3 ms·

It is sad that most, if not all, of the databases don’t take into account accents and other phonetic signs. My last name is completely different with and withou

It is sad that most, if not all, of the databases don’t take into account accents and other phonetic signs. My last name is completely different with and without and accent. Actually in my case different languages, without accent is a Spanish last name and with the accent is Catalan. That means that people like me have to keep record of our real names. Also curious that databases have been one step backwards, in Spain Catholic churches kept record of all the babies born in their towns with correct spelling and that is lost now with modern technologies.

fnordian_slip 5y ago
That is indeed sad. I, on the other hand, was pleasantly surprised that the site makes a distinction between "ß" and "ss". This usually presents a problem online, and I've sometimes considered changing my last name because of that. I had never thought about the fact that this must be even harder for French and Spanish speakers, with the high amount of accents compared to Umlauts and the "sharp s" in German.
eb0la 5y ago
They still keep that records. During the spanish civil war they had better data than the goverment.
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
Tons of surnames were truncated or spelled phonetically over the years because not everyone wants to hand hold an immigration official through the proper spelling of a name that they can't pronounce and may have characters that aren't in the alphabet they're using. Even if you don't say "screw it, good enough" after the first few syllables you can lose resolution because there can be multiple character combos that generate the same sound in the source language but there may be fewer used for that in the destination language.
manuelabeledo 5y ago
> ... in Spain Catholic churches kept record of all the babies born in their towns with correct spelling and that is lost now with modern technologies. I found this to be the opposite. My church record contains a hispanicized version of my name, whereas the government has the proper one. Reason given was that the church wouldn't admit certain regional spellings. Also, acute accents have been recorded in the census databases since forever, at least in Spain.
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fnordian_slip 5y ago

That is indeed sad. I, on the other hand, was pleasantly surprised that the site makes a distinction between "ß" and "ss". This usually presents a problem online, and I've sometimes considered changing my last name because of that. I had never thought about the fact that this must be even harder for French and Spanish speakers, with the high amount of accents compared to Umlauts and the "sharp s" in German.

eb0la 5y ago

They still keep that records. During the spanish civil war they had better data than the goverment.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

Tons of surnames were truncated or spelled phonetically over the years because not everyone wants to hand hold an immigration official through the proper spelling of a name that they can't pronounce and may have characters that aren't in the alphabet they're using. Even if you don't say "screw it, good enough" after the first few syllables you can lose resolution because there can be multiple character combos that generate the same sound in the source language but there may be fewer used for that in the destination language.

manuelabeledo 5y ago

> ... in Spain Catholic churches kept record of all the babies born in their towns with correct spelling and that is lost now with modern technologies. I found this to be the opposite. My church record contains a hispanicized version of my name, whereas the government has the proper one. Reason given was that the church wouldn't admit certain regional spellings. Also, acute accents have been recorded in the census databases since forever, at least in Spain.

deleted 5y ago
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