Is there any nation on Earth where you don’t have to have a name? I know it’s a weird concept sort of like the artist formally known as prince, but even he has a symbol.
And can you actually change your name to a symbol or do you have to be rich and famous?
PerfectDark
AN interesting point which your OP raises is that the names of nations listed on the maps in my house are very often not the names by which natives of individual countries or areas refer to their homelands.
Perhaps there’s no such thing as an un-named country, in that someone, somewhere, is bound to have included a given point on the map in at least a general region. Yet I suspect that there are places for which the native occupants have no written name, and for which the inhabitants concept of their territorty is so different to ours that it doesn’t extend beyond what is immediately visible (I’m sure I’ve read something about this relating to pygmies, and I’m certainly aware that the indigenous Australian’s concept of “territory” is vastly different to our western one of, towns, cities, states, countries).
Any anthropologists out there who can enlighten us?
**OLD JOKE **
One of the early Spanish explorers lands on the Yucatan Penninsula and asks one of the natives “What is this place called?” The native replies, “Yucatan.” Which means "I don’t understand in the native language.
What I want to know is, what does it say on TAFKAP’s (The Artist Formerly Known As Prince) driver’s licence? What about Cher’s or Rosanne’s?
I recall that during a lawsuit involving Prince, everybody was tying themselves up in knots trying to refer to him, until the judge got pissed off and ordered everyone to just refer to him as Prince Rogers, which had the advantage of having been his birth name.
The question isn’t about names of countries, but names of people. Is there any place where a person is allowed to not have a name?
Cecil Adams wrote on a related topic:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/981016.html
Don’t think it is possible to do so even if a nation permitted it.
Your name, albeit undocumented, would default to “Hey You” with several possible, and not necessarily desirable, middle names.
Go to your public library, copy the form provided in the state law books, submit form (form in English, name in any language) with filing fee to the court clerk.
New name by return mail.
My guess would be that those celebs either don’t have licenses anymore (they’ve long since become invalid, and they never bothered to renew them) or they have licenses but only from the good ol’ days when they had real, complete names (that is, their birth names).
Help me here!
The link to a Cecil Adams article
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/981016.html
contained within a broken link.
The link within that is broken refered to anothere article, if memory serves, that included information about Prince’s name change.