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And good thing, IMO. You try and have a weird name in a foreign country. If you're not careful, everyone will spell it differently, and then you'll spend ages

And good thing, IMO. You try and have a weird name in a foreign country. If you're not careful, everyone will spell it differently, and then you'll spend ages going "No, I'm sure I'm in your system. Try this other spelling". At least back in the 90s when I often had to deal with that, you were usually talking to a real life person, sitting on the other side of the desk. You could show them your documentation. Today since everything is online and computerized, the risk is that a computer somewhere in the chain will just go "The bits don't match", and it'll be challenge to even reach a real person, let alone one capable of even understanding what problem you're having. Here's a real problem this could cause: To get a visa you usually need to prove ties to your country. This normally includes a bank extract. If the name printed on your bank extract doesn't match what's printed on your documentation that means a very real risk of rejection, and not going anywhere if you can't fix it fast enough. And I can imagine other very not fun possibilities, like having some sort of KYC/AML snag where something decides you lied about your name.

dathinab 3y ago
> weird name to double down on it it's not even about a weird name per-se but lot of very normal EU names if a lot of early IT wouldn't have been dominated by a US "works for us must work for everyone" approach I think we never would have ended up with such limitations common in legacy systems (there still would be limitations, pre-unicode the solution was custom code pages and similar, which all supported some subset of non us-ascii but only a subset) luckily today unicode is the standard (through for some cultural and historic aspects it's sometimes not enough)
- taway1237 3y ago
  >US "works for us must work for everyone" approach I'm all for bashing the US, but I think this is a global ghing, not unique to the US.
  - corbezzoli 3y ago
    The difference is that most countries don't expect the world to bow to them (culturally, technologically, etc). While I used Chinese products, I never had to learn how to spell my name with Chinese characters.
    - smcl 3y ago
      You're saying this like it was some deliberately hostile, colonial move to impose ASCII on the world. But I don't think it was quite like that, more that in the beginnings of computing people designed and built things for themselves. And it just happened to be that a lot of that early work happened in the anglosphere.
      - wink 3y ago
        I honestly think it has more to do with culture. I've never been to the US so this might be completely wrong, but my observations from talking to people and just observing: - if you move to the US and have a name made up of non-ASCII chars you are more likely to either drop them/substitute them with ascii chars, or use the Anglicized version of your name if it exists, or adopt an English name. And then it's kinda easy to legally change or your name. Or screw it, it's kinda easy to just show up and tell them you're Johnny Awesome and then you're Johnny Awesome. - if you move to Germany, you can't legally change your name at all without good reason, every document ever, no matter how informal (especially at school) will probably have your full name, maybe hopefully just "First Last" and not all 7 of them, everyone of authority will refuse to call you Johnny Awesome if your name is actually Johnathan Jean-Pierre Awesome-Livingston, and so on, oh and they will also fail to not butcher your name if it's not so easy a 4y old can learn it. We can't be the only ones leaning more towards #2. And no, I'm not making this up, my go-to example is that I've seen cases where things like officially not calling "Bill Gates" "William Gates" have met resistance. Your name is your name, and I'm still not sure how people in the spotlight are able to be called Dick, I'm not joking.
        account42 3y ago
        Try living in an asian country - probably you will have to choose a name in the local script which at best vaguely sounds like your given name. It's expected that if you use someone elses playground that you adapt to their rules - that goes for moving to a foreign country and to using technology primarily developed in one.
  - dathinab 3y ago
    true it's not that uncommon but it's especially stereotypical for mainly the US, China and I think Japan. Which are all countries where to due to various reasons (size, culture/nationalism) there are a lot of people doing technical decisions which: 1st only speak the countries language, 2nd have little interaction with very different cultures (in the US it's complicated, they have a lot of mixing other cultures into them, but do so in a very very US specific way with a lot of unaware cultural appropriation (and I don't mean this in the "bad/evil" way it's often used today but the cultural normal way) and the US is so large that there is little reason to make a trip to a country which is very different, and even if they do so, it's often in a form which is very touristy. This leads to situation where e.g. US citizens claim they are Spanish because of some ancestors and claim to practice Spanish culture but they are 0% clueless about actual Spain even after having traveled there twice or so. Contrast this with the EU where e.g. spending on study semester in another country which does have a completely different language and culture isn't rare, and non touristy holiday trips to other countries are common too (I mean in some cases it's just a few hours by care) and it's very easy, to have people which just don't know better.)
- liotier 3y ago
  In the early 90's me and a couple of other French guys had taken to writing French unaccented, so that we wouldn't suffer the daily pain of character set problems - we really bashed our own heads to fit into lower ASCII !
  - Zanfa 3y ago
    In early 2000s Estonia, I remember people using numbers to denote certain accented characters when texting: õ - 6 ä - 2 ö - 8 ü - y
    - buchoo 3y ago
      Arabic speakers have a comparable system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_chat_alphabet#Comparison_table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_chat_alphabet#Compariso...
      - HPsquared 3y ago
        The trouble comes up when an Arab needs to communicate with an Estonian verbally. How do they spell their names to each other?
        iforgotpassword 3y ago
        I think it could lead to an accidental diffie helman key exchange.
    - dathinab 3y ago
      in German there is an official convention for the non us-ascii letters, AFIK it predates computers and is rooted in germanic dialects developing differently and later stuff like non-german specific type writers, printing press machines, etc. ä => ae ö => oe ü => ue ß => ss but one gotcha is that it's a fuzzy one way trip, some words, especially city names, can have a ae,oe,ue in their correct native spelling. Worse ss is a normal language building block in German which is pronounced differently then ß so writing it as ss is quite confusing for anyone which doesn't happen to know that it's correct spelling is with ß. To top that of some cases of ß spelling have officially changed to ss spelling over time due to people anyway pronouncing it more like a ss and getting it wrong all the time. And to some degree ß is semi-official abandoned by now.
- simiones 3y ago
  I don't think this is strictly a technical problem, at least not when it happens in international contexts (it's inexcusable for your own country's authorities to not be able to record your actual culturally-specific name). The reality is that there is a limited char set that is actually understandable at an international level, and it's not that different from ASCII. Even with paper systems, if you go to Rome to sign into a hotel and you give your name as 依诺, they will not be able to even write it down, nevermind pronounce it. And even if you tell them it's Yī Nuò, they will likely ignore the accents since they won't know what those mean. Similarly, if you go to China and say your name is Sângeorz-Băi, they will not know what the diacritics mean and will not be easily able to write them down. In all times in history, when multiple cultures interact, they have to find a common subset of their languages to communicate in, and that includes names. The situation in writing is actually much much better, even if limitted to ASCII, than it is in actual spoken language. Maybe you can write my name down perfectly (Simionescu), but I would bet you won't use the proper pronunciation unless you happen to know Romanian - you will likely use different vowels and consonants.
