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My name, Ĝonatano, contains a ĝ, which is an uncommon letter outside of my language, Esperanto. But when I go to set my username to "ĝonatano," I'm often told t

My name, Ĝonatano, contains a ĝ, which is an uncommon letter outside of my language, Esperanto. But when I go to set my username to "ĝonatano," I'm often told that usernames "may only contain letters or underscores," as if ĝ weren't a letter. (You can see that I've approximated it in my HN username, but I don't need to do that on web services that correctly understand that letters exist outside of ASCII and Latin-1.)

noahjk 2y ago
To be fair, Esperanto is, as far as I can tell, not very widely used. The letter ĝ mostly returns Esperanto results. Using that letter in a place where others may need to communicate or type the letter would be a severe burden on almost anyone else you interact with, outside of Esperanto communities. I'm sure there are plenty of people who share your frustration with accented letters, ñ, umlauts, etc, though. I'd hope that most systems can handle those letters, although I wouldn't hold out hope that Ĝ/ĝ would be high on the priority list.
- gxonatano 2y ago
  > as far as I can tell, not very widely used Well, it's the most widely spoken international language, spoken in over a hundred countries, by an estimated 2-5M people. There's a rich literature (probably 30-50K books), vibrant music scene, and support in open source software (Linux, Firefox, Google products) is usually pretty good. But the issue is not how widely Esperanto, or any other language, is spoken. If you assume that languages should only be supported according to their number of speakers, you leave no room for useful languages, bridge languages, auxiliary languages, or growing languages. Even if Esperanto had only 100 speakers, it'd be worthwhile to support, if it's easy to learn, and easy for non-speakers to understand. It's not a "severe burden" to consider non-ASCII letters as letters. Unicode is pretty straightforward to work with, and if you want to support more than just English, it's a necessity. There's no need to have a "priority list" of letters you consider more or less important than others. That attitude comes across as very Anglocentric.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - fph 2y ago
    What is the definition of an "international language" that makes Esperanto the most widely spoken one? Isn't Arabic an international language, for instance?
    - walthamstow 2y ago
      For that matter, isn't English? It's an official language in many countries, such as South Africa, India, and Ireland, each of which has other official languages.
      - muzani 2y ago
        Especially in Asia, where it's not exactly a primary language for anyone. It's funny that you'll be in a room with Chinese, Egyptians, Pakistanis, Indonesians, Ukranians, and everyone will speak English. I once saw a documentary which went deep into Borneo, via rivers, to a tribe that didn't wear shirts, and they spoke fluent English too.
    - _emacsomancer_ 2y ago
      I think the point is that of intentional international languages (i.e., international in the sense of not being tied to any particular country), Esperanto is the most widely used one. That still is going to be a quite small number against English, Spanish, French &c. in terms of being a lingua franca.
    - tjalfi 2y ago
      Esperanto is probably the most widely spoken international auxiliary language[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_auxiliary_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_auxiliary_langua...
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
Asooka 2y ago
You also can't put in Cyrillic or CJK characters. It's a user name, not a human name, you should be fine just using the 26 ASCII letters for it. Basically anything that is a computer-centric string should be only ASCII and nothing else, because supporting all of human writing is a never-ending task.
- Limeray 2y ago
  [dead]
- ericpruitt 2y ago
  It's also a dangerous one. For example, are a number of variants of "a" that are different characters in Unicode but are often indistinguishable in most fonts and/or at small font sizes: https://util.unicode.org/UnicodeJsps/confusables.jsp?a=abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz&r=None https://util.unicode.org/UnicodeJsps/confusables.jsp?a=abcde....
Rebelgecko 2y ago
Are you a native speaker of Esperanto?
- kome 2y ago
  that would be so nice
layman51 2y ago
When I do a Ctrl+F search for “Gonatano” one of the search results is the actual name as typed with the circumflex. I think that is kind of a handy feature of the browser I’m using but at the same time it is sort of weird since it technically is not the same name without the circumflex, right? Also not all database systems would think the non-circumflex version is equivalent to the circumflex version. Does anyone have thoughts or ideas about how or why they should be treated equivalently? I also recognize this can get kind of political. There was a push in California recently to let people have accented letters in their name. Apparently it is legally not allowed. And yet some people claim their California birth certificate does contain accented letters.
- bwilliams18 2y ago
  Postgres has a module called unaccent[0] that removes diacritics for filtering. I expect your browser is doing something similar. While not appropriate when looking for exact matches, when doing user-input based searches, this should probably be the norm, as the user may be unaware of the accents or how to input them correctly on their keyboards. Dove deep on this years ago when implementing a filter for wines and wine regions. [0][https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/unaccent.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/unaccent.html]
- Marsymars 2y ago
  This is absolutely the desired default behaviour for ctrl+F in a browser. e.g. I frequently read French, and don't normally want to have to put in accents in my search term when I'm searching text for a word containing an accent. Firefox has a "Match Diacritics" checkbox right next to the "Match Case" box when you ctrl+F so you can configure as desired.
- kmoser 2y ago
  > but at the same time it is sort of weird since it technically is not the same name without the circumflex, right? Assuming you have a "standard" keyboard, it's not weird at all for your browser to match the diacritic when you type the non-diacritic character since presumably the diacritic would be difficult to type. Firefox's search feature even has a [_] Match Diacritics checkbox which you can enable or disable.

