8 ms·

> 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

> 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.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    If modern computers had been invented in China and had had a decade or two headstart on the rest of the world then you may well have had to do just that. This was an accident of history, not some deliberate plan to get the world to bow to the English speakers. And English was already well established as a major language in trade (due to it being superficially simple to learn), next to German, French and Spanish. China was pretty isolated for a long time culturally as well as geographically and the complexity of its script is another barrier to it being accepted as a common language by the rest of the world. One of the more interesting things along this line in recent history is that with Brexit the EU no longer has an England/Wales/Scotland and a chunk of Ireland in it, but another chunk of Ireland remains. This led the French to immediately propose that French become the official language of the EU parliament but the rest of the countries wouldn't have it, and rightly so. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/brexit-france-eu-french-english-b1861087.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/brexit-franc...
    - extraduder_ire 3y ago
      I think that french diplomat just saw their shot, and took it. I doubt they actually forgot that there's still two english-speaking countries in the EU.
      - bdsa 3y ago
        Ireland and... Malta?
    - acqq 3y ago
      > due to it being superficially simple to learn I, however, don't think most of the people who started using one of the named languages instead of their mother tongue ever really selected English using that specific criterion.
    - b3orn 3y ago
      > This led the French to immediately propose that French become the official language of the EU parliament but the rest of the countries wouldn't have it, and rightly so. Didn't happen, they just said they'll use French during their council presidency (not the parliament, it's not even mentioned in your article), that's all, there are no rules against that. They would've done it regardless of Brexit.
  - FooBarWidget 3y ago
    China has its own problems. There are obscure family names out there consisting of characters that aren't officially recognized, so computers can't process their actual family names. So those people instead pick the closest alternative officially recognized character instead, purely for the purpose of official documents and appeasing computer systems.
    - snowpid 3y ago
      As I understood family names are very old in China. So who chose the family name and "invented" a character?
      - FooBarWidget 3y ago
        I think in premodern times the Chinese character set was not as centrally regulated as it is now, and therefore there should be quite many instances of independent/local character invention.
        dtech 3y ago
        I mean this is far from unique to China, see e.g. the disappearance of þ (Thorn) from the English alphabet.
        em-bee 3y ago
        many chinese characters consist of combinations of other characters. most common is a combination of two, where one component suggests the meaning, while another hints at the pronunciation. here is one character made up of 11 others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biangbiang_noodles#Chinese_character_for_bi%C3%A1ng https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biangbiang_noodles#Chinese_cha... this shows that new characters can be created not by inventing new strokes, but by simply combining existing characters to convey a new meaning, much like we occasionally do create new words in english by combining existing ones, even though that process in english is not productive, unlike eg. german, where it is quite normal. the difference is that these new words only have one syllable. with the digitalization the creation of new characters essentially ends. the creation of the simplified chinese character system also pushes against creating new, more complicated characters. it is going to be interesting to see how that will affect language development. new "words" can still be created by using a sequence of characters, but that means that each character keeps their syllable sound. whereas new compound characters would have a single syllable. so if a new meaning emerges for a syllable, a new character can't be created for it. will this prevent new single-syllable words? or will it lead to multiple characters being pronounced with a single syllable?
  - GrygrFlzr 3y ago
    Even right now in modern day Japan I have to canonize my name in katakana (syllabary designed for foreign/loan words), and all the systems strictly expect a singular word First Name and a singular word Family Name. If you have a middle name, it effectively gets thrown out. Multi-word first and/or last names need to be smooshed or cut down. I have encountered even worse issues digital forms that only accept kanji (Chinese characters) or hiragana (syllabary designed for native Japanese words), the latter of which usually does not support certain voices that katakana supports. Ashley Tisdale, for example, is normally rendered as アシュレイ・ティスデイル (ashurei tisudeiru) - ティ is actually te with a small -i modifier, which does not usually exist with hiragana. Forcibly converted to hiragana, it turns into あしゅれい・てぃでいる - but ぃ is not accepted by the form, even if it exists in UTF-8. Your options are either converting the ティ into ち (chi) or て (te), neither of which are ideal, and may cause mismatches to other systems that properly support the katakana version. The problem extends further into physical paper forms, where often they provide a very limited amount of boxes for characters, because native Japanese and Chinese names can easily fit within 8 characters. Combine this with the digital systems above and you're bound to have several versions of your name floating around on official documents all mismatching each other. Some systems that need to print onto physical cards (e.g. getting a 1/3/6 month route pass on your SUICA or PASMO contactless smart cards) are even worse and turn dakuten (diacritics for hiragana/katakana) into their own character. As an example, the character ほ (ho) can be turned into ぼ (bo) using a dakuten, or ぽ (po) using a handakuten. The system will instead render those as two separate characters: ほ゛ and ほ゜ respectively, which cuts down on the number of available characters for the already limited textbox space you're dealing with. The world is full of presumptions about names even today.
