3 ms·

This begs the question: when nobody in the world speaks a language fluently and only three people speak it at all, who exactly benefits from the ability to regi

by bww 6y ago

This begs the question: when nobody in the world speaks a language fluently and only three people speak it at all, who exactly benefits from the ability to register a business using the characters of that language? This is a legal formality, after all. Surely they could use the actual characters of their language in marketing materials and so fourth, if not on their checks. Allowing the use of characters on legal documents that only three people in the world understand seems pretty problematic for obvious reasons. If this is genuinely the obstacle preventing these folks from starting a business, I submit that they don't care about starting a business, they care about making a point. I guess that's fine, but I'm not convinced business registration is really the right venue for this particular issue.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
exporectomy 6y ago
Yes, they're just making a point and a stupid point too. In my native language, it's not customary to write names in all-caps nor to append the word "LIMITED" to them, yet that's what I have to do to register my business.
kelnos 6y ago
Where do you draw the line, though? In addition to the charset issue, they appear to actually have a law that requires business names to use English or French characters. That means no Greek, no Cyrillic, no Asian languages... at least not without Romanizing them. Presumably a Spanish speaker couldn't even use "ñ" in a business' registered name, which is pretty absurd. How about other indigenous languages present in Canada that do still have wide fluency and use rates, but may use a different alphabet? I get that there are practical problems dealing with characters that people aren't familiar with, but if colonialism and war hadn't wiped out a lot of these indigenous peoples and cultures over the last 500 years, maybe these languages would be more prominent. Saying, "we stole your land and supplanted your culture so you have to use our alphabet", is a pretty shitty thing to do.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  >Saying, "we stole your land and supplanted your culture so you have to use our alphabet", is a pretty shitty thing to do. Who is "we"? No one alive today stole anything. Maybe it's more about the utility of the use of a common language and script that results in a functional society, and sometimes the boundary conditions of time and effort cause some scripts to be unsupported.
- CoolGuySteve 6y ago
  > "we stole your land and supplanted your culture so you have to use our alphabet" That's pretty much how all the indigenous alphabets in Canada came to be when they were created by missionaries in the 19th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Aboriginal_syllabics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Aboriginal_syllabics
- skissane 6y ago
  > Where do you draw the line, though? I think the likely answer is going to be – no, they won't allow any language, they will keep to a restricted alphabet for company names, based on what characters are used in a list of allowed languages. What they'll do, is extend that list to include indigenous languages of British Columbia. So likely there will be a process, in which an indigenous community will submit an application to have its script allowed in company names (and possibly other names such as personal names). The government will ask professional linguists to advise on the application to ensure its correctness. Then the characters used to write that particular language will be added to the allowed list. I think the argument is that the British Columbia government has a special moral duty to its indigenous peoples to help preserve their languages and culture, which justifies them going the extra mile to support the official use of their languages. I don't think it has the same moral duty to preserve Tibetan or Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji) so it would be justified in not extending this provision to those languages. One potential issue I foresee is data interchange. I presume that British Columbia shares company data with other Canadian provinces, the Canadian federal government, probably even foreign governments (especially the US) and private sector firms (such as D&B Hoovers). What if the data interchange format doesn't allow these additional characters? One solution is to give the company two names – its name in the indigenous language, and an English/French approximation to that. The system would store both names. Data interchanges which can't support the indigenous language characters would only receive the English/French approximation name.

by bww 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

exporectomy 6y ago

Yes, they're just making a point and a stupid point too. In my native language, it's not customary to write names in all-caps nor to append the word "LIMITED" to them, yet that's what I have to do to register my business.

kelnos 6y ago

Where do you draw the line, though? In addition to the charset issue, they appear to actually have a law that requires business names to use English or French characters. That means no Greek, no Cyrillic, no Asian languages... at least not without Romanizing them. Presumably a Spanish speaker couldn't even use "ñ" in a business' registered name, which is pretty absurd. How about other indigenous languages present in Canada that do still have wide fluency and use rates, but may use a different alphabet? I get that there are practical problems dealing with characters that people aren't familiar with, but if colonialism and war hadn't wiped out a lot of these indigenous peoples and cultures over the last 500 years, maybe these languages would be more prominent. Saying, "we stole your land and supplanted your culture so you have to use our alphabet", is a pretty shitty thing to do.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
>Saying, "we stole your land and supplanted your culture so you have to use our alphabet", is a pretty shitty thing to do. Who is "we"? No one alive today stole anything. Maybe it's more about the utility of the use of a common language and script that results in a functional society, and sometimes the boundary conditions of time and effort cause some scripts to be unsupported.
CoolGuySteve 6y ago
> "we stole your land and supplanted your culture so you have to use our alphabet" That's pretty much how all the indigenous alphabets in Canada came to be when they were created by missionaries in the 19th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Aboriginal_syllabics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Aboriginal_syllabics
skissane 6y ago
> Where do you draw the line, though? I think the likely answer is going to be – no, they won't allow any language, they will keep to a restricted alphabet for company names, based on what characters are used in a list of allowed languages. What they'll do, is extend that list to include indigenous languages of British Columbia. So likely there will be a process, in which an indigenous community will submit an application to have its script allowed in company names (and possibly other names such as personal names). The government will ask professional linguists to advise on the application to ensure its correctness. Then the characters used to write that particular language will be added to the allowed list. I think the argument is that the British Columbia government has a special moral duty to its indigenous peoples to help preserve their languages and culture, which justifies them going the extra mile to support the official use of their languages. I don't think it has the same moral duty to preserve Tibetan or Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji) so it would be justified in not extending this provision to those languages. One potential issue I foresee is data interchange. I presume that British Columbia shares company data with other Canadian provinces, the Canadian federal government, probably even foreign governments (especially the US) and private sector firms (such as D&B Hoovers). What if the data interchange format doesn't allow these additional characters? One solution is to give the company two names – its name in the indigenous language, and an English/French approximation to that. The system would store both names. Data interchanges which can't support the indigenous language characters would only receive the English/French approximation name.