6 ms·

This story happens in Belgium. All national languages(Dutch, French, Germans) have plenty of accented characters. This EBCDIC variant was never a valid techni

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.
      - tremon 3y ago
        I'm not sure this issue can ever satisfactorily be resolved by ignoring it. Yes, it is customary even among Dutchies to just type i-j because it's easier, but the Dutch alphabet does have a dotted ĳ as its 25th letter. It's not a ligature in the source language, it is a single letter; as evidenced by the fact that the proper noun Ĳsselmeer (among others) is written with two capital letters (if not using the single 0x0132 Ĳ). The letter y does not exist in the Dutch script, only in loanwords (of which we have plenty).
        Freak_NL 3y ago
        Stop repeating that nonsense! The current Dutch alphabet has 'Y' as its 25th letter. Not 'IJ'. This is a historical thing. The 'IJ' is a letter, culturally speaking, in the sense that it is capitalized as one, and that it is often rendered as a single unit (which you can see in vertical lettering, if done right), and sorted as if it was a single letter. In terms of character encoding however, it is a 'i' followed by a 'j'. Cf.: * https://onzetaal.nl/taalloket/ij-plaats-in-alfabet https://onzetaal.nl/taalloket/ij-plaats-in-alfabet (first sentence!) * https://taaladvies.net/ij-alfabetisering/ https://taaladvies.net/ij-alfabetisering/ See my other posts for 0x0132, which is a compatibility character for rare obsolete character encodings which did encode it on a single codepoint.
    - the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
      I corrected the Wikipedia article now. That code point is not deprecated, it's a compatibility character which is a different thing entirely.
- giamma 3y ago
  In Italy, in Veneto (the region around Venice) the local dialect tends to omit the last letter of a word if such letter is a vowel. Because of that, my grand father and his sister happened to have different family name in their ID cards: when they got registered by the priest at the beginning of 1900, on a paper book of course, the priest who registered the sister added an "I" at the end of the family name as he thought that that should be the right spelling in proper Italian. At that time ID cards did not even exist so nobody bothered.
  - gertrunde 3y ago
    In Greece there are different male/female variants of the same surname, so it would be normal for a married couple to have slightly different surnames. e.g Papadopoulou vs Papadopoulos. Then there are the cases where a Greek wife takes the male surname form to co-exist more easily in other countries where it is expected for a husband/wife surname to match (or if different, be more considerably different).
- smcl 3y ago
  Ahhh interesting, I didn't know it was an entirely separate, single letter! I was in Amsterdam a few weeks back and saw a lot of signage featuring "ij" had it stylised with the "i" sitting just above the tail of the "j" but never considered that it was just one letter. Czech has this too, sort of, where "ch" is considered one letter but it is composed of two separate characters.
  - HNDen21 3y ago
    Croatian has a few of these as well like NJ and LJ Here is the full alphabet A B C Č Ć D Dž Đ E F G H I J K L Lj M N Nj O P R S Š T U V Z Ž
  - gdprrrr 3y ago
    Handwritten, it looks like y with diaresis.
  - benrow 3y ago
    I've also noticed over a few recent trips to Amsterdam that there's something special about the sound Ij. The river IJ, and the beer Ijwit. The language is unfamiliar to me, and quite intriguing. I find the pronunciation of Zuid very counter-intuitive.
    - smcl 3y ago
      Ahhh yeah the beer with the ostrich logo :D I have a real soft spot for it.
- Freak_NL 3y ago
  To be fair, digitally, Ĳ is simply spelled using the separate letters I and J in Dutch, despite it being a digraph. That codepoint you used is deprecated in Unicode and only there for historic compatibility reasons. Your family members using 'ij' are simply applying the correct orthography, with those using 'y' just digging themselves into a hole.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    I don't know what the correct codepoint is but it certainly isn't deprecated in the language and that's the bit that counts, historic compatibility wasn't part of ASCII and that's what caused this. 'ij' takes the same spot as the Greek letter 'y' in the Dutch alphabet and that's what stops this from being resolved to everybody's satisfaction. "Those using 'y'" -> people who didn't have a choice in the matter because the official that made the change did so without their consent in a couple of cases and once it is on your birth certificate good luck trying to change it retroactively across all of your documentation. More than you ever wanted to know about 'IJ': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph) I still have a typewriter that has it as a single letter.
