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
This sounds as if it could slowly erode the whole "gendered surname" concept even in the origin countries (e.g. Russia)

If you can treat the gendered name simply as a grammatical construct, things are easy - and a "name" like "Elena Kuznetsov" would simply be a grammatical error and never occur as a real name.

However, now people from abroad visit the country or possibly even (re-)immigrate and suddenly you do have real-live "Elena Kuznetsovs" - in addition to the regular gendered names. This sounds pretty complicated to keep track of.

>>xg15+Jh
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.

>>watwut+Hi
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 our surnames using the masculine form, ending up with things like Eleni (Helen) Papadopoulos, which in Greek sounds like a grammatical monstrosity.

Other surnames were commonly mangled in weird ways - Nicholas Metropolis (of the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm) surname was Μητρόπουλος (Mitropoulos). Metropolis is quite near phonetically but grammatically makes no sense in Greek.

>>ricudi+A12
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.