  - ninkendo 3y ago
    Thank you for providing sanity here. Not every problem comes from idiot Americans just being lazy.
    - dathinab 3y ago
      except that the system they mention was (co) created by the US with the US being a major player deciding on the rules it uses...
      - tsimionescu 3y ago
        If you mean ASCII, you'll also notice that it happens to correspond pretty well with the entirety of writing symbols which have broad global recognition, and this has been true for a long time. Sure, it's missing many many culturally specific things like accents and other diacritics, non-latin writing systems etc. But none or at least very few of the symbols missing from ASCII are actually broadly understood by people from more than a handful of countries (which can still mean a billion plus people in the case of Chinese, Arabic, and Indian scripts, of course). Probably Arabic is the biggest counterpoint to my claim, as there is quite a large array of countries across two continents that recognize it. However, even there, there are far more people in countries which use Arabic writing that also recognize Latin letters than the other way around. The many diacritics used by various European languages are definitely NOT something that has any wide adoption or meaning. Perhaps only the umlaut sign and the accent are even used by more than one or two European languages. So again, my claim is that any system of writing that is intended for global international communication will have to restrict all names to the A-Z characters in ASCII with spaces as separators (and perhaps 0-9 and a few other characters that would anyway get ignored). Nothing else will work if people around the world are supposed to recognize the name in some meaningful sense. And relying entirely on automated OCR is a no-go for many use cases. And just like people who interact with those outside their cultures have to accept that their name will be pronounced in a myriad of ways, they have no reason not to accept that it will be written in different ways as well.
- wink 3y ago
  I can tell you that German bank thing I signed up in 2023 and can't be older than ~5 years asked for my FULL name as written on my ID, in my case it's "First Second Last" but I go by "First Last" but in their infinite wisdom they decided to ask for the full thing (which I understand, it's bank stuff) but never think about what they call me in their stupid email. No one's ever called me "First Second" - not even my parents. And I can't even be mad, but I'm still disappointed. (Fortunately my name is ASCII and since we can do more than 8+3 I've never had problems.)
  - rjsw 3y ago
    I made a similar mistake in France, the system decided to call me Firstsecond Last.
    - selimthegrim 3y ago
      This happens to me on United all the time for some reason.
      - Jailbird 3y ago
        I've seen that forever and not just on United. I have thought it's something about the underlying SABRE system that many airlines use. Maybe someone here knows more.
        pavlov 3y ago
        Happens to me as well. My first, second and last names are quite short, five letters each. So my guess is that’s it’s related to that. Maybe there’s simply the COBOL equivalent of the following somewhere: if len(first) + len(second) + len(last) <= MAX_LEN_ON_TICKET: first_name_on_ticket = first + second
        raverbashing 3y ago
        I've asked ChatGPT for the COBOL equivalent... and it's 18 lines
- ahoka 3y ago
  But then ASCII can't even represent proper US English.
- michaelteter 3y ago
  > US "works for us must work for everyone" I think you mean “built for us, and meets our needs”. It’s not the US’s problem that other countries don’t necessarily take innovation risks, but instead buy our old stuff.
- kps 3y ago
  The IT in question started with Hollerith cards¹, processed by electromechanical equipment. These were originally numeric only — digit n represented by a hole in row n which would stop or start a counter wheel. (Punched cards were processed row by row, not column by column.) The alphabetic extension added a second hole near the top edge, handled using much more complicated and expensive equipment. EBCDIC was originally a straightforward mapping of these holes into an 8 bit space, and its arrangement makes sense seen that way. ASCII on the other hand derives much more from communications equipment (telegraphy) than IT gear. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card#IBM_80-column_format_and_character_codes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card#IBM_80-column_for...
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  I get that it was a USAcentric thing, and that we should always be active w.r.t. calling out ethnocentric behavior. But it was also an "8-bit" thing and a "extremely limited computing resources" thing. EBCDIC was designed in 1963/1964. I mean, when you've got 8 bits to represent a character, and there are more than 256 possible characters... what do you do? A truly robust solution like Unicode would not have been feasible with the resources of the day, and even a "simple" 16-bit scheme would barely be able to contain all 50,000 Chinese characters. The blame here lies with the Dutch bank who willingly chose an EBCDIC solution in 1995, although I'm sure they were dealing with various constraints and pressures as well.
- pif 3y ago
  > "works for us must work for everyone" You are wrong. It was rather a poor decision on the buyers' side: "It does NOT work for us, but who cares?".
- gopher_space 3y ago
  > if a lot of early IT wouldn't have been dominated by a US "works for us must work for everyone" approach I think we never would have ended up with such limitations common in legacy systems Most of the early work was in English and the people buying these systems all understood English. Nobody back then had a problem with a lingua franca for aspects of tech because there were still people around who had to learn German to study science.
KirillPanov 3y ago
> some sort of KYC/AML snag where something Get used to it. Once the government realizes it can shift the burden of enforcing a law onto the private sector, it never un-discovers that. It's a ratchet.
hyperman1 3y ago
This story happens in Belgium. All national languages(Dutch, French, Germans) have plenty of accented characters. This EBCDIC variant was never a valid technical choice for the country. Sad that we needed the GDPR to finally whack some sense in this bank. I worked in a similar national organization. I fought for having a newly built systems in 2015 created in anything different than cp1252 and ISO8859-1. I lost. The architects flat out forbade UTF-8 and required 1252, in the name of consistency.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  In Dutch we also have the letter Ĳ which is part of my last name. But ASCII (nor EBCDIC) don't have it so some family members have changed it to 'y' and some are using 'ij' to make up for that. So on paper our family lineage is now split because these changes have meanwhile made it into birth certificates and legal names and it's so ingrained that it can't really be changed any more.
  - tremon 3y ago
    That would be http://www.unicode-symbol.com/u/0133.html http://www.unicode-symbol.com/u/0133.html (ĳ), am I right?
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      Yes, that's the one. According to the Wikipedia page it is deprecated but that doesn't show in the page linked here.
      - Freak_NL 3y ago
