

When Hyphen Boy Meets Hyphen Girl, Names Pile Up - tokenadult
http://www.npr.org/2012/07/19/156923573/when-hyphen-boy-meets-hyphen-girl-names-pile-up

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Mvandenbergh
How about a variation of what the Spanish do? In Spain, children take one name
from their father and one from their mother, every child is named using the
patrilineal names of there two grandfathers. Of course this leads to
information loss, as the name of the grandmothers gets dropped. You have to
lose information obviously, otherwise you'd get unwieldy names. How about
changing it so that for the children's names, the mother contributes the name
she got from her mother and the father the name he got from his father. So
John Smith-Davis and Mary Hill-Richards have children who have Smith-Richards
as a last name and the name of John's mother and Mary's father get dropped.

As someone with a Dutch last name, hyphenation would be quite hard. There are
already plenty of systems, either old enough to be from an age where bits
where precious or developed by incompetents that can't handle my last name
because it has spaces in it. I shudder to think what would happen if I added a
hyphen to that.

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irickt
This is not a new problem. Picasso's given name was

Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios
Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso [wikipedia]

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niccl
There have been rules for this for centuries in the UK. Pre-hyphenated names
wre combined on marriage as <woman's_family_name>-<man's_family_name> On two
people with such names marrying the final married name is
<first_part_of_woman's_name>-seond_part_of_man's_name> Archaic, I know, but
there it is. I guess it all breaks down if you don't follow the rules in the
first place, and since the rules are just some of the arcana of the british
class system, who knows and who cares about them?

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Inufu
I'm confused. Why does it matter which name you have? Why keep the old ones
and not just pick a random new one you happen to like?

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iwwr
Do as the Icelanders do

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_name>

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orofino
You erase the error of your parents, and go with the man's father's last name
for husband, wife, progeny, and pets.

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solox3
While I like this solution because it is indeed the simplest and most common,
it will not work for gay males.

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rayiner
It's not any simpler than going with the wife's mother's last name. Or the
husband's mother's last name. Or the wife's father's last name.

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GiraffeNecktie
Or just do like they do in Quebec where women never take their husband's last
name. In fact, it's the law.

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hanleybrand
Given that this has been solved in Spanish seeking cultures for quite some
time - well, I guess I'm surprised that either no one at NPR speaks Spanish,
or was willing to point out that this isn't an unsolved problem.

