5 ms·

This ruling is interesting. As a person with names in Chinese, I could technically force my bank to support UTF-8 simply by saying I do not wish to be known as

This ruling is interesting. As a person with names in Chinese, I could technically force my bank to support UTF-8 simply by saying I do not wish to be known as my English name, which is the phonetic spelling of my Chinese one. Now since I'm Hongkongese where my English legal name is as legal as the Chinese one the law might be different but for Chinese people though...

caf 5y ago
Same for those with Arabic, Persian, Korean, Thai, Russian ... names
- egeozcan 5y ago
  Also Greek, Turkish, German, Romanian... Is there any language other than English that can be written 100% by ASCII characters? If you have special letters in your name, you'll have a different name in another country without that letter. My surname is supposed to be Özcan, but it's Ozcan or Oezcan in many official documents. Don't even let me start with the "Turkish iİıI problem"... I mean it's not totally unrecognizable but it's a different name nevertheless. I was talking to a Romanian colleague recently and she told me that most of the country uses some US keyboard layout instead of Romanian and cannot type Romanian letters, so people have 2 names even in their home country.
  - gpderetta 5y ago
    thinking that ASCII is enough for English is a bit naïve.
    - xxpor 5y ago
      Spelling it that way is a fantastic way to look pretentious.
      - WorldMaker 5y ago
        It's at least a little more elementary than that. There are many, many school teachers of young children that will tell you that words like coöperative lost a lot useful disambiguation power when English dropped support for such syllabic markers. I see words written like that and I think of grade school, which seems like the opposite of pretension.
      - gpderetta 5y ago
        I could have spelled in the naive way, but then the joke wouldn't have worked.
  - jhbadger 5y ago
    > Is there any language other than English that can be written 100% by ASCII characters Latin. Yes, a lot of textbooks add some diacritics to show pronunciation (as Latin wasn't 100% consistent between spelling and pronunciation), but the Romans themselves didn't use them.
    - N19PEDL2 5y ago
      So they will never face this problem in Vatican City [0]. Although I guess that Vatican institutions are not required to comply with GDPR. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/5vcd2h/til_the_atms_in_the_vatican_city_are_the_only/ https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/5vcd2h/til_t...
    - cabalamat 5y ago
      > the Romans themselves didn't use them They did sometimes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apex_(diacritic) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apex_(diacritic)
  - clankyclanker 5y ago
    Not even English can be correctly written in (lower) ASCII, it has far too many borrowed words, like naïve and résumé. Say nothing of archaic spellings or ligatures, like encyclopædia, or ruﬀle. It's almost surprising ASCII was as successful as it is.
    - egeozcan 5y ago
      "Not good enough, but used everywhere so nothing we can do" is the worst enemy of good, even worse than perfectionism.
      - mastax 5y ago
        Worse is Better: https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html
    - retrac 5y ago
      Not that surprising. It was a big improvement over the 6-bit encodings that came before. All caps! And it was broadly assumed from the 70s onward that the 8th bit extended to a regional character set. Even my 1980s Canadian Apple //e supported displaying French characters, in some variant of Latin-1 I think. The easy extensibility of ASCII on 8-bit-byte systems was a big part of its popularity (and eventually its greatest curse when all the divergent extensions started meeting online). Or just consider how the Japanese put up with computing in pure katakana (their writing system's equivalent of all caps) well into the 1980s.
    - coldacid 5y ago
      Most English ligatures (pretty much all other than æ and œ) are simply artifacts of formatting, rather than actual letters. With that in mind, ligature versions of fl and ffl (and the like) are unnecessary.
      - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
        There's a person who was involved for years in the maintainance of the venerable CSound audio programming language who specifically changed his last name to ffitch (with a ligature, and no leading capital). I don't know for certain, but I think it was intended to provoke/test/trouble weak text representation in software.
  - anthk 5y ago
    Basque.
  - int_19h 5y ago
    > Is there any language other than English that can be written 100% by ASCII characters Indonesian and Malay languages.
  - samus 5y ago
