Number of Names
It is not uncommon, in Portugal, that a married woman has two given names and six surnames, two from her mother's family, two from her father's family and the last two coming from her husband. In addition, some of these names may be made of more than one word, so that a full feminine name can have more than 12 words. For instance, the name "Maria do Carmo Mão de Ferro e Cunha de Almeida Santa Rita Santos Abreu" would not be surprising in a married woman. Mão de Ferro (iron hand) and Santa Rita (after Saint Rita of Cascia) count only as one surname each. In this case, Santos Abreu would probably have come from this woman's husband.
In Portugal, the custom of giving a child four last names is getting popular, since this way a child can have each of their grandparents' last name. In Portugal and Brazil some people view this as a sign of snobbery, since it used to be the noble families who had a large number of surnames (for instance, the 4th Duke of Lafões (1797–1851), whose full name was Caetano Segismundo de Bragança e Ligne de Sousa Tavares Mascarenhas da Silva). For the sake of simplicity, most Portuguese people have two surnames.
In Portugal, having only one surname is rare, and it usually happens when both the parents have the same last name, to avoid repetitive combinations such as António Santos Santos (which would, however, be a perfectly legal name). In Brazil, having only one surname is common in areas with large communities of non-Portuguese immigrants.
Read more about this topic: Portuguese Name
Famous quotes containing the words number of, number and/or names:
“Love has its name borrowed by a great number of dealings and affairs that are attributed to it—in which it has no greater part than the Doge in what is done at Venice.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“Strange goings on! Jones did it slowly, deliberately, in the bathroom, with a knife, at midnight. What he did was butter a piece of toast. We are too familiar with the language of action to notice at first an anomaly: the ‘it’ of ‘Jones did it slowly, deliberately,...’ seems to refer to some entity, presumably an action, that is then characterized in a number of ways.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)
“At present our only true names are nicknames.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)