[BoppreH]

I'm obliged to mention Falsehoods Programmer Believe About Names: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... . As someone who also has two family names, I always dread questions for my "last name".

What's also fun are alphabet differences. Try to interact with the Greek government and they might ask you to spell your name using only their characters. An interesting challenge when your name contains sounds that don't exist in the local language (sh, hu).

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> Try to interact with the Greek government and they might ask you to spell your name using only their characters. An interesting challenge when your name contains sounds that don't exist in the local language (sh, hu).

Seen from the other side, a friend of mine called Γωγώ (short for Γεωργία, i.e. Georgia) spelled her name "Roro" when she went to France. The standard transliteration would be "Gogo" but the French would pronounce that like "go-go", whereas they pronounce the "R/r" like Greeks pronounce the "Γ/γ".

And how about all the Greek women who take on their father's spelling of the family name in English-speaking languages (as have I)? E.g. Olympia Dukakis: that's a male form (Δουκάκης); the female is "Doukaki" (Δουκάκη). But, try to explain that to speakers of a language without grammatical genders. Sounds more like a spelling error.

I understand that Icelanding families have a similar problem, with surnames that name the parent, so that if the father's first name e.g. Bjorn, the son's surname would be Bjornsson and the daughter's name would be Bjornsdottir, with the father and mather's surname being whatever -son or -dottir reflects their ancestry. Can cause trouble when going through passport control as a family with underage kids all with different surnames.

[wkjagt]

One falsehood I just ran into myself when booking a parking spot at the airport: "all parts of a name start with a capital letter". This isn't true for Dutch names with "van de", "van der" etc, which this site "corrected" to start with capitals. So silly to have a system "correct" my own name and get it wrong.

[emayljames]

This happens to Irish/Scottish names too, such as McDonald, Mc being 'son of' in Gaelic language; the capital letter after Mc is wrongly changed to a lowercase letter.

Another very frustrating issue I run into, is hyphens not being allowed. My firstname and surname both have hyphens, and they are very common even in English based names.

[nneonneo]

A Russian friend living in Japan noted that, at least as of a decade ago, a decent number of government services (for citizens) allowed something like 6 characters max for the entire name. This is because Japanese names are normally written compactly in Kanji, but it becomes a problem when your name is 15 Katakana or 25 Latin characters long.

[tkgally]

When I moved to Japan in 1983, not much was computerized and I was able to use my preferred short version of my name--eight letters or five katakana, surname last in both cases--for nearly everything. But over the years more and more places started requiring that names be input into labeled fields, which would reverse the given-name surname order. And many places started to insist on the same name as on my passport--nineteen letters, eleven or twelve katakana, depending on how I wrote it. Many input forms don't allow so many characters, none that I have encountered distinguish first from middle names, and there's usually no way to link that long name to the short name that I have been using for work and in daily life for more than forty years. It's a constant annoyance, not just for me but for other people.

[Joker_vD]

"Константин Константинович Константинопольский" is a somewhat popular example of what one's design (graphical, computer system, whatever) should realistically allow for.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Ah... "Constantin Constantinovitch Constantino... pushkin"?

Don't want to check it out online, just curious how well I can read Cyrillic as a native Greek speaker.

[Joker_vD]

"Constantinopolsky", it's "Constantinopol" plus "-sky" which is for forming adjectives, so essentially it means "Constantinopolean".

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Aha! Thanks! My eyes get very confused with the ин and the ий. I expect и to be the consonant and н the vowel but it seems like they're ... not?

[Joker_vD]

Yeah, they're opposite. I suggest taking a look at the rows 10 and 16 of the table at [0]: as you can see, those letters originally had their horizontal stroke differently slanted, but in time, the slant... slanted further, and turned "Ν" (GREEK CAPITAL LETTER NU) into "Н" (CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER EN), and "Η" (GREEK CAPITAL LETTER ETA) into "И" (CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER I).

You know, looking at that table, this alphabet is surprisingly fitting for modern Polish phonology, it even has nasal vowels.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Cyrillic_alphabet#Alphab...

[makeitdouble]

This also usually applies to bank accounts, they have a character limit of around 16 characters for the whole name in most banks.

Of course it's not explicited in most places as 16 chars for a standard Japanese name is an exception, and some applications will silently cut when sending to their backend.