    Dutch, although they insist on treating the ligature IJ as a letter on its own. It's even part of the sort order in dictionaries and telephone books. Also, probably thanks to Dutch colonialism, the unmodified Latin alphabet is the official writing system in Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, and Singapore, and is used to write the Malay and Indonesian languages. It is also used as the base for romanization systems for languages that don't have a latin-style alphabet already. These are often designed to stick as close to plain lating as possible. Apart from academia and language teaching, a few of them are actually used by governments to render names in latin characters for passports, street signs etc. Personally, I think that the plain latin alphabet is quite limited and that extensions are necessary. Accents, macrons, circumflexes, etc. are certainly annoying to input, but certainly not worse than inventing completely new letters or using digraphs for everything. I rather think that our educational systems don't teach well how to handle them. We don't have to pronounce them all correctly, and certainly can't be expected to, but typing them is not impossible at all!
    - Deukhoofd 5y ago
      Dutch can't be fully written in (non extended) ASCII. https://www.opentaal.org/het-laatste-nieuws/171-karakterfrequentie https://www.opentaal.org/het-laatste-nieuws/171-karakterfreq...
  - kps 5y ago
    ASCII was designed to handle the common Western European accents ˊˋˆ˜¨ by overstriking. 0x08 0x60 is not inherently a worse encoding than 0xCC 0x80 for a combining grave accent.
consp 5y ago
You might be able to but I wonder if you want to. (Considering this is in Western Europe, Belgium) Most of the people will not be able to convert the characters into something they can process, even if they wanted to. While maybe legal, it would speed your processing up a lot to use the phonetic writing in the extended latin character set. The diacritical marks however have some familiarity and are in common use. On a sidenote: lots of airlines also have this issue where an accent or other dimark will remove the character completely making your name different from the one in your passport. Could be quite annoying. edit: thought it was in the Netherlands but it was in Flanders/Belgium.
- gambiting 5y ago
  In all of EU you can have your name spelled with or without the diacritics are it's equally valid, I have official ID documents with my name with and without the diacritics and it's not a problem in the slightest. In fact when my son was born, we decided to keep the diacritics off his first passport(he has dual nationality) but keep them in his second passport for the country where the diacritics came from originally.
- irishsultan 5y ago
  It's in Belgium actually.
  - consp 5y ago
    Yes, Noticed that later. Though my point still applies.
- tdeck 5y ago
  Southwest Airlines doesn't even support having a hyphen in your name, as if that's some exotic character and not something fairly common in English surnames.
nroets 5y ago
Even the Dutch have words that cannot be encoded with in Ebcdic[1]. And I suppose many Dutch have names like André. https://blogs.transparent.com/dutch/tremas-e-i-u-o-a/ https://blogs.transparent.com/dutch/tremas-e-i-u-o-a/
- erk__ 5y ago
  I assume that code page 37 [0] is used in the Netherlands, so it is likely something more other than the common diacritics. Edit: I just saw it was in Belgium, but the same should apply there. Although they seem to be using a variant of code page 37 called code page 500 (also in [0]). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_37 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_37
- Deukhoofd 5y ago
  And considering the ruling was in Belgium, where half the population is French speaking I'd expect a lot of diacritics to occur.
Eduard 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_European_Union#Writing_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_European_Unio...
tdeck 5y ago
When you write your name in Chinese characters, how do people know whether to pronounce it in Cantonese or Mandarin (or some other Chinese language)? Does that ambiguity ever come up?
- samus 5y ago
  I guess it depends on the language they are using at the specific moment. People in Hong Kong are probably going to pronounce it in Cantonese. Border guards in Beijing will probably pronounce it in Mandarin. There is actually no good way to tell whether a name is Mandarin or Cantonese, except maybe by looking at the place of birth or residence. Ironically, the romanized form might give clues as there are many different romanization systems in use.
  - tyteen4a03 5y ago
    There are some limits but other places (especially China) has names that I would find unusual, and I can sort of guess that way. It's definitely not as sure-fire than looking at the romanization for sure.
- bialpio 5y ago
  I'd expect that people who speak Cantonese would use Cantonese, and people who speak Mandarin would use Mandarin pronunciation. When you see a name "Peter", how do you know which pronunciation to use - Dutch, German, Norwegian, English, or other (there's a couple more)? :-)

