4 ms·

Interesting article, I've had some similar (though significantly less severe) experiences with having ä and ß in my names, it seems many U. S. companies are jus

• ninalanyon 1y ago
  > The government being this sloppy at getting accents right is surprising, I would expect them to value accuracy That tells me you're German, I didn't even need to see the ä and ß. Even in the UK I encounter websites that won't accept my Norwegian address because it begins with Å. English speaking countries generally are pretty bad at this sort of thing.
  • dcminter 1y ago
    Last time I tried to make an international transfer from my British bank account it couldn't accept destination names with any accented characters. An international transfer. Sheesh.
  • reorder9695 1y ago
    You'd think the UK would be alright with it given Irish names are and were reasonably common (at least in parts of the UK), which commonly have fadas in them (i.e. Béibhinn, Seán, Ciarán, etc)
    • miki123211 1y ago
      I mean, English itself has diacritics in perfectly ordinary words that many Americans use every day (café, résumé, and yet somebody decided to put "useless" characters like @, ^ or # in ASCII instead.
      • TinkersW 1y ago
        They are optional though, and who can be bothered to add that when typing.
      • int_19h 1y ago
        ^ comes from typewriters, where it was used to type letters like â by backing the caret and typing over the last letter. Similarly ' could be used for acute accent - hence why it didn't get a separate letter - and ` for grave accent. By the way, the accents can often be used to force the right pronunciation of a foreign name on native speakers (at least in US, where Spanish names are so widespread). So e.g. use "á" if you want it to be pronounced [a] etc.
  • QuantumNomad_ 1y ago
    Just because we have æ, ø, å here in Norway doesn’t mean that we’re much better at handling “weird” characters from other countries than the English speaking countries are. My Spanish girlfriend has an ñ in her last name, and as does our son. To the people here in Norway, I just tell them to put a plain n when typing the last name. It’s easier to just go with that than to try and get people to understand how to type ñ on the keyboard (even though our computers can do it), and to avoid extra back and forth with people who have systems that don’t handle it. Likewise, when I’m in Spain I don’t bother to say that my last name has ø in it. I don’t even bother to rewrite the o in my last name as oe. I just put it as o. The only situation where I put it as oe is indirectly when an airline converts ø to oe on my airline ticket, or where the airline system doesn’t handle ø and I put it as oe for them when making the booking. To me my name looks worse with oe in it, and seems harder to pronounce for people if I write it as having oe in it than just putting it as o.
    • ninalanyon 1y ago
      I'm not talking about ordinary members of the public not bothering to figure out how to type an unusual character on a Norwegian keyboard. I have no idea how I would type a an n with a tilde, I would have to pick it from the character map. My point was that someone who can type it will often have it rejected by a website. I was using a hotel booking site and when I booked a room it asked me for my address so I typed Å... The web page rendered it correctly but when I hit the button to complete the transaction it told me that my address contained an illegal character (or some similar wording). And this site handles bookings for hotels that themselves have names with umlauts, tildes, cedillas, etc.
• comrade1234 1y ago
  The USA government can't even handle ü. I was filling out a simple form to replace my damaged passport. I live in Zürich but it couldn't handle the umlaut. I never know what to do in this situation - do I use 'ue' instead, which is most common in Europe, or do I just use 'u' which is wrong but usually works in America. I didn't even bother checking with 'ue' and just went with 'u' Ü isn't even a special character or utf-8 - ü is part of ascii. How does this even fail? Is their database a 7-bit database?
  • nemomarx 1y ago
    if they can't type it on a keyboard when manually copying it from one place to another they'll drop it is what I've come to expect.
  • pixl97 1y ago
    Don't think of government ascii as the entire ascii code page. Instead think of it as what's on a typewriter. You get 0-9 and A-Z along with a few punctuation characters.
    • krior 1y ago
      Not very helpful - my typewriter has an ü :)
      • pixl97 1y ago
        And I'm sure Chinese typewriters have a totally different charset then German ones.
      • marcellus23 1y ago
        But do American English typewriters have a ü?
  • technothrasher 1y ago
    Heck, they can't even handle that my last name has more than one capital letter in it.
  • 1y ago
• Y_Y 1y ago
  I know these characters now have lives of their own, but they emerged as shorthands for "ae" and "ss" respectively (where the first s was the long kind that looks like an 'f'). My understanding is that they are still phonetically entirely equivalent. How does it feel to have to substitute them into your name? (Or do you have a different recourse?)
  • c0balt 1y ago
    > How does it feel to have to substitute them into your name? It does not directly bother me but can lead to downstream inconveniences. Public services (in Germany) ime don't like mismatches in identifiers, especially inconsistent ones. If it is required then it might sometimes take more than one application (with a small explanation on why the mismatch is there). As another example, if ä is substituted for ae in shipping addresses then automatic tracking for packages by DHL via my customer account breaks (as the address is not identical anymore).
• Aloisius 1y ago
  A clean paper trail is only possible if everyone always enters your name in exactly how you spell it. That's not realistic though. If you try spelling your name over the phone to an American government employee, the vast majority would have no idea what a eszett was or how to enter it. Even if you wrote ß on a form, most wouldn't be able to enter it. Nor would most know how to pronounce it. Even for accented letters like ä which at least have a form someone might recognize, the sheer number of different accent marks used across languages and the difficulty in reading someone's handwriting and general unfamiliarity with foreign names is just asking for some clerk to enter in wrong. And that's just names with Latin letters. It becomes infinitely worse once you start including all the other character in world languages. Instead, US government databases usually have first and last names transliterated into uppercase non-accented letters and they match against the transliterated name. Middle names are often only for display purposes. If you're lucky, they'll be display versions of first and last as well where you might sometimes be able to stick an accented character. This isn't really limited to the US either. If you look at any passport, you'll notice the machine-readable section does the exact same thing, so on German passports ß becomes SS and Ä becomes AE.
• 6SixTy 1y ago
  Don't completely rule out EBCDIC from the equation. It's generally an IBM-ism meant for punched cards with the same characters as ASCII. Despite the similarity, it means that it's a legacy system kept alive to now and switching to UTF-EBCDIC would likely incur disturbing 70+ year old layers of tech debt dust. Some of them don't even support lower case characters as it's using EBCDIC's predecessor, BCD.
  • miki123211 1y ago
    And this is even the case in Europe. There was a case of some German bank treating ü as "ue", its typical ASCII transliteration. A customer complained under GDPR and won.
• AndriyKunitsyn 1y ago
  It's a question of scope, though. Imagine you are an American designing a system. What about non-Latin alphabets? Yeah, these should probably be converted, nobody's going to bother with those. What about Hungarians, should we care about their O / Ó / Ö / Ő and U / Ú / Ü / Ű? And Icelanders - should we allow their Ð / Þ? I understand that seeing your name misspelled hurts, but pretending ASCII is enough for everyone is an understandable simplification.
  • int_19h 1y ago
    ASCII isn't even enough for English. And yes absolutely we should bring Ð / Þ back for English use and drop those ridiculous digraphs.
• Rendello 1y ago
  I saw online that people moving to Japan can sometimes take months to get a bank account because the systems aren't there designed to handle middle names. If you want to maximize your child's ability to move around, I guess go with an ASCII first name-last name, which works almost everywhere. Except Iceland!