9 ms·

My last name contains an ü and it has been consistenly horrible. * When I try to preemptively replace ü with ue many institutions and companies refuse to accep

by mglz 3y ago

My last name contains an ü and it has been consistenly horrible. * When I try to preemptively replace ü with ue many institutions and companies refuse to accept it because it does not match my passport * Especially in France, clerks try to emulate ü with the diacritics used for the trema e, ë. This makes it virtually impossible to find me in a system again * Sometimes I can enter my name as-is and there seems to be no problem, only for some other system to mangle it to � or or a box. This often triggers error downstream I have no way of fixing * Sometimes, people print a u and add the diacritics by hand on the label. This is nice, but still somehow wrong. I wonder what the solution is. Give up and ask people to consistenly use a ascii-only name? Allow everybody 1000+ unicode characters as a name and go off that string? Officially change my name?

userbinator 3y ago
Everyone's name should just be a GUID. /s
- BuyMyBitcoins 3y ago
  Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names, #41 - People have GUIDs. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
makeitdouble 3y ago
The part I came to love about France in general is that while all of these are broken, the people dealing with it will completely agree it's broken and amply sympathize, but just accept your name is printed as G�nter. Same for names that don't fit field lengths, addresses that require street numbers etc. It's a real pain to deal with all of it and each system will fail in its own way to make your life a mess, but people will embrace the mess and won't blink an eye when you bring paper that just don't match.
- zokier 3y ago
  Under GDPR people have the right to have their personal data to be accurate, there was a legal case exactly about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38009963 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38009963
  - makeitdouble 3y ago
    That's a pretty unexpected twist, and I'm frilled with it. I don't see every institution come up with a fix anytime soon, but having it clear that they're breaking the law is such a huge step. That will also have a huge impact on bank system development, and I wonder how they'll do it (extend the current system to have the customer facing bits rewritten, or just redo it all from top to bottom) There is the tale of Mizuho bank [0], botching their system upgrade project so hard they were still seeing widespread failures after a decade into it. [0] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2022/02/11/business/mizuho-banking-failure/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2022/02/11/business/mizuho...
    - ryandrake 3y ago
      > I don't see every institution come up with a fix anytime soon, but having it clear that they're breaking the law is such a huge step. It's excellent, but also sad that it takes legislation to motivate companies to fix their crappy legacy systems, and they will likely fight tooth and nail rather than comply.
  - jojobas 3y ago
    > Does it mean Z̸̰̈́̓a̸͖̰͗́l̸̻͊g̸͙͂͝ǒ̷̬́̐ can finally have a bank account? I wonder if this also means one can require a European bank have a name on file in Kanju, Thai script or some other not-so-well-known in Europe alphabet.
    - makeitdouble 3y ago
      A bank can specially request it to be the name on a passport or domestic ID card. That's one way to make sure that the name falls within some parameters, though that can be tough on the customer in some conditions.
zokier 3y ago
Germans have of course a standard for this > a normative subset of Unicode Latin characters, sequences of base characters and diacritic signs, and special characters for use in names of persons, legal entities, products, addresses etc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_91379 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_91379
- em-bee 3y ago
  and it's used in the passport too. so names with umlaut show up in both forms and it is possible to match either form
samatman 3y ago
The only solution is going to be a lot of patience, unfortunately. Everyone should be storing strings as UTF-8, and any time strings are being compared they should undergo some form of normalization. Doesn't matter which, as long as it's consistent. There's no reason to store string data in any other format, and any comparison code which isn't normalizing is buggy. But thanks to institutional inertia, it will be a very long time before everything works that way.
- lmm 3y ago
  > Everyone should be storing strings as UTF-8, and any time strings are being compared they should undergo some form of normalization. Doesn't matter which, as long as it's consistent. There's no reason to store string data in any other format, and any comparison code which isn't normalizing is buggy. This will result in misprinting Japanese names (or misprinting Chinese names depending on the rest of your system).
  - earthboundkid 3y ago
    Can we please talk about Unicode without the myth of Han Unification being bad somehow? The problem here is exactly the lack of unification in Roman alphabets!
    - lmm 3y ago
      > Can we please talk about Unicode without the myth of Han Unification being bad somehow? It's not a myth, as anyone living in Japan knows, and the "just use Unicode, all you need is Unicode" dogma is really harmful; a lot of "international" software has become significantly worse for Japanese users since it took hold. > The problem here is exactly the lack of unification in Roman alphabets! Problems caused by failing to unify characters that look the same do not mean it was a good idea to unify characters that look different!
      - earthboundkid 3y ago
        > It's not a myth, as anyone living in Japan knows I lived in Japan. It is a myth. :-¥
zokier 3y ago
> * Especially in France, clerks try to emulate ü with the diacritics used for the trema e, ë. This makes it virtually impossible to find me in a system again In Unicode umlaut and diaeresis are both represented by same codepoint, U+0308 COMBINING DIAERESIS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umlaut_(diacritic) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umlaut_(diacritic)
_v7gu 3y ago
Can ü be printed on a passport rather than a u? I have a ş and a ç so I have been successfully substituting s and c for them in a somewhat consistent manner.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  On the human-readable zone ("VIZ" in ICAO 9303) yes, see part 3 section 3.1 [1]. The MRZ however, not - it is limited to Latin alphanumeric only, see section 4.3. How to transliterate non-Latin characters is left to the discretion of the issuing government, and that has been a consistent source of annoyances for people who have identity cards issued by different governments (e.g. dual-nationals of Western European and Turkish, Arabic or Cyrillic-using Slavic countries). [1] https://www.icao.int/publications/Documents/9303_p3_cons_en.pdf https://www.icao.int/publications/Documents/9303_p3_cons_en....
