6 ms·

It's the same logistics as an American thinking twice before naming their baby with the Cyrillic alphabet. It's a foreign language that will probably not play w

It's the same logistics as an American thinking twice before naming their baby with the Cyrillic alphabet. It's a foreign language that will probably not play well with domestic systems.

paranoidrobot 8y ago
All sorts of people from non-English extraction will have the same problem. I've known a few people called Zoë (enough now that I still know the alt-0235 short-code for it on windows), and inevitably on their licenses the omit the diaeresis above their name. It's really a version of Falsehoods Programmers Believe about Names[1] writ-large, by government. [1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  The diaeresis in Zoë is a purely English mark. It's not foreign in any sense.
  - yorwba 8y ago
    It is however slowly going the way of the þorn, since most people don't know how to type it, and even if they did they wouldn't see a reason to use it.
- bloak 8y ago
  I was curious and googled a bit. Some British people on netmums.com report that they successfully put these names on birth certificates: Éilis, Zoë. I would guess that "Michèle" would also be allowed. I've never heard of an official set of allowed characters, but everything relating to names of people seems to be unregulated in the UK. One argument people mentioned (though I have no idea whether it has any validity) is that if you have the diacritic on the birth certificate then it's easy to drop it later, or not use it in practice, but the other direction would be harder to justify.
  - EliRivers 8y ago
    but everything relating to names of people seems to be unregulated in the UK As an aside, one can indeed simply change one's name whenever one likes and start going by a new name, so long as it's not for fradulent purposes. One is advised to get some kind of documentary name-changing paperwork, and getting a passport etc in your new name will require that paperwork.
sonnyblarney 8y ago
With Cyrillic, because of it's proximity to Latin, there may be a way to have a 'standard transfer pattern' set of rules, whereby Cyrillic<->Latin can be done with clarity and consistency. But we'd have to get our act together ...
- bmn__ 8y ago
  ISO 9 was adopted 1954.
  - sonnyblarney 8y ago
    touché
  - PeterisP 8y ago
    It's worth to note that it's a standard, not the standard - even that page includes multiple variations, and there are other transliteration standards officially used in various places (e.g. the Russian international passports transliterate names a bit differently than ISO 9), so you can't really do "Cyrillic<->Latin can be done with clarity and consistency", you get different inconsistent transliterations of the same name and also it's not 100% reversible, especially if you don't know how it was transliterated. For example, the (quite common) name Юрий has been transliterated as Yuriy, Yurij, Yurii, Yuri, Juriy, Jurij or even other options. Also, you can't transliterate from Cyrillic, you can transliterate from a particular language, since any phonetic transliterations will be slightly different between, for example, Russian and Ukrainian - even ISO 9 accounts for that, so a sequence of letters without context can't be sufficient for transliteration, the exact same sequence of cyrillic letters may have to be transliterated differently depending on its language.
    - bloak 8y ago
      Pedantry: I think you can transliterate from Cyrillic. But you can't transcribe from Cyrillic. There are situations in which you have to transliterate, rather than transcribe, because you don't know what language it is. For example, it's a name in a list of names of people from different places.
TuringTest 8y ago
It's not the names, it's the technology. Ask any non-US, non-UK, non MS-Windows computer user: any document not in the original ASC-127 subset is prone to be mangled for being shown with the wrong character set, wrong linefeed configuration, not having the right BOM, not allowing right-to-left... Open the document in the wrong application, and the text will be interspeded with ∆ and °, or ® and▯in the places of all the non-English characters, with no obvious way to fix the encoding. The most robust solution would be that each document-showing application had a dialog showing how the text is displayed in all the supported codesets at once, allowing the user to choose the right one. Instead, we get config options buried deep in the menu, showing endless lists of cryptic options, forcing the user to try then one by one. It's frustrating to know that the correct configuration is one click away, but having no idea which one is the right option. Mmmmmhhh... That gives me an idea for an app...
- majewsky 8y ago
  > any document not in the original ASC-127 subset is prone to be mangled for being shown with the wrong character set, wrong linefeed configuration, not having the right BOM, not allowing right-to-left... It got much better in the last years as UTF-8 gained wider adoption. The problems are mostly with legacy systems in government. (Cannot comment on that since my name fits in ASCII.)
  - TuringTest 8y ago
    Maybe for registering to government systems... Using desktop applications is still a nightmare, where opening any document from the internet or navigating to a foreign page is hit or miss. Also, the main frustration is not that it happens often; it's that when you encounter it, fixing it may involve studying the whole software stack to find out where the setting is switched or at what point in the toolchain the format was mishandled.
    - TuringTest 8y ago
      And there are non-zero chances that changing to the wrong option and saving the document will permanently break the file as the combination of two wrongly configured codesets. I don't know, maybe it's me who's doing something wrong and turn to using only a small subset of software tools, properly configured? But I do need to process documents from many origins using a variety of different tools; I've never found a good programable multimedia editor that satisfies all my needs (something like emacs but with WYSIWIG capabilities).

