[dirktheman]

I have a friend who's a refugee from Afghanistan. Apparently they don't use surnames there (or at least his tribe doesn't). When he applied for a visa my city council shifted his first name to his last name and he had to come up with a first name on the spot. His name is officially Peter Abdullah now.

[somenomadicguy]

Immigrant officials at Ellis Island used to give people last names based on their father's first name, or the name of the city they come from.

Also, Armenians didn't have last names until recently, so you'll meet lots of people with names like "Gevork Gevorkian" or "Ohan Ohanesian", or their name will be shifted to the right, adding an "ian" to the end (think the prefixed O' in irish names), and give them anglicized names.

[cronopios]

At my uni there is a student (from India, IIRC) that doesn't have any surname.

Some of our software didn't like that, so we checked her passport, and sure enough, her full name was merely her first name.

[somenomadicguy]

Oh man, I really feel for her. Dealing with the various immigration agencies must have been a nightmare. I bet they ended up officially changing her name to "Firstname Firstname", which is what we tend to do in the states..

This bugs me, because if a name is supposed to be a unique identifier, then part of it's existence is to feed the ego. "This is ME! I am Jean Valjean!"

When you then you change somebody's name to fit your short-sighted database constraints you're pretty much saying, "You don't matter as much as our programmers' decisions matter, now move along 9430"