lmm 3y ago
> Give up and ask people to consistenly use a ascii-only name? > Officially change my name? Yes. That's the only one that's going to actually work. You can go on about how these systems ought to work until until the cows come home, and I'm sure plenty of people on HN will, but if you actually want to get on with your life and avoid problems, legally change your name to one that's short and ascii-only.
- taejo 3y ago
  And then never move to Japan (or any other country where names are expected not to have Latin letters in them)
  - lmm 3y ago
    Or rather, if you move countries, change your name to one that fits. It's pretty normal and really not that hard.
    - taejo 3y ago
      Interestingly, it seems that Japan does have a procedure for foreigners to officially adopt a Japanese name. Changing your name is often very hard, and doing it in a country where you're not a citizen might be completely impossible, depending on the country.
      - lmm 3y ago
        > Japan does have a procedure for foreigners to officially adopt a Japanese name. Sort of but not really. The post-2012 residence cards do not display a registered alias anywhere, and since those cards are what banks are required to KYC you on, a lot of banks won't allow you to use a registered alias which in turn means it's hard to use it for anything else (credit cards, phone, pension...). It's very non-joined-up government.
- em-bee 3y ago
  a friend of mine in china had a character in his name that was not in the recognized set of characters. he refused to change his name and instead submitted the character to be added to unicode (which i believe eventually happened) in the meantime he was unable to own the company he founded (instead made his wife the owner), had a national ID card with a different character, and i am not sure if he had a bank account, but i think the bank didn't care because laws that enforced the names to match the passport/ID only came later. i don't know how the ID didn't automatically imply a name change, but the IDs were issued automatically and maybe he filed a complaint about his name being wrong.
Chilko 3y ago
> Officially change my name? My German last name also contains an ü, so when we emigrated to an English-speaking country and obtained dual-citizenship we used 'ue' for that passport and I now use 'ue' on a day-to-day basis. This also means I have two slightly different legal surnames depending by which passport I go.
- hodgesrm 3y ago
  At least German transliteration is 1-to-1. Slavic names among others often have multiple transliterations available. The Russian name Валерий can be rendered for example as Valery, Valeriy, or Valeri. It's very confusing for documents that require the person's name. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Romanization_of_Russian/Harmonization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Romanization_of_Russ...
  - bobthepanda 3y ago
    Also don't forget Chinese, which due to different romanizations or different dialects being used for the romanization, can result in different outputs depending on whether a person is from PRC, ROC, Macao, Hong Kong, or Singapore.
  - krab 3y ago
    That's the English transliteration. Don't forget that other Slavic languages also transcribe according to their own rules. For example in Czech, Валерий would be transliterated as Valerij because "j" is pronounced in Czech as English "y" in "you".
  - illiac786 3y ago
    There's an ISO standard for this. Can't find it but I am 100% sure for russian for example.
  - koliber 3y ago
    Transliteration is a two way street. Non-Russian names get transliterated into Cyrillic inconsistently as well.
- 3y ago
benhurmarcel 3y ago
When my child was born, one of the requirements I had to choose his name was that it shouldn't have any accent (or character that's not in the 26 universal letters basically).
- em-bee 3y ago
  who made this requirement? in which country?
  - d1sxeyes 3y ago
    Based on OP's comment history, he's Belgian or lives in Belgium. Seems that there's no such requirement in Belgium (https://be.brussels/en/identity-nationality/children/birth-formalities https://be.brussels/en/identity-nationality/children/birth-f...) and in many countries I know that ü is explicitly allowed. Potentially OP is talking about a set of requirements he imposed on himself? Edit: or maybe France? Either way, it's free choice still theoretically. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_law#:~:text=Since%201993%20the%20choice%20has,Napoleon%20Bonaparte%20created%20the%20law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_law#:~:text=Since%20199....
  - ale42 3y ago
    Isn't it the OP him/herself? Maybe they just wanted to prevent the issue for their child...
    - em-bee 3y ago
      ah, possibly. the way it is worded i didn't read it that way. but i get it. we did something comparable to make sure our kids had names that transliterated nicely into chinese so that they could use the same or at least a similar name in english and chinese, instead of having two names like it is common for many expats and locals in china.
  - benhurmarcel 3y ago
    Sorry for the confusion, it’s just a requirement I had for myself, to make my child’s life a little easier
enderstenders 3y ago
We clearly need to phase out name-based identification within software. "What's your name?" should never be a question heard from workers as any means of locating one's official identity in any system. Some form of biometrics to pull up an ID in a globally agreed-upon system is certainly the way forward. Whether or not it is close to what a final solution should be, World ID is making some effort into solving global identification problems https://worldcoin.org/world-id https://worldcoin.org/world-id
- lupire 3y ago
  "global identification" and "final solution" dot sit well together.
- GardenLetter27 3y ago
  Or just standardise the alphabet...
Tabular-Iceberg 3y ago
What’s the difference between the ë and ü diacritics? I would assume, like the French, that the two are interchangeable.
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  See this post [1] somewhere else in the comments. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39818435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39818435
gsich 3y ago
Passports have an entry like "corresponds to ..." for that.

