[xg15]

This sounds as if it could slowly erode the whole "gendered surname" concept even in the origin countries (e.g. Russia)

If you can treat the gendered name simply as a grammatical construct, things are easy - and a "name" like "Elena Kuznetsov" would simply be a grammatical error and never occur as a real name.

However, now people from abroad visit the country or possibly even (re-)immigrate and suddenly you do have real-live "Elena Kuznetsovs" - in addition to the regular gendered names. This sounds pretty complicated to keep track of.

[int_19h]

It's very hard to erode it because Russian, as all Slavic languages, is very thoroughly gendered in general. It's not just nouns (including names) and pronouns, but adjectives and verbs also have gender that must agree with the noun they apply to.

Coincidentally, this actually makes it possible to have names that don't conform to the standard gender patterns without much confusion, because as soon as you start talking about what the person is like or what they're doing, you have to specify the gender anyway, so the marker on the noun is mostly redundant.

But also Russia in particular has a long-standing cultural tradition of Russifying foreign names of immigrants. For example, Americans don't have patronymics, but when you get Russian citizenship, they will ask you for the name of your father and assign one accordingly - so e.g. John, son of Donald, would become Джон Дональдович. Similarly last names are often modified by appending -ов or -eв, although this is less common today. Anyway, a name of clearly Slavic origin like "Elena Kuznetsov" would almost certainly be nativized if that person immigrate.

This usually doesn't apply to non-immigrants, though. Thus e.g. Barbara Liskov is still Барбара Лисков in Russian, not Лискова. Which makes it very confusing when a native speaker first sees the last name and confidently decides that it's male.

There are also some weird cases where names with obvious Slavic patterns are not re-nativized for political reasons. For example, Isaac Asimov is originally Исаак Озимов, which has very clear markers of a Russian Jewish name. When his stories were translated to Russian in late Soviet era, though, his name was rendered as Айзек Азимов (i.e. a direct transliteration of English), and it's been said that this was a conscious choice by translators because that way it didn't sound Jewish, which helped get it past censors when "anti-Zionism" was particularly prevalent in USSR.

[pavel_lishin]

Yep. One thing I forgot to mention is that kids born to Americans here typically inherit the father's last name - so an Elena Kuznetsov is a very real possibility.

In fact, that's one way to guess/cold-read some information about a person. If you meet an Elena Kuznetsov in America, odds are pretty decent that she was born to Russian parents here.

[DavidVoid]

It's already eroded in many countries right? Gendered patronymic names used to be common here in Sweden - Katarina Gustavsdotter (Vasa) was the daughter of Gusav Eriksson (Vasa), who was the son of Erik Johansson (Vasa), &c. - but gendered patronymic names eventually became permanent last names that got inherited over multiple generations.

So now we have a few hundred thousand people with the last name Andersson, despite most of them not being Anders's son.

[madcaptenor]

English similarly has the name Anderson (and also Andrews).

[tliltocatl]

As everyone said already, the gendering isn't something just cultural, it's baked into the grammar. Specially because of grammatical case, different genders have different inflections. In a setting like "Let's call Kuznetsov(a)" accusative case applies, so Kuznezov would become Kuznetsova, Kuznetsova would become Kuznetsovu. Gender-neutral speech is absolutely impossible without overhauling the whole grammar, not just pronouns like in English. And yes, to a unaccustomed Russian ear applying third-person plural "they" to as indefinite-gendered singular sounds weird - and singular neutral "it" is just degrading, as I think it is in English.

[dhosek]

Although in at least some cases the gendering isn’t just a simple gender marker: In Czech, for last names which are adjectives, then yes it’s a gender inflection (e.g., Rosický → Rosicka), but for non-adjectival names, the female version is expressed as a possessive, so, e.g., Hošek → Hošková, which to my liberal American ear feels kind of weird.

I would note that in Spanish-speaking countries, it’s generally the case that a woman does not take her husband’s surname, but simply keeps her own. She might add de + her husband’s name to her own after the marriage,¹ but this is less common than women in English-speaking countries retaining their name after marriage.

⸻

1. When my ex-wife’s green card was processed after our marriage, the attorney had added “de Hosek” to her name which she didn’t want and had to have the attorney change everything to keep her name as it was.

