My best friends last name confuses me!?

Question

Her last name is de la Rosa. She said her actual last name is "ROSA". .. At school they spell is all capitolized. What is the rule on lower cased "de la" ? My doctor has the same last name and I asked her and she said if its lower cased "de la" it has something to do with marriage. I got confused again. anyhoo.. Just want to set it straight.

Answer 1

This is literally Spanish for "of the Rose". Many names started as titles, like Smith and Carpenter. Others are really place names, like al Harabi.

Answer 2

the problem is that name usage is customary, according to the country. What we "know" or expect is from our experience.  In Spanish, a 3 word name is normal.. and we are not used to this.

The marriage thing is when a person uses both his father's last name and his mother's last name.. example Gonzales y Perez.  Your friend's name is not doing this.. it is just a 3 word last name, and the English translation  is "of the rose".  The lower case letters is fine, in Spanish use.

Our systems are set up for one word last names, and the entire thing starts with a capitol.  So a computer system just does not know which is supposed to "be" the real last name. It really IS all her last name.

The bottom line is that when you have one country does it one way, it does not mean that all countries do the same way. Very hard to just translate a custom from one language to the other.

Answer 3

I think that, in Romance language last names, words like "de" and "la" are not capitalized, but since English-speaking countries always capitalize the first letter of a last name, those words (or at least the first of them) get capitalized, properly or improperly.  To the best of my knowledge, it has nothing to do with marriage, although in many Spanish speaking countries, a married woman combines her own last name with that of her husband, with "y" (and) between them.  I'm not sure which comes first, but their children use both names and put the mother's name last; then when a daughter marries, she drops her mother's name from the combination but joins her father's and her husband's.