by mglz 3y ago

userbinator 3y ago

Everyone's name should just be a GUID. /s

BuyMyBitcoins 3y ago
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names, #41 - People have GUIDs. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

makeitdouble 3y ago

The part I came to love about France in general is that while all of these are broken, the people dealing with it will completely agree it's broken and amply sympathize, but just accept your name is printed as G�nter. Same for names that don't fit field lengths, addresses that require street numbers etc. It's a real pain to deal with all of it and each system will fail in its own way to make your life a mess, but people will embrace the mess and won't blink an eye when you bring paper that just don't match.

zokier 3y ago
Under GDPR people have the right to have their personal data to be accurate, there was a legal case exactly about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38009963 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38009963
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  That's a pretty unexpected twist, and I'm frilled with it. I don't see every institution come up with a fix anytime soon, but having it clear that they're breaking the law is such a huge step. That will also have a huge impact on bank system development, and I wonder how they'll do it (extend the current system to have the customer facing bits rewritten, or just redo it all from top to bottom) There is the tale of Mizuho bank [0], botching their system upgrade project so hard they were still seeing widespread failures after a decade into it. [0] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2022/02/11/business/mizuho-banking-failure/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2022/02/11/business/mizuho...
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    > I don't see every institution come up with a fix anytime soon, but having it clear that they're breaking the law is such a huge step. It's excellent, but also sad that it takes legislation to motivate companies to fix their crappy legacy systems, and they will likely fight tooth and nail rather than comply.
- jojobas 3y ago
  > Does it mean Z̸̰̈́̓a̸͖̰͗́l̸̻͊g̸͙͂͝ǒ̷̬́̐ can finally have a bank account? I wonder if this also means one can require a European bank have a name on file in Kanju, Thai script or some other not-so-well-known in Europe alphabet.
  - makeitdouble 3y ago
    A bank can specially request it to be the name on a passport or domestic ID card. That's one way to make sure that the name falls within some parameters, though that can be tough on the customer in some conditions.

