This video was made possible by Brilliant. The first 424 people to sign up at brilliant.org/HAI
will get 20% off their premium subscription. This is Sweden, one of the countries on the
friendly northern countries side of the world. In Sweden, you can’t name your baby Metallica,
you can’t name them Elvis, you can’t name them Ikea, and you definitely can’t name
them Albin just as long as its spelled like this. That’s because Sweden has some of the strictest
laws in the world on which names you can use. These laws originally came around because
Sweden is a monarchy. They’ve got a king, and queen, and royal
families, as monarchies do, and they don’t want anyone to just waltz into fake nobility
by changing their name. They want the nobles to stay noble and their
ordinaries to stay ordinary so nobody is allowed to use the names of noble families unless
they are part of that family. Slight problem—there are over 28,000 nobles
in Sweden. That’s a lot of prohibited names. Weirdly, these laws are managed by the Swedish
Tax Agency. Whenever a baby is born in Sweden, parents
are required to submit a name to them for approval. Of course in most cases babies just take the
last name of their parents, but you can technically change last names, so, in order to prevent
anyone from changing their last names to that of a royal, this agency prevents anyone from
naming their child or changing their name to a noble name. But they also regulate first names. The naming law states that “First names
shall not be approved if they can cause offense or can be supposed to cause discomfort for
the one using it, or names which for some obvious reason are not suitable as a first
name.” This is why they rejected this spelling of
Albin. The parents submitted this name in protest
of the naming laws since they were fined 5000 krona for not submitting a name by the child’s
5th birthday and, after this spelling was rejected, they tried again by submitting the
name Albin, this time spelled like this. This name was rejected again because of a
ban on one-letter names. But Sweden isn’t the only place where some
names are illegal. In Denmark, which is, fun fact, the only country
in the world who’s name starts with “d-e-n” and ends with “mark,” there’s a list
of 15,000 male names and 18,000 female names that are approved for use. In order to name a child something not on
this list, parents have to go through a laborious approval process. Iceland, one of the other countries in the
jibber-jabber language area of the world, is even more restrictive where there are only
1,700 approved male names and 1,800 approved female names. These Icelandic laws are even more difficult
to comply with because Iceland doesn’t name people the same way as the rest of the world. In the traditional Icelandic naming system,
there are no real last names. If someone named Karl DanĂelson has a boy
named Björn, the son would not take the last name DanĂelson. In Iceland, boys last names are typically
their fathers first names plus “son” which, surprisingly, means son, while girls last
names are correspondently usually their fathers first names plus dóttir, which means daughter. So, that boy named Björn with a father named
Karl would be named Björn Karlson. This can create enormous difficulties especially
for Icelandic nationals who have children abroad and name them with the more traditional
last-name system. Children without proper gendered last names
have regularly been denied passports in Iceland and so, to summarize, in Iceland, Aliaksandr
Alexander Aliaksandrson is a legal name but John Smith is not. But even the US has some restrictions on names. Of course, Americans seem to take this whole
free speech thing pretty seriously so you don’t need to get names approved, but there
are some technical limitations on which names you can have. There are no country-wide laws on names, but
different states have different restrictions mostly based off of how advanced their computer
systems that handle name registration are. In Alaska, for example, you can have any name
you want but in New Hampshire, on the other hand, names are capped at 100 characters because
the state computers can only handle 100 character names. California, meanwhile, prohibits names spelled
with anything but the 26 letters of the English alphabet so Günter and Léa and José are
out of luck. Of course these people aren’t just prohibited
from existing in California, but for all government purposes their name will be switched to a
version without accents. Also out of luck would be famous mathematician
Mileva Marić who I’m sure you all know married Albert Einstein who published the
Theory of Relativity, which stated that you can’t travel faster than the speed of light,
among other things, in 1905 then 113 years later it went up as a course on brilliant.org. Brilliant is the best place to learn things
like probability, machine learning, special relativity, and more because they don’t
teach you by making you frantically check a bunch of inane rules. With Brilliant you learn by playing through
puzzles that help you build up your intuition, so you truly come to understand these concepts. You can take as many of these superbly designed
courses as you want with their premium subscription which, by being one of the first 424 people
to click on the link in the description, you can get for 20% off.
I love his smooth transitions into the final ad. Can't even be mad.
It realy caught me off guard when he Said My real Name and country, out loud. Great video.
Additional perspective on the Icelandic names for you guys. This is a saying that I use to give my friends better understanding of it. "My name is Viktor but I am JĂłnsson".
Pronounced Albin