        It is mentioned here: https://unicode.org/faq/casemap_charprop.html#6a https://unicode.org/faq/casemap_charprop.html#6a > The Unicode Standard encodes these two compatibility characters [0x0132 Ĳ and 0x0133 ĳ] to provide support for roundtrip conversion of the Dutch letter 'ij' in certain very rare legacy (non-Unicode) character encodings. It is strongly preferred (and far more common) to use the two character ASCII sequence 'ij' to represent this letter instead. You can dig in the Unicode mailing lists for discussions on this from over twenty years ago. The bottom line is that you shouldn't use 0x0132 and 0x0133 in modern text. By now this is a resolved issue.
fodkodrasz 3y ago
> weird name Yeah, some people think about their heritage as not compatible with the brave new world, so get rid of it. I know people giving their child dedicatedly ascii-only name common in the USA to make sure their children won't have a "weird name" when going to the USA.
- snordgren 3y ago
  We would have loved to name our son after my grandfather, but his name includes non-ASCII characters so we went with his middle name instead.
  - Y_Y 3y ago
    Good old grampa \NUL\BEL\ACK would be rolling in his gràve if he knew that foreigners with non-ASCII names had taken over his country.
    - soco 3y ago
      Oh the little Bobby Tables right https://xkcd.com/327/ https://xkcd.com/327/
  - fodkodrasz 3y ago
    This is the kind of compromise I'd never take. (Yet still a million times closer to my world view than the decision I mentioned. Guess I'm stubborn in some topics.)
  - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
    Why not just use a spelling without accents?
    - fodkodrasz 3y ago
      In some places there is an officially acknowledged list of valid given names (for citizens born in the jurisdiction, eg. Hungary), and that format of the name might not be on it. Elon Musk would be in trouble here naming his children. It is a debatable practice, yet I think this is somewhat protecting the children from silly decisions of parents (some example from Hungarian tabloid media where parents were outraged: Fradi / Fradika (from the slang name Fradi of the FTC football club, without and with diminutive appendix), Traktorka (tractor with diminutive appendix), various names from soap operas, WoW characters, Shrek, Satan. So think of the children! :) But really, this is the other end of the spectrum. And this (giving especially weird names to children) is a fine recipe for making the child subject to bullying in my opinion.
giamma 3y ago
My first name in Italian is made of two words. That is not uncommon in Italy, but I usually write it as a single word otherwise non-Italians would assume that the second part is a second name, and address me with only the first part of my name, which I find somehow annoying. Even better, when I was a kid and I got my first official document, the national healthcare card, the software in use did not allow a space character in the first name. The operator then decided to add a hyphen to enter the two parts of my name as separate words. Fast forward many years, and I my first name shows up with the hyphen on the ID card and healthcare card, while it does not contain the hyphen on the driving license, which of course I got much later when software had improved. Generally this is a non issue, nobody ever said that it's not me because there is a hyphen or a space in my name, however when I signed the mortgage for my house, the layer asked me to sign with the hyphen, and in the document he wrote both variants of my name with an A.K.A. clause.
- CaptainZapp 3y ago
  > Even better, when I was a kid and I got my first official document, the national healthcare card, the software in use did not allow a space character in the first name. The operator then decided to add a hyphen to enter the two parts of my name as separate words. On virtually every airline ticket for which I provided my first and middle name it was just concatenated. For example: I would provide Frank John Sample as my name it appears as FRANKJOHN SAMPLE on the ticket Old reservation and ticketing systems, indeed.
  - selimthegrim 3y ago
    Only United does this to me.
  - rowyourboat 3y ago
    Yeah, I have a two-word last name. It sometimes gets smushed together by the airlines, but they're inconsistent about it. Lufthansa for example does this in a particularly annoying way, if I give my name as LAST NAME, it will automatically smush it to LASTNAME. However, if I then want to retrieve my boarding pass, it will only find my booking when I enter my name as LASTNAME, because the look-up does not smush things automatically.
wodenokoto 3y ago
That’s absurd. So now every organization needs to be able to handle every script in the world? One thing is if the database can handle Unicode, but what about employees? They now need to be able to differentiate Chinese characters as well as Sanskrit, Hangul and Thai script? Of course not. Airlines have pretty paved the way for everyone having an ascii encodable version of the name and this is so standardized that it’s even in your passport.
- davedx 3y ago
  Why is it absurd? Either you accept customers or users with foreign names or you don't. If you don't, fine! If you do, then you should be able to store those names correctly. I find it laughable that airlines are given as a shining example of operational excellence.
  - HPsquared 3y ago
    The good thing with ASCII is that everyone, everywhere can type it in using a standard keyboard. Everyone can read, write, speak and hear the basic Latin alphabet. Not even an English/US thing, this is the Latin script from Roman times.
    - SiempreViernes 3y ago
      Funny! But you should put the /s in there to indicate it is satire :)
      - HPsquared 3y ago
        It's funny because it's true. Edit: what do you suggest as a universal alternative for bit-perfect verbal communication... Spelling out Base64 Unicode over the phone?
        epcoa 3y ago
        > speak and hear the basic Latin alphabet. The Latin alphabet does not have a single pronunciation. And the vowels are ambiguous across the most common languages so you can't even make an argument that they are intelligible. You've really lost the plot on this one.
chx 3y ago
Yeah I just bought a new home in Birżebbuġa, Malta and you bet every single piece of official and unofficial documentation has it as Birzebbuga. No one wants to deal with this.
physicles 3y ago
I live in China. According to my bank, my full name is LASTNAMEFIRSTNAMEMIDDLENAME. All caps, no spaces. When it comes to the amount of ass-pain this can cause, that's just the tip of the iceberg. Sometimes it's funny though. At hospitals, there's an automated system that announces the next person by name (GDPR? Privacy? What's that?). For non-Chinese names, it reads the name letter by letter. So now everyone in earshot knows there's a foreigner around somewhere.
deleted 3y ago
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jwr 3y ago
That is a very narrow view. You assume that your set of characters is appropriate for representing names in the entire world. Why this specific set of characters? Cyrillic or greek could work just as well, they have a limited set and no diacritics.
cameronh90 3y ago
I don't really care how I'm identified, provided I know it's me. But the security problems are real and very annoying, even with a "normal" name. For some silly historical reason, my middle name has two different spellings depending on which official document you're looking at, which causes no end of problems. Conversely, I know people with very simple, common names, the kind where two people born in the same city on the same day have the same name, that suffer a load of different but equally frustrating issues. These problems, however, aren't just limited to computer systems [0]. Border officers, bank clerks and government officials and other general bureaucrat types are all just as bad as a strict strcmp implementation. The issue is that many people operating in an official capacity seem to work under the assumption that a name is a globally unique identifier that has exactly one representation, but that's not how names work in any culture. On the other hand, if not names, then what? Combined with birth dates, it's the closest thing we have to a globally recognised unique immutable identifier, and any better alternative is going to feel invasive and face a lot of opposition on privacy grounds. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq-dchJPXGA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq-dchJPXGA
