Small nitpick, if you are* in Germany but have an e.g. Spanish name (e.h. Hector Garcia Gonzalez) then... that's 2 surnames without a dash. I have no idea what happens if you marry or have children, but your example is just the -most basic- version.
*"you are" meaning you'd be a German citizen with a German passport.
My German last name also contains an ü, so when we emigrated to an English-speaking country and obtained dual-citizenship we used 'ue' for that passport and I now use 'ue' on a day-to-day basis. This also means I have two slightly different legal surnames depending by which passport I go.
My last name has a space in it as well. All the airlines helpfully remove the space for me, making it not match my passport, leading to me always being flagged by the computer for the 'reject line' at the US border.
My last name does not have a space but probably did at some point in time (DeFelippi). Some idiot at the passport office put a space in it (De Felippi) despite not having a space in the application. Australian customs really hassled me about that.
> with "X" as a first name and "AE A-XII" as a middle name
It sounds as though they allowed the middle name to contain a space, which doesn't match my mental model but perhaps that's how they do it in California. It invites the question: do they allow a first name to contain a space, so that ("X", "AE A-XII", "Last Name") and ("X AE", "A-XII", "Last Name") are different names?
EDIT: The funny thing isn't allowing spaces in a middle name; it's have a separate field for middle name(s) at all. Modern passports have just two name fields: "surname" and "given names". Both may contain spaces. But according to images on the web, Californian birth certificates really do have three name fields.
As a Spaniard I have two last names (no middle name, no one last name with space) but 0% of the non-spanish websites I have ever seen accommodate for this.
Normally I just use it with an space in the last name field, but then I get exactly the same problems you mention.
Try living in Japan, where you're generally forced to use the name in your passport, including any middle names included (with space) in given name.
Meanwhile a typical Japanese name is no more than three characters each for family and given names, but someone with a western name will have several times that, complete with spaces. And of course most of the companies running various websites and computer systems care, because foreigners are a single digit percentage of the market. If you're lucky you can use a separate but equal foreigner flow with fewer features available. (I am looking at you, JAL Mileage Bank and your SEVEN character family+given name limit!)
It is typically possible to circumvent this using paper systems, but that's a particular shame -- one of the nice points about online computerized forms is that it is easy to send them back and forth through browser integrated machine translation which can make them vastly easier to fill out.
A friend also has the same issue with his passport, but he had survived many years believing his first of 2 names was his first name, and the 2nd name his last. It worked okay until he moved cities (in Germany) and the authorities decided, "According to your passport, these 2 names is your last name, and your first name in our system should be '-'".
Luckily, like everything in Germany, there was a form to fill to fix it.
My wife and I decided to have our kid in Portugal so he could get both of our surnames without adding hyphens or changing our own surnames. If we had opted to have him in Germany we would have all had to adopt a single (probably hyphenated) "family name".
> One of my coworkers was from Spain and had a last name consisting of two words separated by a space.
It's two last names, father and mother first last names. I guess the same definition works, but it's worth noting that any last name might contain a space.
I have a dash in my last name. Some airlines keep the dash, some drop it and my last name becomes Namename, some convert it to a space so it becomes Name Name. My passport retains the dash and is so far the only travel documentation that does so. Interestingly its never been an issue for airlines (even if travelling with Airline A that drops the dash and Airline B that converts the dash to space, on the same ticket as happened to me recently due to carrier A rebooking an oversold flight segment onto another carrier B). Even self service passport checks is fine despite the passport having a dash and all my flight bookings missing the dash. I suspect all the systems involved just strips all the special characters and spaces and compare that way. So instead of comparing Name-Name with Namename, they just normalise it to NAMENAME vs NAMENAME which matches.
I had a similar problem. I have a Brazilian name which means I have multiple middle names which normally means it can't fit in the required space.
When I renewed my UK Passport they just decided to lose one of my names. I was furious, but it became clear I'd need to go through administrative hell to correct it, and I needed the passport at the time.
Some time later, I've just given up on having my full name. I prefer just to give out a firstname lastname and ignore my middlenames. Its just far too much hassle to go through. As far as I am concerned, I have an external name which fits in ASCII and complies with anglo-centric formulae and an internal name which doesn't.
Thats just my personal choice though. My sister is defiant and managed to get her full name on by demanding that it was an unhyphenated triple barreled surname.
My official full name is too long, I just have a second and a third first name with are all not so short. This is not uncommon here in Germany and therefore usually not a problem. But a lot of foreign IT systems where it says "put it exactly like in your official document" it doesn't work or it cuts it of. Witch made my third name once "Al". It also happened that it took my second name as my last name....
The German state isn't much better with foreign names. I have a lot of friends who are from eastern europe. Everybody has a weird story about how their current passport name came about.
Why isn't there some ISO name parsing standard that can understand a weird title of a prince of a city state and give you an appropriate output of it?
This is acutally a research topic, so the information is right there.
Any name can contain a space. For example "Ana Maria" is a common first name which contains a space. On official documents, generally a name will be separated into a given name and surname. In this case "<A> <B C>" and "<A B> C" are considered separate names.
Source: I have a space in my name and some of my different identity documents have the name as "<A> <B C>" or "<A B> C", which causes all sorts of administrative problems.
Similar to this, some countries have two first and/or two last names. I had my share of trouble with government forms requiring to input the second names I don't have.
I've seen stuff like that. Well in fact, nowhere near, but long names or last names. I did while working on some desktop implementation to interface with passport scanners.
Passport authorities will clearly not print the whole thing. So for a name like this you will end up with something like:
Adolph B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
As for the last name, I've never seen something like that but I figure they would put the whole thing in the annotations page of the passport along with a note or asterisk in the last name part of the MRZ. This can be seen in Indonesian or Indian passports due to the amalgamation of names based on regional customary.
So you could store a partial of the name on the last_name field and the rest on a standard text field for comments.
I have three first names, and round these parts they are space separated. Turns out that in a neighbouring country I should be comma separating them, or they are treated as a single first name (that happens to have spaces).
The DMV in Massachusetts can't handle a space in a last name. They convert it to a dash instead.
As a result, I know several people who have different names on their passport and their driver's license, simply because the computer system at the DMV is broken.
This is possible because you can make a “name declaration” where you choose to apply the naming law of another EU country.
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