zokier 3y ago

Germans have of course a standard for this > a normative subset of Unicode Latin characters, sequences of base characters and diacritic signs, and special characters for use in names of persons, legal entities, products, addresses etc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_91379 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_91379

em-bee 3y ago
and it's used in the passport too. so names with umlaut show up in both forms and it is possible to match either form

samatman 3y ago

The only solution is going to be a lot of patience, unfortunately. Everyone should be storing strings as UTF-8, and any time strings are being compared they should undergo some form of normalization. Doesn't matter which, as long as it's consistent. There's no reason to store string data in any other format, and any comparison code which isn't normalizing is buggy. But thanks to institutional inertia, it will be a very long time before everything works that way.

lmm 3y ago
> Everyone should be storing strings as UTF-8, and any time strings are being compared they should undergo some form of normalization. Doesn't matter which, as long as it's consistent. There's no reason to store string data in any other format, and any comparison code which isn't normalizing is buggy. This will result in misprinting Japanese names (or misprinting Chinese names depending on the rest of your system).
- earthboundkid 3y ago
  Can we please talk about Unicode without the myth of Han Unification being bad somehow? The problem here is exactly the lack of unification in Roman alphabets!
  - lmm 3y ago
    > Can we please talk about Unicode without the myth of Han Unification being bad somehow? It's not a myth, as anyone living in Japan knows, and the "just use Unicode, all you need is Unicode" dogma is really harmful; a lot of "international" software has become significantly worse for Japanese users since it took hold. > The problem here is exactly the lack of unification in Roman alphabets! Problems caused by failing to unify characters that look the same do not mean it was a good idea to unify characters that look different!
    - earthboundkid 3y ago
      > It's not a myth, as anyone living in Japan knows I lived in Japan. It is a myth. :-¥

zokier 3y ago

> * Especially in France, clerks try to emulate ü with the diacritics used for the trema e, ë. This makes it virtually impossible to find me in a system again In Unicode umlaut and diaeresis are both represented by same codepoint, U+0308 COMBINING DIAERESIS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umlaut_(diacritic) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umlaut_(diacritic)

_v7gu 3y ago

Can ü be printed on a passport rather than a u? I have a ş and a ç so I have been successfully substituting s and c for them in a somewhat consistent manner.

mschuster91 3y ago
On the human-readable zone ("VIZ" in ICAO 9303) yes, see part 3 section 3.1 [1]. The MRZ however, not - it is limited to Latin alphanumeric only, see section 4.3. How to transliterate non-Latin characters is left to the discretion of the issuing government, and that has been a consistent source of annoyances for people who have identity cards issued by different governments (e.g. dual-nationals of Western European and Turkish, Arabic or Cyrillic-using Slavic countries). [1] https://www.icao.int/publications/Documents/9303_p3_cons_en.pdf https://www.icao.int/publications/Documents/9303_p3_cons_en....

lmm 3y ago

> Give up and ask people to consistenly use a ascii-only name? > Officially change my name? Yes. That's the only one that's going to actually work. You can go on about how these systems ought to work until until the cows come home, and I'm sure plenty of people on HN will, but if you actually want to get on with your life and avoid problems, legally change your name to one that's short and ascii-only.