- sokoloff 3y ago
  Names are mutable though.
  - cameronh90 3y ago
    They're also not globally unique and don't have a single representation. But they're the closest thing we have that would be acceptable to most people. Better suggestion?
    - bandrami 3y ago
      GUID assigned at birth and implanted in an RFID chip behind the ear.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
luma 3y ago
Question for you as this seems to be your lived experience: how would you correct the issue stated in the article? They give an example of characters like "á, è, ô, ü, ç". Say your name included a "ç" and you're at a movie theater trying to get your call in tickets. Their keyboard notably does not have a "ç" key. How do you guide them toward success?
DoreenMichele 3y ago
I had a professor with a foreign name from someplace that didn't use the Roman alphabet. His credit report had like 30-some-odd spellings of his name. When asked "So what is the correct spelling?" he snarkily shot back "You tell me." It's not a standard western name. It wasn't originally written I'm English. Attempts to translate it to English -- well, they are guesses on how to spell what someone thinks they are hearing from a language that the Roman alphabet isn't designed to capture.
patrakov 3y ago
Even if you are 146% careful, there is still a chance that your own country officially renames you by introducing new rules for transliteration between its alphabet and the Latin one. Happened to me in 2020 - the name I use online matches my old passport, but not the new one.
forth_fool 3y ago
So the bureaucrats are winning (as they always do). Demanding that your name is written down in a specific way is just stupid. I always found it elitist when people insist on a specific spelling. Typical examples are "Philip/Phillip/Philipp", "Stefan/Stephan", "Harald/Harold", "Erik/Eric/Erich", "Michael/Michel/Mikail" and so on... all these variations refer to the same name. Different dialect, different language, the spelling varies. So what? It's still the same name! IMHO, the cited Article 16 doesn't necessarily demand a rectification of the spelling. This is about meaning, not syntax. But that's surely up to interpretation.
grishka 3y ago
I'm Russian and I have to live with three similar names: my real one written in Cyrillic, the stupid transliteration into Latin I have in my international passport (and by extension everywhere I show it abroad), and Gregory when I introduce myself to someone who doesn't speak Russian. Will a bank in a country that doesn't use the Cyrillic alphabet agree to write my name in Cyrillic? I'm 99% sure no. So, organizations fully supporting the writing system of the country in which they operate is a reasonable expectation. But I never expect anyone abroad to agree to write my name in an alphabet they can't even read. Tangentially, Turkey renamed itself in English into "Türkiye". This suffers from the same issue — there is no letter ü in English. No one knows how to spell that. So it's no surprise the new name didn't stick.
sotix 3y ago
I have been working on obtaining Greek citizenship, and it has been crazy dealing with the documentation from my late grandfather who never updated anything upon moving to America. There are two ways to spell his surname depending on if the documents come from Greece or Albania (due to borders changing between countries since his birth). When he was in the process of immigrating to the US through Ellis Island, his last name was converted to Greeklish (English alphabet representing Greek characters) on all of the manifests. This resulted in a few mixed spellings. At Ellis Island they ruled his name would be too confusing for Americans, so they entirely altered the spelling to make it phonetically more pleasing to an American. Fortunately, his name was short enough where the new name sounds the same as it does in Greek. My grandfather proudly took his new name and enjoyed his new life! Many immigrants from Greece had their names shortened and completely altered. To a Greek, they are incoherent gibberish with no meaning. Then there is the issue where women’s surnames are conjugated into a feminine ending, so women have similar but different last names than their husbands. The US didn’t like this and didn’t understand this practice for a long time. I know a few women that have dual citizenship and maintain a passport for each country with a different spelling of their last name. Updating documentation in one country to the other causes all sorts of issues with this setup (since everything requires a translation via an apostille). My friends recently got married in Greece and then separately again in the US at a courthouse to avoid all of the paperwork and translation pains from the woman’s Greek maiden name differing from her American maiden name. Many of these issues are easier to deal with now, but they have a long history of confusion and extra effort going back more than 100 years. Safe to say, I’m relying on documentation from my other Greek grandfather where things are more straightforward for pursuing my citizenship.
tapoxi 3y ago
I don't even have a name that's very "weird", I have an Irish last name, in Boston, and the O' part is something no computer can reasonably tolerate in 2023. I've missed flights. I've had duplicate accounts because some places drop the apostrophe and some don't, I've been given badges at tech conferences where its O' - it's infuriating.
ta988 3y ago
This is why when you do a us visa you have the opportunity to give all the spellings and forms of your names.
marcosdumay 3y ago
There's a good reason why every institution just distributes numbers for everyone and asks them to remember it.
yencabulator 3y ago
I see you haven't interacted with companies in the US much. I write my name on an online form, a minimum-wage employee reads my name from a screen and types it into another application, and gets it wrong. Now the online account and the actual billing have my name spelled differently. U.S. concept of automation is that a cheap employee does something in the back office..
oldbbsnickname 3y ago
> "No, I'm sure I'm in your system. Try this other spelling." Every Turk, Russian, and Serb enters the chat. Transliteration without deterministic, reversable fidelity sucks. PS: I have a "normal" given name people spell 4 different ways and surname people spell 3 ways. ]: I always spell them out. Just be glad your last name doesn't have 4 "y"s as their legal American name like a former coworker.
centur 3y ago
This hits so very close to home for me. I'd rather prefer that certain things stays in ASCII, despite my name and surname are not originally written in English. This problem is too well-known to everyone who have their original docs written in non-English alphabet (read - everyone with diacritics or cyrillic script or hebrew or heaps of other non-Latin-based writing systems). To add insult to injury - this is not even about some common transliteration tables from non-Latin to Latin script. Sometimes? rules of transliteration are changed based on local govt whims and if you got caught in such bureaucracy - all hell let loose. You can't obtain a document with previous "latin spelling", because it's changed in a system. This way you may have a ticket with one spelling and passport with another. Or, like in my case, my brother and I have different surname transliterations to English. And my first name would be spelled with 4 different letters than it's in all my other documents if I have to issue a document from scratch. Good luck explaining all this nonsense to anyone, who is trying to "character-match" someone's hard-to-pronounce surname from official document. Even worse when they would try to re-type any of UTF-8 characters without knowing a correct character codes or not having corresponding layout installed (most of the time in international airports and customs). So, I'm personally fine with something is incompatible with GDPR, as long as certain systems would stay ASCII as long as they can. We'll be opening a whole new can of worms if internationally used documents would be in UTF-8, imo.