It's as fun as you can imagine it to be.

[nxc18]

Even something as simple as buying a movie ticket can require submitting a name using only Japanese characters.

[mc3301]

It has always been ridiculous, but getting more and more since everything much match each other perfectly. MyNumber, bank, credit card, residence card and passport... There are a few services I outright can't use because my name doesn't fit in their system, and this is after weeks of phone calls with real people. (Note, it's Rakuten iDeco I'm talking about here)

[pavel_lishin]

> What's also fun are alphabet differences.

Yeah. Slavic names are fun here. Polish names are already long due to their di- and tri-graphs, and transliterated Russian and Ukrainian names can easily eat up the "maximum character count" if you have a lot of sibilants in your name. And that's before you meet with someone who has to try and stumble over the various zh, sh and sch sounds.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

That must be why the Czechs leave all their names' vowels at home when they travel abroad :P

[IAmBroom]

"Don't mock the Welsh. You have the privilege of growing up with a language that has vowels."

[Telaneo]

> As someone who also has two family names, I always dread questions for my "last name".

I feel the same about anything that doesn't ask about my middle name. I end up constantly see emails with 'Hi/Dear First-Name Middle-Name', which nobody calls me, but if you want my full name as written in my passport, it's got to be there somewhere.

It'd be much better if they instead asked for 'Legal name (what's written in your passport)' and 'Nickname (what you want us to call you)', although I suspect many would fill in an actual nickname in that second box and be mad that the service 'needs' that, or doesn't treat them with the proper respect, when you could just fill in Dr. Robert Smith there and it wouldn't matter in the slightest.

I've considered changing my name to a more simplified version with just two names, but I'm expecting it to be a hassle, and there's a social aspect to it, which I'm not sure I want to deal with. But with every day that passes, the sunk cost becomes bigger.

[DonaldPShimoda]

Yeahhh currently considering going through the legal name-change process to move one of my family names to a middle name or something. It's made all the worse by the fact that my parents didn't always use both family names when I was growing up, so some legal documents disagree on what my "last name" is.

[radarsat1]

I can sympathize, the Spanish naming system makes things legitimately complicated sometimes. My wife has a Spanish style name Firstname(s) Fathername Mothername. But very very often she just goes by Firstname Fathername but it's not technically her legal name and is confusing in the non Spanish world because people assume otherwise that Mothername is her last name.

So for our son we decided to try to skip any confusion by doing what you are alluding to, and making her Fathername into his middle name, and giving him just my last name, in the English style.

And it worked, sort of, but then we discovered it was absolutely not legal to do that in my wife's country of origin. So kind of hilariously his registration in that country is: Firstname Mothername Fathername Mothername.

They forced us to repeat the middle name as part of his last name too. Just ridiculous. I thought at the least they would allow us to reverse them, but no.

[____tom____]

I find this follow on article really helpful: https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers...

It contains concrete examples of each of the ideas listed in the first article.

[Muskwalker]

The author there reads the point "Two different data entry operators, given a person’s name, will by necessity enter bitwise equivalent strings on any single system, if the system is well-designed" by thinking in terms of erroneous spelling, but also relevant is encoding issues such as lookalike characters.

Peter Biľak gives a story on bumping into this for the accent in his name. https://www.typotheque.com/articles/lcaron

[stavros]

Eh you just replace those with the closest analog(s). "Sh" becomes "s", for example.

[BoppreH]

"Sh" to "s" is simple enough. Sounds horrible to my ears, but maybe not to someone named Stavros ;). I've also been told that the double-p of Boppre looks alien in Greek.

And the "hu" syllable (like the sound an owl makes) was a genuine challenge. I think we went with χού. And now that my name is in the system, that's forever with this spelling, I guess.

[stavros]

Yeah, it'd be χου. Which language is this from?

[BoppreH]

It's just a syllable of the whole name, which is a German surname in a certain old dialect. And its pronunciation has been mangled after 150 in a country that can't pronounce it properly, so it's a mess all around.

[stavros]

I ask because usually hu is two sounds, so it would be transliterated as two letters. If you mean it used to be hü, then yes, you'd lose the umlauts in the transliteration, and it would just become "χου", with a hard h, not an aspirated one.