noahjk 2y ago

To be fair, Esperanto is, as far as I can tell, not very widely used. The letter ĝ mostly returns Esperanto results. Using that letter in a place where others may need to communicate or type the letter would be a severe burden on almost anyone else you interact with, outside of Esperanto communities. I'm sure there are plenty of people who share your frustration with accented letters, ñ, umlauts, etc, though. I'd hope that most systems can handle those letters, although I wouldn't hold out hope that Ĝ/ĝ would be high on the priority list.

gxonatano 2y ago
> as far as I can tell, not very widely used Well, it's the most widely spoken international language, spoken in over a hundred countries, by an estimated 2-5M people. There's a rich literature (probably 30-50K books), vibrant music scene, and support in open source software (Linux, Firefox, Google products) is usually pretty good. But the issue is not how widely Esperanto, or any other language, is spoken. If you assume that languages should only be supported according to their number of speakers, you leave no room for useful languages, bridge languages, auxiliary languages, or growing languages. Even if Esperanto had only 100 speakers, it'd be worthwhile to support, if it's easy to learn, and easy for non-speakers to understand. It's not a "severe burden" to consider non-ASCII letters as letters. Unicode is pretty straightforward to work with, and if you want to support more than just English, it's a necessity. There's no need to have a "priority list" of letters you consider more or less important than others. That attitude comes across as very Anglocentric.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- fph 2y ago
  What is the definition of an "international language" that makes Esperanto the most widely spoken one? Isn't Arabic an international language, for instance?
  - walthamstow 2y ago
    For that matter, isn't English? It's an official language in many countries, such as South Africa, India, and Ireland, each of which has other official languages.
    - muzani 2y ago
      Especially in Asia, where it's not exactly a primary language for anyone. It's funny that you'll be in a room with Chinese, Egyptians, Pakistanis, Indonesians, Ukranians, and everyone will speak English. I once saw a documentary which went deep into Borneo, via rivers, to a tribe that didn't wear shirts, and they spoke fluent English too.
  - _emacsomancer_ 2y ago
    I think the point is that of intentional international languages (i.e., international in the sense of not being tied to any particular country), Esperanto is the most widely used one. That still is going to be a quite small number against English, Spanish, French &c. in terms of being a lingua franca.
  - tjalfi 2y ago
    Esperanto is probably the most widely spoken international auxiliary language[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_auxiliary_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_auxiliary_langua...
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]

Asooka 2y ago

You also can't put in Cyrillic or CJK characters. It's a user name, not a human name, you should be fine just using the 26 ASCII letters for it. Basically anything that is a computer-centric string should be only ASCII and nothing else, because supporting all of human writing is a never-ending task.

Limeray 2y ago
[dead]
ericpruitt 2y ago
It's also a dangerous one. For example, are a number of variants of "a" that are different characters in Unicode but are often indistinguishable in most fonts and/or at small font sizes: https://util.unicode.org/UnicodeJsps/confusables.jsp?a=abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz&r=None https://util.unicode.org/UnicodeJsps/confusables.jsp?a=abcde....

Rebelgecko 2y ago

Are you a native speaker of Esperanto?

kome 2y ago
that would be so nice

layman51 2y ago

When I do a Ctrl+F search for “Gonatano” one of the search results is the actual name as typed with the circumflex. I think that is kind of a handy feature of the browser I’m using but at the same time it is sort of weird since it technically is not the same name without the circumflex, right? Also not all database systems would think the non-circumflex version is equivalent to the circumflex version. Does anyone have thoughts or ideas about how or why they should be treated equivalently? I also recognize this can get kind of political. There was a push in California recently to let people have accented letters in their name. Apparently it is legally not allowed. And yet some people claim their California birth certificate does contain accented letters.

bwilliams18 2y ago
Postgres has a module called unaccent[0] that removes diacritics for filtering. I expect your browser is doing something similar. While not appropriate when looking for exact matches, when doing user-input based searches, this should probably be the norm, as the user may be unaware of the accents or how to input them correctly on their keyboards. Dove deep on this years ago when implementing a filter for wines and wine regions. [0][https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/unaccent.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/unaccent.html]
Marsymars 2y ago
This is absolutely the desired default behaviour for ctrl+F in a browser. e.g. I frequently read French, and don't normally want to have to put in accents in my search term when I'm searching text for a word containing an accent. Firefox has a "Match Diacritics" checkbox right next to the "Match Case" box when you ctrl+F so you can configure as desired.
kmoser 2y ago
> but at the same time it is sort of weird since it technically is not the same name without the circumflex, right? Assuming you have a "standard" keyboard, it's not weird at all for your browser to match the diacritic when you type the non-diacritic character since presumably the diacritic would be difficult to type. Firefox's search feature even has a [_] Match Diacritics checkbox which you can enable or disable.