caf 5y ago

Same for those with Arabic, Persian, Korean, Thai, Russian ... names

egeozcan 5y ago
Also Greek, Turkish, German, Romanian... Is there any language other than English that can be written 100% by ASCII characters? If you have special letters in your name, you'll have a different name in another country without that letter. My surname is supposed to be Özcan, but it's Ozcan or Oezcan in many official documents. Don't even let me start with the "Turkish iİıI problem"... I mean it's not totally unrecognizable but it's a different name nevertheless. I was talking to a Romanian colleague recently and she told me that most of the country uses some US keyboard layout instead of Romanian and cannot type Romanian letters, so people have 2 names even in their home country.
- gpderetta 5y ago
  thinking that ASCII is enough for English is a bit naïve.
  - xxpor 5y ago
    Spelling it that way is a fantastic way to look pretentious.
    - WorldMaker 5y ago
      It's at least a little more elementary than that. There are many, many school teachers of young children that will tell you that words like coöperative lost a lot useful disambiguation power when English dropped support for such syllabic markers. I see words written like that and I think of grade school, which seems like the opposite of pretension.
    - gpderetta 5y ago
      I could have spelled in the naive way, but then the joke wouldn't have worked.
- jhbadger 5y ago
  > Is there any language other than English that can be written 100% by ASCII characters Latin. Yes, a lot of textbooks add some diacritics to show pronunciation (as Latin wasn't 100% consistent between spelling and pronunciation), but the Romans themselves didn't use them.
  - N19PEDL2 5y ago
    So they will never face this problem in Vatican City [0]. Although I guess that Vatican institutions are not required to comply with GDPR. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/5vcd2h/til_the_atms_in_the_vatican_city_are_the_only/ https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/5vcd2h/til_t...
  - cabalamat 5y ago
    > the Romans themselves didn't use them They did sometimes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apex_(diacritic) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apex_(diacritic)
- clankyclanker 5y ago
  Not even English can be correctly written in (lower) ASCII, it has far too many borrowed words, like naïve and résumé. Say nothing of archaic spellings or ligatures, like encyclopædia, or ruﬀle. It's almost surprising ASCII was as successful as it is.
  - egeozcan 5y ago
    "Not good enough, but used everywhere so nothing we can do" is the worst enemy of good, even worse than perfectionism.
    - mastax 5y ago
      Worse is Better: https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html
  - retrac 5y ago
    Not that surprising. It was a big improvement over the 6-bit encodings that came before. All caps! And it was broadly assumed from the 70s onward that the 8th bit extended to a regional character set. Even my 1980s Canadian Apple //e supported displaying French characters, in some variant of Latin-1 I think. The easy extensibility of ASCII on 8-bit-byte systems was a big part of its popularity (and eventually its greatest curse when all the divergent extensions started meeting online). Or just consider how the Japanese put up with computing in pure katakana (their writing system's equivalent of all caps) well into the 1980s.
  - coldacid 5y ago
    Most English ligatures (pretty much all other than æ and œ) are simply artifacts of formatting, rather than actual letters. With that in mind, ligature versions of fl and ffl (and the like) are unnecessary.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      There's a person who was involved for years in the maintainance of the venerable CSound audio programming language who specifically changed his last name to ffitch (with a ligature, and no leading capital). I don't know for certain, but I think it was intended to provoke/test/trouble weak text representation in software.
- anthk 5y ago
  Basque.
- int_19h 5y ago
  > Is there any language other than English that can be written 100% by ASCII characters Indonesian and Malay languages.
- samus 5y ago
  Dutch, although they insist on treating the ligature IJ as a letter on its own. It's even part of the sort order in dictionaries and telephone books. Also, probably thanks to Dutch colonialism, the unmodified Latin alphabet is the official writing system in Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, and Singapore, and is used to write the Malay and Indonesian languages. It is also used as the base for romanization systems for languages that don't have a latin-style alphabet already. These are often designed to stick as close to plain lating as possible. Apart from academia and language teaching, a few of them are actually used by governments to render names in latin characters for passports, street signs etc. Personally, I think that the plain latin alphabet is quite limited and that extensions are necessary. Accents, macrons, circumflexes, etc. are certainly annoying to input, but certainly not worse than inventing completely new letters or using digraphs for everything. I rather think that our educational systems don't teach well how to handle them. We don't have to pronounce them all correctly, and certainly can't be expected to, but typing them is not impossible at all!
  - Deukhoofd 5y ago
    Dutch can't be fully written in (non extended) ASCII. https://www.opentaal.org/het-laatste-nieuws/171-karakterfrequentie https://www.opentaal.org/het-laatste-nieuws/171-karakterfreq...
- kps 5y ago
  ASCII was designed to handle the common Western European accents ˊˋˆ˜¨ by overstriking. 0x08 0x60 is not inherently a worse encoding than 0xCC 0x80 for a combining grave accent.

