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Literacy used to be much less common. If you don't spell your own name, what does it mean to misspell it?


You said your name to the civil servant, and they might "misspell" it. That is: it's recorded "correctly" somewhere (e.g. birth certificate) but somewhere along the line it becomes "wrong" (registering your child, getting new papers, etc.)

My surname is Tournoij, which I inherited from my father. him, me, and my brother have that surname: the entire rest of the family is Tournoy. Mistake during registration when he was born ("y" and "ij" are often pronounced identical in Dutch), and apparently it's nigh-impossible to correct afterwards.

As to the original of Tourno(y|ij), my guess is that it's several degrees of misspellings from Tournai, a place in French Belgium.




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