[watwut]

Gendered name is grammatical construct, literally. But the strong "Elena Kuznetsov" cant exist rules are bad idea, because a.) foreigners exist b.) minorities exists c.) people with strong opinions over how they want to be named exist.

They can exist, but sound weird in the language.

[ricudis]

Most (though not all) Greek surnames are also gendered. The common practice is to inherit your fathers surname, changing the gender if you're born female. For example, a quite common surname is Papadopoulos (masculine) / Papadopoulou (feminine). It was usually chopped into "Pappas" when Greek immigrants to US were passing through Ellis Island.

Till the '90s at least there was an unofficial convention of anglicizing our surnames using the masculine form, ending up with things like Eleni (Helen) Papadopoulos, which in Greek sounds like a grammatical monstrosity.

Other surnames were commonly mangled in weird ways - Nicholas Metropolis (of the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm) surname was Μητρόπουλος (Mitropoulos). Metropolis is quite near phonetically but grammatically makes no sense in Greek.

[dhosek]

That’s not exactly gendered as the -ou suffix is the masculine genitive so Elena Papadopoulou is Papadopoulos’s Elena. Czech does a similar thing with last names that aren’t adjectives.

Slovene, which has roughly the same gender and case as other Slavic languages manages to not have gendered surnames. So, e.g., Pirc Musar and her husband Aleš Musar have identical surnames. Czech, on the other hand, will cheerfully rename Hillary Clinton to Hillary Clintonová, applying their rules for gendered surnames to foreigners when writing in Czech.

[hiatus]

> people with strong opinions over how they want to be named exist.

is a total non-issue. You can't, in any country I'm aware of, choose absolutely any name you want.

[miki123211]

Countries are inconsistent in what names they do and do not accept.

Want a name that is offensive in your language? Your country probably won't let you do that, but some other one might, and yours still needs to accept that name as valid.

You can't just go to another country and change your name there, but if you have dual citizenship, you can usually change it in either one, and the other one needs to respect that.

[ZPrimed]

I had a former coworker who had just (legally) changed his entire name in order to fully separate himself from his family when he started with the company. (This was in the US.) It made the onboarding kind of weird, because he originally gave us one name but then when he started had an entirely different one.

[pavel_lishin]

You sure can! But that doesn't mean it won't cause you problems.

For example, if you're male, and decide to change your name to Sarah, you totally can - but don't be surprised when people assume you're a woman.

And there are many countries, of which you are unaware, that do have pretty strict laws about what you are and aren't allowed to name your children. Iceland is the one that springs to mind off the top of my head. As I recall, Germany also has some limitations.

[hiatus]

I think you misread my comment? I said:

> You can't, in any country I'm aware of, choose absolutely any name you want.

Like in Germany can you name your kid "The Holocaust Didn't Happen"? No right?

[pavel_lishin]

You're right. I absolutely did misread your comment. That's what I get for trying to read on a single cup of coffee.

[amanaplanacanal]

In the US, I'm not sure there are any laws about what you can be named. I'm not a lawyer though.

[hiatus]

I don't think you can name your kid $()*&@Q%&

[amanaplanacanal]

Well, Prince changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol, so I don't know.

[feoren]

People's own opinions about what their name is is not a "non-issue", shitty-ass governments or not. Declaring a people's opinions about names stupid and irrelevant (or even illegal) is one of the many ways majorities oppress or even commit slow genocide against minorities.

[hiatus]

> Declaring a people's opinions about names stupid and irrelevant (or even illegal) is one of the many ways majorities oppress or even commit slow genocide against minorities.

My point was governments do this all the time and it is a far cry from fascism. Elsewhere in the thread, it is mentioned that often times you have to compromise when registering a name in a different country (for instance, if the language does not contain a phoneme used in your name). In that case, you have to conform to the country's culture and language. Under that lens, banning names that violate cultural norms is not so crazy.

[watwut]

There are reasonable regulations and unreasonable regulation. The idea that since some regulation exist, it would be totally the allow any other rule is absurd.

Yes, people (specifically women) with strong opinion on the suffix of their name exist and proper solution of government is to butt off that decision. This is no the norm worth keeping by force.

[int_19h]

The relevant laws in many Western countries today exist so that children don't get saddled with patently stupid names by their parents (see also: Elon Musk and his kids).

[Muromec]

It will not of course.