dathinab 3y ago

> weird name to double down on it it's not even about a weird name per-se but lot of very normal EU names if a lot of early IT wouldn't have been dominated by a US "works for us must work for everyone" approach I think we never would have ended up with such limitations common in legacy systems (there still would be limitations, pre-unicode the solution was custom code pages and similar, which all supported some subset of non us-ascii but only a subset) luckily today unicode is the standard (through for some cultural and historic aspects it's sometimes not enough)

taway1237 3y ago
>US "works for us must work for everyone" approach I'm all for bashing the US, but I think this is a global ghing, not unique to the US.
- corbezzoli 3y ago
  The difference is that most countries don't expect the world to bow to them (culturally, technologically, etc). While I used Chinese products, I never had to learn how to spell my name with Chinese characters.
  - smcl 3y ago
    You're saying this like it was some deliberately hostile, colonial move to impose ASCII on the world. But I don't think it was quite like that, more that in the beginnings of computing people designed and built things for themselves. And it just happened to be that a lot of that early work happened in the anglosphere.
    - wink 3y ago
      I honestly think it has more to do with culture. I've never been to the US so this might be completely wrong, but my observations from talking to people and just observing: - if you move to the US and have a name made up of non-ASCII chars you are more likely to either drop them/substitute them with ascii chars, or use the Anglicized version of your name if it exists, or adopt an English name. And then it's kinda easy to legally change or your name. Or screw it, it's kinda easy to just show up and tell them you're Johnny Awesome and then you're Johnny Awesome. - if you move to Germany, you can't legally change your name at all without good reason, every document ever, no matter how informal (especially at school) will probably have your full name, maybe hopefully just "First Last" and not all 7 of them, everyone of authority will refuse to call you Johnny Awesome if your name is actually Johnathan Jean-Pierre Awesome-Livingston, and so on, oh and they will also fail to not butcher your name if it's not so easy a 4y old can learn it. We can't be the only ones leaning more towards #2. And no, I'm not making this up, my go-to example is that I've seen cases where things like officially not calling "Bill Gates" "William Gates" have met resistance. Your name is your name, and I'm still not sure how people in the spotlight are able to be called Dick, I'm not joking.
      - account42 3y ago
        Try living in an asian country - probably you will have to choose a name in the local script which at best vaguely sounds like your given name. It's expected that if you use someone elses playground that you adapt to their rules - that goes for moving to a foreign country and to using technology primarily developed in one.
- dathinab 3y ago
  true it's not that uncommon but it's especially stereotypical for mainly the US, China and I think Japan. Which are all countries where to due to various reasons (size, culture/nationalism) there are a lot of people doing technical decisions which: 1st only speak the countries language, 2nd have little interaction with very different cultures (in the US it's complicated, they have a lot of mixing other cultures into them, but do so in a very very US specific way with a lot of unaware cultural appropriation (and I don't mean this in the "bad/evil" way it's often used today but the cultural normal way) and the US is so large that there is little reason to make a trip to a country which is very different, and even if they do so, it's often in a form which is very touristy. This leads to situation where e.g. US citizens claim they are Spanish because of some ancestors and claim to practice Spanish culture but they are 0% clueless about actual Spain even after having traveled there twice or so. Contrast this with the EU where e.g. spending on study semester in another country which does have a completely different language and culture isn't rare, and non touristy holiday trips to other countries are common too (I mean in some cases it's just a few hours by care) and it's very easy, to have people which just don't know better.)
liotier 3y ago
In the early 90's me and a couple of other French guys had taken to writing French unaccented, so that we wouldn't suffer the daily pain of character set problems - we really bashed our own heads to fit into lower ASCII !
- Zanfa 3y ago
  In early 2000s Estonia, I remember people using numbers to denote certain accented characters when texting: õ - 6 ä - 2 ö - 8 ü - y
  - buchoo 3y ago
    Arabic speakers have a comparable system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_chat_alphabet#Comparison_table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_chat_alphabet#Compariso...
    - HPsquared 3y ago
      The trouble comes up when an Arab needs to communicate with an Estonian verbally. How do they spell their names to each other?
      - iforgotpassword 3y ago
        I think it could lead to an accidental diffie helman key exchange.
  - dathinab 3y ago
    in German there is an official convention for the non us-ascii letters, AFIK it predates computers and is rooted in germanic dialects developing differently and later stuff like non-german specific type writers, printing press machines, etc. ä => ae ö => oe ü => ue ß => ss but one gotcha is that it's a fuzzy one way trip, some words, especially city names, can have a ae,oe,ue in their correct native spelling. Worse ss is a normal language building block in German which is pronounced differently then ß so writing it as ss is quite confusing for anyone which doesn't happen to know that it's correct spelling is with ß. To top that of some cases of ß spelling have officially changed to ss spelling over time due to people anyway pronouncing it more like a ss and getting it wrong all the time. And to some degree ß is semi-official abandoned by now.
simiones 3y ago
I don't think this is strictly a technical problem, at least not when it happens in international contexts (it's inexcusable for your own country's authorities to not be able to record your actual culturally-specific name). The reality is that there is a limited char set that is actually understandable at an international level, and it's not that different from ASCII. Even with paper systems, if you go to Rome to sign into a hotel and you give your name as 依诺, they will not be able to even write it down, nevermind pronounce it. And even if you tell them it's Yī Nuò, they will likely ignore the accents since they won't know what those mean. Similarly, if you go to China and say your name is Sângeorz-Băi, they will not know what the diacritics mean and will not be easily able to write them down. In all times in history, when multiple cultures interact, they have to find a common subset of their languages to communicate in, and that includes names. The situation in writing is actually much much better, even if limitted to ASCII, than it is in actual spoken language. Maybe you can write my name down perfectly (Simionescu), but I would bet you won't use the proper pronunciation unless you happen to know Romanian - you will likely use different vowels and consonants.
- ninkendo 3y ago
  Thank you for providing sanity here. Not every problem comes from idiot Americans just being lazy.
  - dathinab 3y ago
    except that the system they mention was (co) created by the US with the US being a major player deciding on the rules it uses...
    - tsimionescu 3y ago
      If you mean ASCII, you'll also notice that it happens to correspond pretty well with the entirety of writing symbols which have broad global recognition, and this has been true for a long time. Sure, it's missing many many culturally specific things like accents and other diacritics, non-latin writing systems etc. But none or at least very few of the symbols missing from ASCII are actually broadly understood by people from more than a handful of countries (which can still mean a billion plus people in the case of Chinese, Arabic, and Indian scripts, of course). Probably Arabic is the biggest counterpoint to my claim, as there is quite a large array of countries across two continents that recognize it. However, even there, there are far more people in countries which use Arabic writing that also recognize Latin letters than the other way around. The many diacritics used by various European languages are definitely NOT something that has any wide adoption or meaning. Perhaps only the umlaut sign and the accent are even used by more than one or two European languages. So again, my claim is that any system of writing that is intended for global international communication will have to restrict all names to the A-Z characters in ASCII with spaces as separators (and perhaps 0-9 and a few other characters that would anyway get ignored). Nothing else will work if people around the world are supposed to recognize the name in some meaningful sense. And relying entirely on automated OCR is a no-go for many use cases. And just like people who interact with those outside their cultures have to accept that their name will be pronounced in a myriad of ways, they have no reason not to accept that it will be written in different ways as well.
wink 3y ago
I can tell you that German bank thing I signed up in 2023 and can't be older than ~5 years asked for my FULL name as written on my ID, in my case it's "First Second Last" but I go by "First Last" but in their infinite wisdom they decided to ask for the full thing (which I understand, it's bank stuff) but never think about what they call me in their stupid email. No one's ever called me "First Second" - not even my parents. And I can't even be mad, but I'm still disappointed. (Fortunately my name is ASCII and since we can do more than 8+3 I've never had problems.)
- rjsw 3y ago
  I made a similar mistake in France, the system decided to call me Firstsecond Last.
  - selimthegrim 3y ago
    This happens to me on United all the time for some reason.
    - Jailbird 3y ago
      I've seen that forever and not just on United. I have thought it's something about the underlying SABRE system that many airlines use. Maybe someone here knows more.
      - pavlov 3y ago
        Happens to me as well. My first, second and last names are quite short, five letters each. So my guess is that’s it’s related to that. Maybe there’s simply the COBOL equivalent of the following somewhere: if len(first) + len(second) + len(last) <= MAX_LEN_ON_TICKET: first_name_on_ticket = first + second
        raverbashing 3y ago
        I've asked ChatGPT for the COBOL equivalent... and it's 18 lines
ahoka 3y ago
But then ASCII can't even represent proper US English.
michaelteter 3y ago
> US "works for us must work for everyone" I think you mean “built for us, and meets our needs”. It’s not the US’s problem that other countries don’t necessarily take innovation risks, but instead buy our old stuff.
kps 3y ago
The IT in question started with Hollerith cards¹, processed by electromechanical equipment. These were originally numeric only — digit n represented by a hole in row n which would stop or start a counter wheel. (Punched cards were processed row by row, not column by column.) The alphabetic extension added a second hole near the top edge, handled using much more complicated and expensive equipment. EBCDIC was originally a straightforward mapping of these holes into an 8 bit space, and its arrangement makes sense seen that way. ASCII on the other hand derives much more from communications equipment (telegraphy) than IT gear. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card#IBM_80-column_format_and_character_codes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card#IBM_80-column_for...
JohnBooty 3y ago
I get that it was a USAcentric thing, and that we should always be active w.r.t. calling out ethnocentric behavior. But it was also an "8-bit" thing and a "extremely limited computing resources" thing. EBCDIC was designed in 1963/1964. I mean, when you've got 8 bits to represent a character, and there are more than 256 possible characters... what do you do? A truly robust solution like Unicode would not have been feasible with the resources of the day, and even a "simple" 16-bit scheme would barely be able to contain all 50,000 Chinese characters. The blame here lies with the Dutch bank who willingly chose an EBCDIC solution in 1995, although I'm sure they were dealing with various constraints and pressures as well.
pif 3y ago
> "works for us must work for everyone" You are wrong. It was rather a poor decision on the buyers' side: "It does NOT work for us, but who cares?".
gopher_space 3y ago
> if a lot of early IT wouldn't have been dominated by a US "works for us must work for everyone" approach I think we never would have ended up with such limitations common in legacy systems Most of the early work was in English and the people buying these systems all understood English. Nobody back then had a problem with a lingua franca for aspects of tech because there were still people around who had to learn German to study science.