    - Freak_NL 3y ago
      You are confusing letter with codepoint and glyph. The IJ is one letter, which consists of two glyphs, and in the Unicode implementation two codepoints. This isn't some historic oversight in Unicode, it was implemented like this based on the Dutch orthography. Yes, this can lead to bugs in software, but so can anything related to names. It is deprecated in Dutch to use a single codepoint for the IJ. That was never really an option in any of the character encodings in popular use. The fact that it is one letter is relevant in cases like (vertical) lettering (which most designers nowadays fuck up), in typography (the number of fonts which make ij look awkward and unaligned is huge), and in collation and sorting using a Dutch locale. I will defend its proper use and treatment where possible, but representing it as a single codepoint is not a sensible goal, and never was.
      - the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
- lucumo 3y ago
  I think most Dutch people nowadays think of that as two letters: i-j. It's called a "long ij", as a counterpart to the "short ei" (same pronunciation), which definitely is considered two letters. The only place where the difference between 1 letter and 2 letters still is visible is in names that start with a long ij, because of the capitalization. E.g. the name of the city IJmuiden is written like that and not as Ijmuiden. In handwriting it's written as one character, but I think that's just a ligature: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraaf)#/media/Bestand:IJ_(letter).svg https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraaf)#/media/Bestand:IJ...
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Yes, it's changing. Fortunately 'my' branch of the family picked 'ij' so we're in the clear ;) But for some of the older members it is causing all kinds of trouble, especially when interacting with the authorities, more so if one set of documents uses 'ij' and another through accidents of history uses 'y'. Some schools even teach 'ij' as the 25th letter of our alphabet, when they really should be using 'y' for that spot and 'ij' as a two letter combination. Also, when spelling words people use 'ij' as a single letter for instance a Dutch person would spell 'mijn' as 'm', 'ij', 'n' (and they would likely not say 'lange ij' because there is no word 'mein' in Dutch. It also causes no end of trouble with storing and searching because a Dutch person might expect IJ to be sorted after 'X' but instead it appears sorted as the combination I J . The fact that different reference works use different methods doesn't help either.
    - Freak_NL 3y ago
      > for instance a Dutch person would spell 'mijn' as 'm', 'ij', 'n' Not anyone under the age of fifty, unless they want to deal with the follow up question too. ("Is that a long or short ij/ei?") Here's a screenshot from just one random Dutch children's spelling quiz online: https://postimg.cc/47wFHy0v https://postimg.cc/47wFHy0v Separate letters for 'ij', despite it formally being a single letter.
- michh 3y ago
  Ha, yes, I have an 'eij' in my last name and constantly explaining it's both the short ei and the long ij is maddening. In reality of course, it's just an e followed by an 'ij' but yeah no never mind.
soco 3y ago
Swiss story 1: immigration authorities insisted adding my wife's birth name to her official name because "that's how it's done here". 20 years later it's still popping up here and there causing confusion. Swiss story 2: I was outvoted having an application properly internationalized, they dumped instead all resources in extra database columns because "this country will only ever need three languages". Fast forward, it took one year to get it in resources because somebody high up decided English and Rumantsch wold be needed too and to rewrite all those language-related SQLs turned out overkill.

