nominally restrictive

This doesn’t make sense:

BERLIN — Germany is renowned for fighting inflation, but the battle extends beyond money and into the realm of names. In a split decision on Tuesday, the German Constitutional Court upheld a ban on married people combining already-hyphenated names, forbidding last names of three parts or more.

…Frieda Rosemarie Thalheim, a Munich dentist, wanted to take the last name of her husband, Hans Peter Kunz-Hallstein, to become Frieda Rosemarie Thalheim-Kunz-Hallstein. The case brought Germany’s minister of justice before the court in Karlsruhe for oral arguments in February to defend the ban on what the Germans call “chain names.”

By a vote of five to three, the court refused to budge, ruling that ballooning names “would quickly lose the effectiveness of their identifying purpose,” and declined to overturn the law on the grounds that it infringed on personal expression.

Surely a Thalheim Kunz-Hallstein is going to be more identifiable than a naked Kunz-Hallstein, though I suppose people could mistake her for a prog rock group. I think the German government have just decided that certain names are embarrassing, especially ones that make you think of wasp-waisted junkers waving sabres around and elbowing women off the pavement.

China, incidentally, has the opposite problem: not enough names for the population. Laobaixing – “old hundred names” - is an exaggeration as a synonym for “the people”, but not by that much.

Comments

[Richard J]

It's a strange quirk shared with several other countries that I've never been able to understand - the Scandinavians have a similar fussiness about names as well, I think. I'd suspect a veiled anti-semitic measure, but it just genuinely does seem to be the bureaucratic equivalent of an appendix.

[jamie]

Thinking on, I wonder if it may be something to do with fitting surnames in the space left for them on official forms.

[Richard J]

ISTR that the Prussian civil service rigorously enforced the ink colour usable by grade. Sensible idea, when you think about it, but redolent of a particular mind set.

(I have occasionally wondered, when struggling with the US Visa waiver form, what exactly happens when one's name is too long for the rather miserly number of blocks available.)

[alle]

At least in Sweden, men drafted into the military who were named Larsson, Karlsson or Svensson or some other very common "-son" name, were sometimes forced by their officers to change it to something shorter, more army-like and shoutable, like Svärd ("Sword"), Krig ("War") or Eld ("Fire"). It went on well into the early 1900s. Maybe the Chinese should try something similar, while they're still authoritarian enough.

[Fellow Traveller]

Thinking on, I wonder if it may be something to do with fitting surnames in the space left for them on official forms.

Databases. It will probably cost money in terms of additional disk storage for all the bytes of extra characters in the long names.

[Phil]

You're not kidding, FT. Huge knock-on effects in storage alone, not to mention the cost of the programming and testing time. Keep names as short as poss., that's w. I s.