taejo 3y ago
And then never move to Japan (or any other country where names are expected not to have Latin letters in them)
- lmm 3y ago
  Or rather, if you move countries, change your name to one that fits. It's pretty normal and really not that hard.
  - taejo 3y ago
    Interestingly, it seems that Japan does have a procedure for foreigners to officially adopt a Japanese name. Changing your name is often very hard, and doing it in a country where you're not a citizen might be completely impossible, depending on the country.
    - lmm 3y ago
      > Japan does have a procedure for foreigners to officially adopt a Japanese name. Sort of but not really. The post-2012 residence cards do not display a registered alias anywhere, and since those cards are what banks are required to KYC you on, a lot of banks won't allow you to use a registered alias which in turn means it's hard to use it for anything else (credit cards, phone, pension...). It's very non-joined-up government.
em-bee 3y ago
a friend of mine in china had a character in his name that was not in the recognized set of characters. he refused to change his name and instead submitted the character to be added to unicode (which i believe eventually happened) in the meantime he was unable to own the company he founded (instead made his wife the owner), had a national ID card with a different character, and i am not sure if he had a bank account, but i think the bank didn't care because laws that enforced the names to match the passport/ID only came later. i don't know how the ID didn't automatically imply a name change, but the IDs were issued automatically and maybe he filed a complaint about his name being wrong.

Chilko 3y ago

> Officially change my name? My German last name also contains an ü, so when we emigrated to an English-speaking country and obtained dual-citizenship we used 'ue' for that passport and I now use 'ue' on a day-to-day basis. This also means I have two slightly different legal surnames depending by which passport I go.

hodgesrm 3y ago
At least German transliteration is 1-to-1. Slavic names among others often have multiple transliterations available. The Russian name Валерий can be rendered for example as Valery, Valeriy, or Valeri. It's very confusing for documents that require the person's name. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Romanization_of_Russian/Harmonization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Romanization_of_Russ...
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  Also don't forget Chinese, which due to different romanizations or different dialects being used for the romanization, can result in different outputs depending on whether a person is from PRC, ROC, Macao, Hong Kong, or Singapore.
- krab 3y ago
  That's the English transliteration. Don't forget that other Slavic languages also transcribe according to their own rules. For example in Czech, Валерий would be transliterated as Valerij because "j" is pronounced in Czech as English "y" in "you".
- illiac786 3y ago
  There's an ISO standard for this. Can't find it but I am 100% sure for russian for example.
- koliber 3y ago
  Transliteration is a two way street. Non-Russian names get transliterated into Cyrillic inconsistently as well.
3y ago

benhurmarcel 3y ago

When my child was born, one of the requirements I had to choose his name was that it shouldn't have any accent (or character that's not in the 26 universal letters basically).

em-bee 3y ago
who made this requirement? in which country?
- d1sxeyes 3y ago
  Based on OP's comment history, he's Belgian or lives in Belgium. Seems that there's no such requirement in Belgium (https://be.brussels/en/identity-nationality/children/birth-formalities https://be.brussels/en/identity-nationality/children/birth-f...) and in many countries I know that ü is explicitly allowed. Potentially OP is talking about a set of requirements he imposed on himself? Edit: or maybe France? Either way, it's free choice still theoretically. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_law#:~:text=Since%201993%20the%20choice%20has,Napoleon%20Bonaparte%20created%20the%20law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_law#:~:text=Since%20199....
- ale42 3y ago
  Isn't it the OP him/herself? Maybe they just wanted to prevent the issue for their child...
  - em-bee 3y ago
    ah, possibly. the way it is worded i didn't read it that way. but i get it. we did something comparable to make sure our kids had names that transliterated nicely into chinese so that they could use the same or at least a similar name in english and chinese, instead of having two names like it is common for many expats and locals in china.
- benhurmarcel 3y ago
  Sorry for the confusion, it’s just a requirement I had for myself, to make my child’s life a little easier

enderstenders 3y ago

We clearly need to phase out name-based identification within software. "What's your name?" should never be a question heard from workers as any means of locating one's official identity in any system. Some form of biometrics to pull up an ID in a globally agreed-upon system is certainly the way forward. Whether or not it is close to what a final solution should be, World ID is making some effort into solving global identification problems https://worldcoin.org/world-id https://worldcoin.org/world-id

lupire 3y ago
"global identification" and "final solution" dot sit well together.
GardenLetter27 3y ago
Or just standardise the alphabet...

Tabular-Iceberg 3y ago

What’s the difference between the ë and ü diacritics? I would assume, like the French, that the two are interchangeable.

littlestymaar 3y ago
See this post [1] somewhere else in the comments. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39818435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39818435

gsich 3y ago

Passports have an entry like "corresponds to ..." for that.