From Roberto to Beto: Why I Officially Changed My Name
I Changed My Name
Brazilian names are famously long, causing daily confusion with credit cards and bar tabs. After years of going by the nickname Beto, I seized the chance during my US citizenship application to legally shorten my name. I dropped the compound first name and simplified my last name to Dealmeida, reducing my legal identity from 35 characters to just 14. Now, I am officially Beto Dealmeida, though updating all my bank accounts remains a challenge.
He was Roberto; I was Beto.
- 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).
- pavel_lishin
A question for any Portuguese or Spanish speakers here, which I think are languages and cultures in which these sorts of name patterns are common - when you see a name like "Roberto Antonio Ferreira De Almeida", is it obvious where the "given" name stops, and the "family name" starts?
I'm guessing in this case it's fairly obvious, since I'm guessing Ferreira is analogous to something like Smith, but are there names where it's not obvious?
And are things like middle names even a thing there? Or is it all "given name consisting of several words"?
- zulux
Pretty normal. My Chinese name is Chinese. Much less friction to pick a 21st-century English name in the anglosphere.
- anticorporate
As problematic as national IDs and related things are are, I do someone wish my country would just assign me a universal identity number and let me use that for all government documents.
Names are just too deeply personal to impose someone else's rules on them.
- Jhsto
I have this weird thing about a birthday -- for some reason, I was assigned a different birth date in NHS records in the UK compared to the one I have in my native Finland. I want to believe it has something to do with electronic systems transacting with different countries' systems (I noticed this difference soon after I exchanged my driver license) -- and I would have indeed born on a different day if it'd been the UK. But, I would assume this to be such a well-known issue with people who migrate, that it must just been just a typo. Doesn't stop me from believing though.