Mongolians seek to make a name for themselves by bringing back family names:
For more than 80 years, everyone in Mongolia was on a first-name basis. After seizing power in the early 1920s, the Mongolian Communists destroyed all family names in a campaign to eliminate the clan system, the hereditary aristocracy and the class structure.Within a few decades, most Mongolians had forgotten their ancestral names. They used only a single given name — a system that eventually became confusing when 9,000 women ended up with the same name, Altantsetseg, meaning ‘golden flower.’
Frankly, I’m surprised that most Mongolians forgot their ancestral names. Anyway, they’re coming back:
By the mid-1990s, Mongolia had become a democracy again, and there were growing worries about the lack of surnames. One name might be enough when most people were nomadic herdsman in remote pastures, but now the country was urbanizing. The one-name system was so confusing that some people were marrying without realizing they were relatives.In 1997, a new law required everyone to have surnames. The law was largely ignored, but then a system of citizenship cards was introduced. Slowly the country of 2.5 million began to adopt surnames.
Today, however, there are still 10,000 people without surnames. So the government is trying to solve the problem with a mixture of incentives (a discount on the registration fee) and heavy-handed pressure (a threat of financial penalties on anyone who fails to get a citizenship card before the June 27 national election).
Of course, everyone now gets to choose a surname, and “Borjigin, the tribal name of Genghis Khan, has become the most popular name in the country. It means master of the blue wolf, a reference to Mongolia’s creation myth.”
Can you imagine literally have a name like “Skywalker”?:
Mongolia’s Defence Minister, an earnest, bespectacled man with a “Hero of the Soviet Union” medal on his jacket, is the proud owner of probably the coolest name in the country.The 58-year-old minister, Gurragchaa, is a former cosmonaut on a Soviet spaceship — the only cosmonaut from Mongolia. And so when he was unable to discover his ancestral surname, he chose Sansar, the Mongolian word for the cosmos. His children will use the same name.