zlacker

>>notok+(OP)
There's an analogous problem for Russians, and presumably folks from other Slavic-language countries. Our last names are gendered; if Ivan Kuznetsov marries Elena, her last name becomes Kuznetsova. (And their children would have gendered last names, too - little Borya Kuznetsov and little Masha Kuznetsova.)

So Russian families who move to America have a choice - either deal with people and systems who assume that married couples, and parents/children all have the same last name and hit roadblocks when that expectation does not match reality, or change one partner's last name to match the other's.

But that second option has problems too, because that name change doesn't retroactively apply in Russia - so now you might have American documents that say you're a Elena Kuznetsov, but your Russian documents say that you're Elena Kuznetsova - so any legal dealings that involve the two countries (like, say, traveling) become significantly more complicated because you need to prove that the two names actually point to the same person.

At least middle names aren't a big issue - patronymics mean something in Russia, but here in America it's just a string you pop into the "middle name" field, and maybe you get asked what it means, and get to teach someone what patronymic means.

>>pavel_+Yb
As a related issue, some Slavic language countries require foreign documents to be transliterated into the Cyrillic alphabet, which doesn't contain exact equivalents for certain English alphabet letters. They usually end up using the closest phonetic equivalent but this often causes bureaucratic hassles.

>>nradov+Ug
This is a general problem whenever there's an alphabet mismatch. Unless there's a 1:1 mapping between phonemes in different languages, one always need to come up with some scheme that will necessarily be imperfect, as seen e.g. when transliterating Slavic or Indian names into English. So long as there is a consistent government-mandated or at least government-blessed system, though, they can work things out fine.

(There's a separate issue here where a system for a specific pair of languages might get codified and become "frozen in time" even as either or both languages evolve. For example, the Russian Polivanov system for transliterating Japanese uses "си" for "シ" because the standard pronunciation of "щ" at the time was more like "шч", similar to Ukrainian, so it was clearly the wrong choice back then - and yet clearly the right choice now if not for backwards compatibility concerns.)

>>int_19+rM
Interesting, I thought Russian did that for the same reasons as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihon-shiki system does, which also uses "si" instead of "shi" for シ.