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.
    - tremon 3y ago
      I'm not sure this issue can ever satisfactorily be resolved by ignoring it. Yes, it is customary even among Dutchies to just type i-j because it's easier, but the Dutch alphabet does have a dotted ĳ as its 25th letter. It's not a ligature in the source language, it is a single letter; as evidenced by the fact that the proper noun Ĳsselmeer (among others) is written with two capital letters (if not using the single 0x0132 Ĳ). The letter y does not exist in the Dutch script, only in loanwords (of which we have plenty).
      - Freak_NL 3y ago
        Stop repeating that nonsense! The current Dutch alphabet has 'Y' as its 25th letter. Not 'IJ'. This is a historical thing. The 'IJ' is a letter, culturally speaking, in the sense that it is capitalized as one, and that it is often rendered as a single unit (which you can see in vertical lettering, if done right), and sorted as if it was a single letter. In terms of character encoding however, it is a 'i' followed by a 'j'. Cf.: * https://onzetaal.nl/taalloket/ij-plaats-in-alfabet https://onzetaal.nl/taalloket/ij-plaats-in-alfabet (first sentence!) * https://taaladvies.net/ij-alfabetisering/ https://taaladvies.net/ij-alfabetisering/ See my other posts for 0x0132, which is a compatibility character for rare obsolete character encodings which did encode it on a single codepoint.
  - the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
    I corrected the Wikipedia article now. That code point is not deprecated, it's a compatibility character which is a different thing entirely.
giamma 3y ago
In Italy, in Veneto (the region around Venice) the local dialect tends to omit the last letter of a word if such letter is a vowel. Because of that, my grand father and his sister happened to have different family name in their ID cards: when they got registered by the priest at the beginning of 1900, on a paper book of course, the priest who registered the sister added an "I" at the end of the family name as he thought that that should be the right spelling in proper Italian. At that time ID cards did not even exist so nobody bothered.
- gertrunde 3y ago
  In Greece there are different male/female variants of the same surname, so it would be normal for a married couple to have slightly different surnames. e.g Papadopoulou vs Papadopoulos. Then there are the cases where a Greek wife takes the male surname form to co-exist more easily in other countries where it is expected for a husband/wife surname to match (or if different, be more considerably different).
smcl 3y ago
Ahhh interesting, I didn't know it was an entirely separate, single letter! I was in Amsterdam a few weeks back and saw a lot of signage featuring "ij" had it stylised with the "i" sitting just above the tail of the "j" but never considered that it was just one letter. Czech has this too, sort of, where "ch" is considered one letter but it is composed of two separate characters.
- HNDen21 3y ago
  Croatian has a few of these as well like NJ and LJ Here is the full alphabet A B C Č Ć D Dž Đ E F G H I J K L Lj M N Nj O P R S Š T U V Z Ž
- gdprrrr 3y ago
  Handwritten, it looks like y with diaresis.
- benrow 3y ago
  I've also noticed over a few recent trips to Amsterdam that there's something special about the sound Ij. The river IJ, and the beer Ijwit. The language is unfamiliar to me, and quite intriguing. I find the pronunciation of Zuid very counter-intuitive.
  - smcl 3y ago
    Ahhh yeah the beer with the ostrich logo :D I have a real soft spot for it.
Freak_NL 3y ago
To be fair, digitally, Ĳ is simply spelled using the separate letters I and J in Dutch, despite it being a digraph. That codepoint you used is deprecated in Unicode and only there for historic compatibility reasons. Your family members using 'ij' are simply applying the correct orthography, with those using 'y' just digging themselves into a hole.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  I don't know what the correct codepoint is but it certainly isn't deprecated in the language and that's the bit that counts, historic compatibility wasn't part of ASCII and that's what caused this. 'ij' takes the same spot as the Greek letter 'y' in the Dutch alphabet and that's what stops this from being resolved to everybody's satisfaction. "Those using 'y'" -> people who didn't have a choice in the matter because the official that made the change did so without their consent in a couple of cases and once it is on your birth certificate good luck trying to change it retroactively across all of your documentation. More than you ever wanted to know about 'IJ': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph) I still have a typewriter that has it as a single letter.
  - Freak_NL 3y ago
    You are confusing letter with codepoint and glyph. The IJ is one letter, which consists of two glyphs, and in the Unicode implementation two codepoints. This isn't some historic oversight in Unicode, it was implemented like this based on the Dutch orthography. Yes, this can lead to bugs in software, but so can anything related to names. It is deprecated in Dutch to use a single codepoint for the IJ. That was never really an option in any of the character encodings in popular use. The fact that it is one letter is relevant in cases like (vertical) lettering (which most designers nowadays fuck up), in typography (the number of fonts which make ij look awkward and unaligned is huge), and in collation and sorting using a Dutch locale. I will defend its proper use and treatment where possible, but representing it as a single codepoint is not a sensible goal, and never was.
    - the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
lucumo 3y ago
I think most Dutch people nowadays think of that as two letters: i-j. It's called a "long ij", as a counterpart to the "short ei" (same pronunciation), which definitely is considered two letters. The only place where the difference between 1 letter and 2 letters still is visible is in names that start with a long ij, because of the capitalization. E.g. the name of the city IJmuiden is written like that and not as Ijmuiden. In handwriting it's written as one character, but I think that's just a ligature: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraaf)#/media/Bestand:IJ_(letter).svg https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraaf)#/media/Bestand:IJ...
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Yes, it's changing. Fortunately 'my' branch of the family picked 'ij' so we're in the clear ;) But for some of the older members it is causing all kinds of trouble, especially when interacting with the authorities, more so if one set of documents uses 'ij' and another through accidents of history uses 'y'. Some schools even teach 'ij' as the 25th letter of our alphabet, when they really should be using 'y' for that spot and 'ij' as a two letter combination. Also, when spelling words people use 'ij' as a single letter for instance a Dutch person would spell 'mijn' as 'm', 'ij', 'n' (and they would likely not say 'lange ij' because there is no word 'mein' in Dutch. It also causes no end of trouble with storing and searching because a Dutch person might expect IJ to be sorted after 'X' but instead it appears sorted as the combination I J . The fact that different reference works use different methods doesn't help either.
  - Freak_NL 3y ago
    > for instance a Dutch person would spell 'mijn' as 'm', 'ij', 'n' Not anyone under the age of fifty, unless they want to deal with the follow up question too. ("Is that a long or short ij/ei?") Here's a screenshot from just one random Dutch children's spelling quiz online: https://postimg.cc/47wFHy0v https://postimg.cc/47wFHy0v Separate letters for 'ij', despite it formally being a single letter.
michh 3y ago
Ha, yes, I have an 'eij' in my last name and constantly explaining it's both the short ei and the long ij is maddening. In reality of course, it's just an e followed by an 'ij' but yeah no never mind.

soco 3y ago

Swiss story 1: immigration authorities insisted adding my wife's birth name to her official name because "that's how it's done here". 20 years later it's still popping up here and there causing confusion. Swiss story 2: I was outvoted having an application properly internationalized, they dumped instead all resources in extra database columns because "this country will only ever need three languages". Fast forward, it took one year to get it in resources because somebody high up decided English and Rumantsch wold be needed too and to rewrite all those language-related SQLs turned out overkill.