    - vladvasiliu 3y ago
      > The problem extends further into physical paper forms, where often they provide a very limited amount of boxes for characters, because native Japanese and Chinese names can easily fit within 8 characters. This happens in Europe quite often, even though many people have longer names.
    - CoastalCoder 3y ago
      Interesting! Any idea if this is why, in Japanese-dubbed anime, the voice actors seriously mangle some English words/names? E.g., they often add a vowel sound to the ends of English words that should end with a percussive syllable. I.e., do you think it comes from those words/names being written in katakana or hiragana in the dialog scripts, and those systems just can't express the correct pronunciation of such English words/names?
  - em-bee 3y ago
    you haven't been in china long enough. i have had a few situations where the system was unable to write my name in latin characters. i even had to get a notarized transliteration of my name into chinese so that the resulting chinese version could be used on some official documents.
  - Kamq 3y ago
    > expect the world to bow to them (culturally, technologically, etc). I mean, I don't expect you to bow to me. But at the same time, the software I produce at work is usually entirely consumed by americans who speak english (ok, well, there's one canadian customer that I'm aware of). Because that's who pays for it, and none of those customers is particularly looking to pay for translation. And the software I produce during my off hours is generally meant for me and my friends to consume. I'll put that on github/gitlab/source hut and you can use it if you want, but I definitely don't have the budget for translation either.
  - AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
    [dead]
- 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.

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.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  If modern computers had been invented in China and had had a decade or two headstart on the rest of the world then you may well have had to do just that. This was an accident of history, not some deliberate plan to get the world to bow to the English speakers. And English was already well established as a major language in trade (due to it being superficially simple to learn), next to German, French and Spanish. China was pretty isolated for a long time culturally as well as geographically and the complexity of its script is another barrier to it being accepted as a common language by the rest of the world. One of the more interesting things along this line in recent history is that with Brexit the EU no longer has an England/Wales/Scotland and a chunk of Ireland in it, but another chunk of Ireland remains. This led the French to immediately propose that French become the official language of the EU parliament but the rest of the countries wouldn't have it, and rightly so. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/brexit-france-eu-french-english-b1861087.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/brexit-franc...
  - extraduder_ire 3y ago
    I think that french diplomat just saw their shot, and took it. I doubt they actually forgot that there's still two english-speaking countries in the EU.
    - bdsa 3y ago
      Ireland and... Malta?
  - acqq 3y ago
    > due to it being superficially simple to learn I, however, don't think most of the people who started using one of the named languages instead of their mother tongue ever really selected English using that specific criterion.
  - b3orn 3y ago
    > This led the French to immediately propose that French become the official language of the EU parliament but the rest of the countries wouldn't have it, and rightly so. Didn't happen, they just said they'll use French during their council presidency (not the parliament, it's not even mentioned in your article), that's all, there are no rules against that. They would've done it regardless of Brexit.
- FooBarWidget 3y ago
  China has its own problems. There are obscure family names out there consisting of characters that aren't officially recognized, so computers can't process their actual family names. So those people instead pick the closest alternative officially recognized character instead, purely for the purpose of official documents and appeasing computer systems.
  - snowpid 3y ago
    As I understood family names are very old in China. So who chose the family name and "invented" a character?
    - FooBarWidget 3y ago
      I think in premodern times the Chinese character set was not as centrally regulated as it is now, and therefore there should be quite many instances of independent/local character invention.
