It’s like Parsi Indians who have family names like “Pilot,” “Shipchandler,” “Merchant,” “Engineer,” “Screwwalla,” or “Contractor.”
I know, I made a mistake here; the nominative is Finnbogi. I’ve asked the mods for a correction.
Hey, Cámara is a Spanish lastname and nothing wrong with it. In this case, it comes not from the meaning of “machine used to take pictures”, but from the meaning of “private room”: a sirviente de cámara was the person who helped a lord or lady dress, camarilla originally meant the group of people who were so much in someone’s confidence that they would be allowed into their private rooms…
The people around the table with me right now include, among others:
Wolf from [Small town]
Of-the-sailmakers
The frank one
Place where canes grow
Dark one
Smith
Thorfinn just spotted land, but he never went ashore and it was his story that inspired Leif Eriksson to go there.
Which I explained a week ago. 
Why is this? Surely, if we know there are multiple places in the world where there are no surnames, the US government knows it, too.
To contribute to the thread, in many places in the UK and Ireland where Celtic languages are spoken, there is one “official” name, used in English, and then the vernacular given name - surname, both of which may be entirely different. Part of the reason for this is the small number of surnames in a given area, requiring a better descriptor, and part of it is the tradition of surnames being truly patronymic and traditionally given in multiple generations. A third part is that English speakers often can’t pronounce the local names and it’s just easier to hand them one they can.
Even where English names are used, in rural areas a handful of surnames can dominate to the point that they’re pretty much useless. So names like Paddy “the shap” (the shopkeeper) etc. spring up. You’d still sometimes also get the Grandad’s name’s- Dad’s name’s - then person’s name, for example, Mickey’s Frankie’s Charlie in a situation where the surname is very common and indeed the first name is too.
I think the US government knows about it, but the ability for people to deal with it practically across all levels may be a bit underdeveloped. I’d imagine there is US government computer software out there that simply won’t move foward without two names fields, and the hapless clerks dealing with this may have no way to deal with unusual circumstances.
My friend eventually got his paperwork by just using his first name twice, but before he went there was some worry that he’d get caught in a bureaucratci mess because the name on his US paperwork wouldn’t exactly match the name on the Cameroonian paperwork. US immigration is not particularly known for wanting to work with you and make sure your problem is resolved.
Is that where those people named “Putz” come from?
That doesn’t mean they’re happy about it. The Spanish government knows that Portuguese folk put maternal lastname before paternal one, but they still give Portuguese people a hard time about it. There have been multi-word lastnames in Spain since before they became family names; many of our most famous historical figures had them (Miguel de Cervantes and Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar come to mind); yet there are Spanish-government computer programs which can’t deal with multi-word lastnames. When self check-in first became available, I was in the US: self check-in machines insisted in calling me Ms. De… de (from) being the second word in my lastname (firstwordinfirstname las t name got treated as firstname middlename lastname appendix).
I missed this earlier.
There’s a little more to it than just whether the father’s name ends with a vowel. Icelandic has several declensions, or classes, of nouns each with its own rule for forming the genitive singular. Depending on which it is, a final /r/ may change to /s/, or a final hard /th/ sound (like in “the”) may add the ending /-ar/. I believe no feminine names use /s/ to form the genitive, but more typically use /-r/ or /-ar/. Again, there are a number of different noun classes here. Historically, the mother’s name may not have mattered much but I’d be surprised if, today, some Icelanders don’t use a “matrinymic”.
The word you were looking for is matronymic.
Of course, yes. 'Twas but a typo, as you’ll observe that the “i” and “o” keys are adjacent.
Not.
I won’t ask you to name names, but these are interesting. Assuming you are posting from your native country, I wonder what type of cane plant grows there, or if it could refer to some other crop we don’t usually think of as a cane plant (i.e., other than sugar or bamboo).
Even in English, cane originally referred to, well, cane. There was no need to specify because there was only one type of cane. When sugar cane and bamboo cane became more common, the similarity to cane was noted and the same term was applied to them. But cane remained cane.
It’s interesting that, because of global trade, there are now people even in temperate regions who think of cane solely as the tropical bamboo cane and sugar cane and have totally forgotten the original cane. Which is another reason why the derivations of surnames become almost impossible to ascertain after a few hundred years.
I can only speak for Swedish culture, but this is how it worked. Men generally acknowledged their offspring, be they intra- or extramarital, and they received their father’s name as a patronymic. The only times, when this didn’t happen, were when the father was totally unknown and more often than not the mother can have been said to have questionable morals being engaged in the World’s oldest profession. Keeping this in mind I find it hard to keep a straight face whenever I come across some radical feminist who has assumed a matronymic instead of her real surname and wonder if she knows what she is implying about her mother.