up in Czech last names, but it does in other Slavic last names (notably in Russian last names), which makes it sound familiar. Whether it also denotes possession in those languages, I don't know.
Only the endings, for example the feminine form of Novák becomes Nováková. When moving to a country where there's no distinction, one usually stays by the masculine form in the official documents, regardless of gender. For example, an American-born daughter of Polish immigrants inherits and uses Kowalski as her last name, but if she were born in Poland, she would use the form Kowalska (and her son would be called Kowalski, etc.)
I'm Russian, and it's very jarring sometimes to meet or read about the daughter of immigrants who has a traditionally Russian name, but keeps the masculine last name. (e.g., Katerina Ivanov - which sounds really strange due to the gender mismatch.)
If you come from a place where you surname is simply FathersnameSon or FathersnameDaughter, then yes. Eg: Bjornson or Einarsdottir (sorry Scandi friends for typos)
Well, I actually come from such a place. In Turkey it's not uncommon that a surname ends with "oğlu", meaning "son of X" where surname is the form "Xoğlu". Because of "reasons", there are no surnames ending with "kızı" ("daughter of") though - at least I've never came upon one.
Also, we never change them, even if the holder is not male.
Funnily enough, this is more widespread than one would think. I didn't know about the Turkish example.
In Spanish, all the surnames ending in -ez also mean "son of". Even many Spanish speaking people don't know (or don't care? :)) about it, as they've been used as "normal" (sorry) surnames for long now.
Lopez: Son of Lope
Rodriguez: Son of Rodrigo
Perez: Son of Pedro
Martínez: Son of Martín
etc
> Also, we never change them, even if the holder is not male.
They got "frozen" in most languages once written records got widespread enough that it became common to want to be able to cross-index registers and track family relationships. It varies by country, but often it coincides with the introduction of tax authority registers or other large national databases.
How does this scale?
Because i have never heard of a Bjornsonsonsonsonsonsonsonsonsonsonson, i think you are all called after the first ones who came up with this? What a master plan...!