It's the same logistics as an American thinking twice before naming their baby with the Cyrillic alphabet. It's a foreign language that will probably not play well with domestic systems.

paranoidrobot 8y ago

All sorts of people from non-English extraction will have the same problem. I've known a few people called Zoë (enough now that I still know the alt-0235 short-code for it on windows), and inevitably on their licenses the omit the diaeresis above their name. It's really a version of Falsehoods Programmers Believe about Names[1] writ-large, by government. [1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

thaumasiotes 8y ago
The diaeresis in Zoë is a purely English mark. It's not foreign in any sense.
- yorwba 8y ago
  It is however slowly going the way of the þorn, since most people don't know how to type it, and even if they did they wouldn't see a reason to use it.
bloak 8y ago
I was curious and googled a bit. Some British people on netmums.com report that they successfully put these names on birth certificates: Éilis, Zoë. I would guess that "Michèle" would also be allowed. I've never heard of an official set of allowed characters, but everything relating to names of people seems to be unregulated in the UK. One argument people mentioned (though I have no idea whether it has any validity) is that if you have the diacritic on the birth certificate then it's easy to drop it later, or not use it in practice, but the other direction would be harder to justify.
- EliRivers 8y ago
  but everything relating to names of people seems to be unregulated in the UK As an aside, one can indeed simply change one's name whenever one likes and start going by a new name, so long as it's not for fradulent purposes. One is advised to get some kind of documentary name-changing paperwork, and getting a passport etc in your new name will require that paperwork.

sonnyblarney 8y ago

With Cyrillic, because of it's proximity to Latin, there may be a way to have a 'standard transfer pattern' set of rules, whereby Cyrillic<->Latin can be done with clarity and consistency. But we'd have to get our act together ...

bmn__ 8y ago
ISO 9 was adopted 1954.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  touché
- PeterisP 8y ago
  It's worth to note that it's a standard, not the standard - even that page includes multiple variations, and there are other transliteration standards officially used in various places (e.g. the Russian international passports transliterate names a bit differently than ISO 9), so you can't really do "Cyrillic<->Latin can be done with clarity and consistency", you get different inconsistent transliterations of the same name and also it's not 100% reversible, especially if you don't know how it was transliterated. For example, the (quite common) name Юрий has been transliterated as Yuriy, Yurij, Yurii, Yuri, Juriy, Jurij or even other options. Also, you can't transliterate from Cyrillic, you can transliterate from a particular language, since any phonetic transliterations will be slightly different between, for example, Russian and Ukrainian - even ISO 9 accounts for that, so a sequence of letters without context can't be sufficient for transliteration, the exact same sequence of cyrillic letters may have to be transliterated differently depending on its language.
  - bloak 8y ago
    Pedantry: I think you can transliterate from Cyrillic. But you can't transcribe from Cyrillic. There are situations in which you have to transliterate, rather than transcribe, because you don't know what language it is. For example, it's a name in a list of names of people from different places.

TuringTest 8y ago

It's not the names, it's the technology. Ask any non-US, non-UK, non MS-Windows computer user: any document not in the original ASC-127 subset is prone to be mangled for being shown with the wrong character set, wrong linefeed configuration, not having the right BOM, not allowing right-to-left... Open the document in the wrong application, and the text will be interspeded with ∆ and °, or ® and▯in the places of all the non-English characters, with no obvious way to fix the encoding. The most robust solution would be that each document-showing application had a dialog showing how the text is displayed in all the supported codesets at once, allowing the user to choose the right one. Instead, we get config options buried deep in the menu, showing endless lists of cryptic options, forcing the user to try then one by one. It's frustrating to know that the correct configuration is one click away, but having no idea which one is the right option. Mmmmmhhh... That gives me an idea for an app...

majewsky 8y ago
> any document not in the original ASC-127 subset is prone to be mangled for being shown with the wrong character set, wrong linefeed configuration, not having the right BOM, not allowing right-to-left... It got much better in the last years as UTF-8 gained wider adoption. The problems are mostly with legacy systems in government. (Cannot comment on that since my name fits in ASCII.)
- TuringTest 8y ago
  Maybe for registering to government systems... Using desktop applications is still a nightmare, where opening any document from the internet or navigating to a foreign page is hit or miss. Also, the main frustration is not that it happens often; it's that when you encounter it, fixing it may involve studying the whole software stack to find out where the setting is switched or at what point in the toolchain the format was mishandled.
  - TuringTest 8y ago
    And there are non-zero chances that changing to the wrong option and saving the document will permanently break the file as the combination of two wrongly configured codesets. I don't know, maybe it's me who's doing something wrong and turn to using only a small subset of software tools, properly configured? But I do need to process documents from many origins using a variety of different tools; I've never found a good programable multimedia editor that satisfies all my needs (something like emacs but with WYSIWIG capabilities).