Thanks.
My favorite example is the renowned author Halide Edip Adıvar. Her husband’s family name is a sentence in Turkish - adı var meaning literally ‘he has a name’. As if when filling in the form in the space for “Last name” they were having a bit of fun with the new rule.
Often what appears to be an Arab’s middle name is their father’s first name, and what appears to be a last name is their paternal grandfather’s first name. Egypt has officially systematized this form for people who don’t use family names. But more and more these days somebody’s grandfather’s name becomes the family name thereafter.
For example, the famous Tamil violinists L. Shankar and L. Subramaniam are brothers. They go by their given names, while the L. is their patronymic initial–their dad’s given name is Lakshminarayana.
Anwar Ibrahim’s last name is actually his dad’s first name. His wife Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, who founded the National Justice Party while he was in prison, uses the honorific title wan before both her and her dad’s name. Malaysians use honorific titles a lot.
Many Indonesians have only a single name. I once met an Indonesaian researcher who could not get his work published in Western journals until he assumed a surname. He made one up for himself.
A viewing of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs will answer that one.
There’s blue and gray and orange (although I think that it might be the case that the family name “Orange” either precedes or is unrelated to the colour “orange”).
Orange may be from the Dutch House of Orange, right?
The house of Orange-Nassau died with William III.
But the name didn’t. Doesn’t the royal family of the Netherlands still call itself the House of Orange-Nassau?