The government ate my name

Post by dhosek » Tue, Oct 14, 2025, 3:19 AM UTC

ricudis wrote: post #180

watwut wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 o…

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.

Post by ninalanyon » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 1:44 PM UTC

QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #41

ninalanyon wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The government being this sloppy at getting accents right is surprising, I would expect them to value accuracy That tells me you're German, I didn't even need to see the ä and ß. Even in the UK I encounter websites that won't accept my Norwegian address because it begins with Å. English speaking countries generally are pretty bad at this sort of thing.

Just because we have æ, ø, å here in Norway doesn’t mean that we’re much better at handling “weird” characters from other countries than the English speaking countries are. My Spanish girlfriend has an ñ in her last name, and as does our son. To the people here in Norway, I just tell them to put a plain n when typing the last name. It’s easier to just go with that than to try and get people to understand how to type…

I'm not talking about ordinary members of the public not bothering to figure out how to type an unusual character on a Norwegian keyboard. I have no idea how I would type a an n with a tilde, I would have to pick it from the character map.

My point was that someone who can type it will often have it rejected by a website. I was using a hotel booking site and when I booked a room it asked me for my address so I typed Å... The web page rendered it correctly but when I hit the button to complete the transaction it told me that my address contained an illegal character (or some similar wording). And this site handles bookings for hotels that themselves have names with umlauts, tildes, cedillas, etc.

Re: The government ate my name

Re: The government ate my name