KirillPanov 3y ago

> some sort of KYC/AML snag where something Get used to it. Once the government realizes it can shift the burden of enforcing a law onto the private sector, it never un-discovers that. It's a ratchet.

hyperman1 3y ago

This story happens in Belgium. All national languages(Dutch, French, Germans) have plenty of accented characters. This EBCDIC variant was never a valid technical choice for the country. Sad that we needed the GDPR to finally whack some sense in this bank. I worked in a similar national organization. I fought for having a newly built systems in 2015 created in anything different than cp1252 and ISO8859-1. I lost. The architects flat out forbade UTF-8 and required 1252, in the name of consistency.

jacquesm 3y ago
In Dutch we also have the letter Ĳ which is part of my last name. But ASCII (nor EBCDIC) don't have it so some family members have changed it to 'y' and some are using 'ij' to make up for that. So on paper our family lineage is now split because these changes have meanwhile made it into birth certificates and legal names and it's so ingrained that it can't really be changed any more.
- tremon 3y ago
  That would be http://www.unicode-symbol.com/u/0133.html http://www.unicode-symbol.com/u/0133.html (ĳ), am I right?
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Yes, that's the one. According to the Wikipedia page it is deprecated but that doesn't show in the page linked here.
    - Freak_NL 3y ago
      It is mentioned here: https://unicode.org/faq/casemap_charprop.html#6a https://unicode.org/faq/casemap_charprop.html#6a > The Unicode Standard encodes these two compatibility characters [0x0132 Ĳ and 0x0133 ĳ] to provide support for roundtrip conversion of the Dutch letter 'ij' in certain very rare legacy (non-Unicode) character encodings. It is strongly preferred (and far more common) to use the two character ASCII sequence 'ij' to represent this letter instead. You can dig in the Unicode mailing lists for discussions on this from over twenty years ago. The bottom line is that you shouldn't use 0x0132 and 0x0133 in modern text. By now this is a resolved issue.