consp 5y ago

You might be able to but I wonder if you want to. (Considering this is in Western Europe, Belgium) Most of the people will not be able to convert the characters into something they can process, even if they wanted to. While maybe legal, it would speed your processing up a lot to use the phonetic writing in the extended latin character set. The diacritical marks however have some familiarity and are in common use. On a sidenote: lots of airlines also have this issue where an accent or other dimark will remove the character completely making your name different from the one in your passport. Could be quite annoying. edit: thought it was in the Netherlands but it was in Flanders/Belgium.

gambiting 5y ago
In all of EU you can have your name spelled with or without the diacritics are it's equally valid, I have official ID documents with my name with and without the diacritics and it's not a problem in the slightest. In fact when my son was born, we decided to keep the diacritics off his first passport(he has dual nationality) but keep them in his second passport for the country where the diacritics came from originally.
irishsultan 5y ago
It's in Belgium actually.
- consp 5y ago
  Yes, Noticed that later. Though my point still applies.
tdeck 5y ago
Southwest Airlines doesn't even support having a hyphen in your name, as if that's some exotic character and not something fairly common in English surnames.

nroets 5y ago

Even the Dutch have words that cannot be encoded with in Ebcdic[1]. And I suppose many Dutch have names like André. https://blogs.transparent.com/dutch/tremas-e-i-u-o-a/ https://blogs.transparent.com/dutch/tremas-e-i-u-o-a/

erk__ 5y ago
I assume that code page 37 [0] is used in the Netherlands, so it is likely something more other than the common diacritics. Edit: I just saw it was in Belgium, but the same should apply there. Although they seem to be using a variant of code page 37 called code page 500 (also in [0]). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_37 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_37
Deukhoofd 5y ago
And considering the ruling was in Belgium, where half the population is French speaking I'd expect a lot of diacritics to occur.

Eduard 5y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_European_Union#Writing_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_European_Unio...

tdeck 5y ago

When you write your name in Chinese characters, how do people know whether to pronounce it in Cantonese or Mandarin (or some other Chinese language)? Does that ambiguity ever come up?

samus 5y ago
I guess it depends on the language they are using at the specific moment. People in Hong Kong are probably going to pronounce it in Cantonese. Border guards in Beijing will probably pronounce it in Mandarin. There is actually no good way to tell whether a name is Mandarin or Cantonese, except maybe by looking at the place of birth or residence. Ironically, the romanized form might give clues as there are many different romanization systems in use.
- tyteen4a03 5y ago
  There are some limits but other places (especially China) has names that I would find unusual, and I can sort of guess that way. It's definitely not as sure-fire than looking at the romanization for sure.
bialpio 5y ago
I'd expect that people who speak Cantonese would use Cantonese, and people who speak Mandarin would use Mandarin pronunciation. When you see a name "Peter", how do you know which pronunciation to use - Dutch, German, Norwegian, English, or other (there's a couple more)? :-)