      - dtech 3y ago
        I mean this is far from unique to China, see e.g. the disappearance of þ (Thorn) from the English alphabet.
      - em-bee 3y ago
        many chinese characters consist of combinations of other characters. most common is a combination of two, where one component suggests the meaning, while another hints at the pronunciation. here is one character made up of 11 others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biangbiang_noodles#Chinese_character_for_bi%C3%A1ng https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biangbiang_noodles#Chinese_cha... this shows that new characters can be created not by inventing new strokes, but by simply combining existing characters to convey a new meaning, much like we occasionally do create new words in english by combining existing ones, even though that process in english is not productive, unlike eg. german, where it is quite normal. the difference is that these new words only have one syllable. with the digitalization the creation of new characters essentially ends. the creation of the simplified chinese character system also pushes against creating new, more complicated characters. it is going to be interesting to see how that will affect language development. new "words" can still be created by using a sequence of characters, but that means that each character keeps their syllable sound. whereas new compound characters would have a single syllable. so if a new meaning emerges for a syllable, a new character can't be created for it. will this prevent new single-syllable words? or will it lead to multiple characters being pronounced with a single syllable?
- GrygrFlzr 3y ago
  Even right now in modern day Japan I have to canonize my name in katakana (syllabary designed for foreign/loan words), and all the systems strictly expect a singular word First Name and a singular word Family Name. If you have a middle name, it effectively gets thrown out. Multi-word first and/or last names need to be smooshed or cut down. I have encountered even worse issues digital forms that only accept kanji (Chinese characters) or hiragana (syllabary designed for native Japanese words), the latter of which usually does not support certain voices that katakana supports. Ashley Tisdale, for example, is normally rendered as アシュレイ・ティスデイル (ashurei tisudeiru) - ティ is actually te with a small -i modifier, which does not usually exist with hiragana. Forcibly converted to hiragana, it turns into あしゅれい・てぃでいる - but ぃ is not accepted by the form, even if it exists in UTF-8. Your options are either converting the ティ into ち (chi) or て (te), neither of which are ideal, and may cause mismatches to other systems that properly support the katakana version. The problem extends further into physical paper forms, where often they provide a very limited amount of boxes for characters, because native Japanese and Chinese names can easily fit within 8 characters. Combine this with the digital systems above and you're bound to have several versions of your name floating around on official documents all mismatching each other. Some systems that need to print onto physical cards (e.g. getting a 1/3/6 month route pass on your SUICA or PASMO contactless smart cards) are even worse and turn dakuten (diacritics for hiragana/katakana) into their own character. As an example, the character ほ (ho) can be turned into ぼ (bo) using a dakuten, or ぽ (po) using a handakuten. The system will instead render those as two separate characters: ほ゛ and ほ゜ respectively, which cuts down on the number of available characters for the already limited textbox space you're dealing with. The world is full of presumptions about names even today.
  - vladvasiliu 3y ago
    > The problem extends further into physical paper forms, where often they provide a very limited amount of boxes for characters, because native Japanese and Chinese names can easily fit within 8 characters. This happens in Europe quite often, even though many people have longer names.
  - CoastalCoder 3y ago
    Interesting! Any idea if this is why, in Japanese-dubbed anime, the voice actors seriously mangle some English words/names? E.g., they often add a vowel sound to the ends of English words that should end with a percussive syllable. I.e., do you think it comes from those words/names being written in katakana or hiragana in the dialog scripts, and those systems just can't express the correct pronunciation of such English words/names?
- em-bee 3y ago
  you haven't been in china long enough. i have had a few situations where the system was unable to write my name in latin characters. i even had to get a notarized transliteration of my name into chinese so that the resulting chinese version could be used on some official documents.
- Kamq 3y ago
  > expect the world to bow to them (culturally, technologically, etc). I mean, I don't expect you to bow to me. But at the same time, the software I produce at work is usually entirely consumed by americans who speak english (ok, well, there's one canadian customer that I'm aware of). Because that's who pays for it, and none of those customers is particularly looking to pay for translation. And the software I produce during my off hours is generally meant for me and my friends to consume. I'll put that on github/gitlab/source hut and you can use it if you want, but I definitely don't have the budget for translation either.
- AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
  [dead]
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.