fodkodrasz 3y ago

> weird name Yeah, some people think about their heritage as not compatible with the brave new world, so get rid of it. I know people giving their child dedicatedly ascii-only name common in the USA to make sure their children won't have a "weird name" when going to the USA.

snordgren 3y ago
We would have loved to name our son after my grandfather, but his name includes non-ASCII characters so we went with his middle name instead.
- Y_Y 3y ago
  Good old grampa \NUL\BEL\ACK would be rolling in his gràve if he knew that foreigners with non-ASCII names had taken over his country.
  - soco 3y ago
    Oh the little Bobby Tables right https://xkcd.com/327/ https://xkcd.com/327/
- fodkodrasz 3y ago
  This is the kind of compromise I'd never take. (Yet still a million times closer to my world view than the decision I mentioned. Guess I'm stubborn in some topics.)
- PrimeMcFly 3y ago
  Why not just use a spelling without accents?
  - fodkodrasz 3y ago
    In some places there is an officially acknowledged list of valid given names (for citizens born in the jurisdiction, eg. Hungary), and that format of the name might not be on it. Elon Musk would be in trouble here naming his children. It is a debatable practice, yet I think this is somewhat protecting the children from silly decisions of parents (some example from Hungarian tabloid media where parents were outraged: Fradi / Fradika (from the slang name Fradi of the FTC football club, without and with diminutive appendix), Traktorka (tractor with diminutive appendix), various names from soap operas, WoW characters, Shrek, Satan. So think of the children! :) But really, this is the other end of the spectrum. And this (giving especially weird names to children) is a fine recipe for making the child subject to bullying in my opinion.

giamma 3y ago

My first name in Italian is made of two words. That is not uncommon in Italy, but I usually write it as a single word otherwise non-Italians would assume that the second part is a second name, and address me with only the first part of my name, which I find somehow annoying. Even better, when I was a kid and I got my first official document, the national healthcare card, the software in use did not allow a space character in the first name. The operator then decided to add a hyphen to enter the two parts of my name as separate words. Fast forward many years, and I my first name shows up with the hyphen on the ID card and healthcare card, while it does not contain the hyphen on the driving license, which of course I got much later when software had improved. Generally this is a non issue, nobody ever said that it's not me because there is a hyphen or a space in my name, however when I signed the mortgage for my house, the layer asked me to sign with the hyphen, and in the document he wrote both variants of my name with an A.K.A. clause.

CaptainZapp 3y ago
> Even better, when I was a kid and I got my first official document, the national healthcare card, the software in use did not allow a space character in the first name. The operator then decided to add a hyphen to enter the two parts of my name as separate words. On virtually every airline ticket for which I provided my first and middle name it was just concatenated. For example: I would provide Frank John Sample as my name it appears as FRANKJOHN SAMPLE on the ticket Old reservation and ticketing systems, indeed.
- selimthegrim 3y ago
  Only United does this to me.
- rowyourboat 3y ago
  Yeah, I have a two-word last name. It sometimes gets smushed together by the airlines, but they're inconsistent about it. Lufthansa for example does this in a particularly annoying way, if I give my name as LAST NAME, it will automatically smush it to LASTNAME. However, if I then want to retrieve my boarding pass, it will only find my booking when I enter my name as LASTNAME, because the look-up does not smush things automatically.

wodenokoto 3y ago

That’s absurd. So now every organization needs to be able to handle every script in the world? One thing is if the database can handle Unicode, but what about employees? They now need to be able to differentiate Chinese characters as well as Sanskrit, Hangul and Thai script? Of course not. Airlines have pretty paved the way for everyone having an ascii encodable version of the name and this is so standardized that it’s even in your passport.

davedx 3y ago
Why is it absurd? Either you accept customers or users with foreign names or you don't. If you don't, fine! If you do, then you should be able to store those names correctly. I find it laughable that airlines are given as a shining example of operational excellence.
- HPsquared 3y ago
  The good thing with ASCII is that everyone, everywhere can type it in using a standard keyboard. Everyone can read, write, speak and hear the basic Latin alphabet. Not even an English/US thing, this is the Latin script from Roman times.
  - SiempreViernes 3y ago
    Funny! But you should put the /s in there to indicate it is satire :)
    - HPsquared 3y ago
      It's funny because it's true. Edit: what do you suggest as a universal alternative for bit-perfect verbal communication... Spelling out Base64 Unicode over the phone?
      - epcoa 3y ago
        > speak and hear the basic Latin alphabet. The Latin alphabet does not have a single pronunciation. And the vowels are ambiguous across the most common languages so you can't even make an argument that they are intelligible. You've really lost the plot on this one.

chx 3y ago

Yeah I just bought a new home in Birżebbuġa, Malta and you bet every single piece of official and unofficial documentation has it as Birzebbuga. No one wants to deal with this.

physicles 3y ago

I live in China. According to my bank, my full name is LASTNAMEFIRSTNAMEMIDDLENAME. All caps, no spaces. When it comes to the amount of ass-pain this can cause, that's just the tip of the iceberg. Sometimes it's funny though. At hospitals, there's an automated system that announces the next person by name (GDPR? Privacy? What's that?). For non-Chinese names, it reads the name letter by letter. So now everyone in earshot knows there's a foreigner around somewhere.

deleted 3y ago

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jwr 3y ago

That is a very narrow view. You assume that your set of characters is appropriate for representing names in the entire world. Why this specific set of characters? Cyrillic or greek could work just as well, they have a limited set and no diacritics.

cameronh90 3y ago

I don't really care how I'm identified, provided I know it's me. But the security problems are real and very annoying, even with a "normal" name. For some silly historical reason, my middle name has two different spellings depending on which official document you're looking at, which causes no end of problems. Conversely, I know people with very simple, common names, the kind where two people born in the same city on the same day have the same name, that suffer a load of different but equally frustrating issues. These problems, however, aren't just limited to computer systems [0]. Border officers, bank clerks and government officials and other general bureaucrat types are all just as bad as a strict strcmp implementation. The issue is that many people operating in an official capacity seem to work under the assumption that a name is a globally unique identifier that has exactly one representation, but that's not how names work in any culture. On the other hand, if not names, then what? Combined with birth dates, it's the closest thing we have to a globally recognised unique immutable identifier, and any better alternative is going to feel invasive and face a lot of opposition on privacy grounds. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq-dchJPXGA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq-dchJPXGA

sokoloff 3y ago
Names are mutable though.
- cameronh90 3y ago
  They're also not globally unique and don't have a single representation. But they're the closest thing we have that would be acceptable to most people. Better suggestion?
  - bandrami 3y ago
    GUID assigned at birth and implanted in an RFID chip behind the ear.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]

luma 3y ago

Question for you as this seems to be your lived experience: how would you correct the issue stated in the article? They give an example of characters like "á, è, ô, ü, ç". Say your name included a "ç" and you're at a movie theater trying to get your call in tickets. Their keyboard notably does not have a "ç" key. How do you guide them toward success?

DoreenMichele 3y ago

I had a professor with a foreign name from someplace that didn't use the Roman alphabet. His credit report had like 30-some-odd spellings of his name. When asked "So what is the correct spelling?" he snarkily shot back "You tell me." It's not a standard western name. It wasn't originally written I'm English. Attempts to translate it to English -- well, they are guesses on how to spell what someone thinks they are hearing from a language that the Roman alphabet isn't designed to capture.

patrakov 3y ago

Even if you are 146% careful, there is still a chance that your own country officially renames you by introducing new rules for transliteration between its alphabet and the Latin one. Happened to me in 2020 - the name I use online matches my old passport, but not the new one.

forth_fool 3y ago

So the bureaucrats are winning (as they always do). Demanding that your name is written down in a specific way is just stupid. I always found it elitist when people insist on a specific spelling. Typical examples are "Philip/Phillip/Philipp", "Stefan/Stephan", "Harald/Harold", "Erik/Eric/Erich", "Michael/Michel/Mikail" and so on... all these variations refer to the same name. Different dialect, different language, the spelling varies. So what? It's still the same name! IMHO, the cited Article 16 doesn't necessarily demand a rectification of the spelling. This is about meaning, not syntax. But that's surely up to interpretation.

grishka 3y ago

I'm Russian and I have to live with three similar names: my real one written in Cyrillic, the stupid transliteration into Latin I have in my international passport (and by extension everywhere I show it abroad), and Gregory when I introduce myself to someone who doesn't speak Russian. Will a bank in a country that doesn't use the Cyrillic alphabet agree to write my name in Cyrillic? I'm 99% sure no. So, organizations fully supporting the writing system of the country in which they operate is a reasonable expectation. But I never expect anyone abroad to agree to write my name in an alphabet they can't even read. Tangentially, Turkey renamed itself in English into "Türkiye". This suffers from the same issue — there is no letter ü in English. No one knows how to spell that. So it's no surprise the new name didn't stick.

sotix 3y ago

I have been working on obtaining Greek citizenship, and it has been crazy dealing with the documentation from my late grandfather who never updated anything upon moving to America. There are two ways to spell his surname depending on if the documents come from Greece or Albania (due to borders changing between countries since his birth). When he was in the process of immigrating to the US through Ellis Island, his last name was converted to Greeklish (English alphabet representing Greek characters) on all of the manifests. This resulted in a few mixed spellings. At Ellis Island they ruled his name would be too confusing for Americans, so they entirely altered the spelling to make it phonetically more pleasing to an American. Fortunately, his name was short enough where the new name sounds the same as it does in Greek. My grandfather proudly took his new name and enjoyed his new life! Many immigrants from Greece had their names shortened and completely altered. To a Greek, they are incoherent gibberish with no meaning. Then there is the issue where women’s surnames are conjugated into a feminine ending, so women have similar but different last names than their husbands. The US didn’t like this and didn’t understand this practice for a long time. I know a few women that have dual citizenship and maintain a passport for each country with a different spelling of their last name. Updating documentation in one country to the other causes all sorts of issues with this setup (since everything requires a translation via an apostille). My friends recently got married in Greece and then separately again in the US at a courthouse to avoid all of the paperwork and translation pains from the woman’s Greek maiden name differing from her American maiden name. Many of these issues are easier to deal with now, but they have a long history of confusion and extra effort going back more than 100 years. Safe to say, I’m relying on documentation from my other Greek grandfather where things are more straightforward for pursuing my citizenship.

tapoxi 3y ago

I don't even have a name that's very "weird", I have an Irish last name, in Boston, and the O' part is something no computer can reasonably tolerate in 2023. I've missed flights. I've had duplicate accounts because some places drop the apostrophe and some don't, I've been given badges at tech conferences where its O' - it's infuriating.

ta988 3y ago

This is why when you do a us visa you have the opportunity to give all the spellings and forms of your names.

marcosdumay 3y ago

There's a good reason why every institution just distributes numbers for everyone and asks them to remember it.

yencabulator 3y ago

I see you haven't interacted with companies in the US much. I write my name on an online form, a minimum-wage employee reads my name from a screen and types it into another application, and gets it wrong. Now the online account and the actual billing have my name spelled differently. U.S. concept of automation is that a cheap employee does something in the back office..

oldbbsnickname 3y ago

> "No, I'm sure I'm in your system. Try this other spelling." Every Turk, Russian, and Serb enters the chat. Transliteration without deterministic, reversable fidelity sucks. PS: I have a "normal" given name people spell 4 different ways and surname people spell 3 ways. ]: I always spell them out. Just be glad your last name doesn't have 4 "y"s as their legal American name like a former coworker.

centur 3y ago

This hits so very close to home for me. I'd rather prefer that certain things stays in ASCII, despite my name and surname are not originally written in English. This problem is too well-known to everyone who have their original docs written in non-English alphabet (read - everyone with diacritics or cyrillic script or hebrew or heaps of other non-Latin-based writing systems). To add insult to injury - this is not even about some common transliteration tables from non-Latin to Latin script. Sometimes? rules of transliteration are changed based on local govt whims and if you got caught in such bureaucracy - all hell let loose. You can't obtain a document with previous "latin spelling", because it's changed in a system. This way you may have a ticket with one spelling and passport with another. Or, like in my case, my brother and I have different surname transliterations to English. And my first name would be spelled with 4 different letters than it's in all my other documents if I have to issue a document from scratch. Good luck explaining all this nonsense to anyone, who is trying to "character-match" someone's hard-to-pronounce surname from official document. Even worse when they would try to re-type any of UTF-8 characters without knowing a correct character codes or not having corresponding layout installed (most of the time in international airports and customs). So, I'm personally fine with something is incompatible with GDPR, as long as certain systems would stay ASCII as long as they can. We'll be opening a whole new can of worms if internationally used documents would be in UTF-8, imo.