4 ms·

Icelandic girls can't be called Harriet, government tells family

20 points by dsego 12y ago

kzrdude 12y ago
Bearing an icelandic middle name seems like a painless workaround, it's kind of beautiful to acknowledge your icelandic roots that way too, isn't it?
- jonnathanson 12y ago
  Or the reverse: caving in and picking an Icelandic first name, but keeping Harriet as the middle name, and calling her Harriet in everyday circumstances. I'm not an expert in Icelandic by any stretch, but I think the problem here is that names are used in declensions in everyday speech. Which means that "Harriet" isn't painless, from a linguistic point of view. It sort of "breaks" the language. It returns an error, so to speak. This is an imperfect analogy, but imagine if I were to name my son "Michael's." Not "Michael," but "Michael's," which is essentially a possessive tense. That would create some odd headaches in certain conversational and written contexts. It's hard to understand from the perspective of English, because in most cases, we don't use declensions in proper nouns. In theory, you could probably force Icelandic to work around foreign words and names, just as English has worked around and incorporated foreign words and names. But English has a long history of doing that, and the population of English speakers worldwide is enormous and heterogeneous. I'm opposed to the Icelandic Naming Committee's position here. Seems they could stand to be a little more flexible, and/or to recognize that this inflexibility breeds more inflexibility, recursively. But I guess that's their goal. Linguistically, they are extremely conservative and would prefer their language remain static. English is pretty much the opposite: unregulated, as it were, and constantly evolving.
- stefantalpalaru 12y ago
  Not really. That "middle name" becomes your only legal first name and the unofficial one is only an alias with no legal value.
dm2 12y ago
If a name isn't legal then there is an "Icelandic Naming Committee" which can approve the child's name. Names are used differently in Iceland, they always reference to people by the first name. There are thousands of pre-approved names by the way: http://www.nordicnames.de/wiki/Icelandic_Names http://www.nordicnames.de/wiki/Icelandic_Names Icelanders also speak on their in-breath, I tried that just now and it seems like it might be possible to kill people by naming yourself a certain word they have to say while breathing inwards. (joking, kind of) I'm not trying to be mean but this in no way relates to anything Hacker News is about. It's a very slipper slope to cat pictures.
- gingerlime 12y ago
  personal liberty issues and freedom from censorship, government oppression and the likes are fairly regular subjects on HN. I don't think this is vastly different. Personally I found this interesting and educational. The conflict between preservation of a society, language and its heritage against the personal freedom of parents to name their children. Quite different from cat pictures I'd say.
  - Karunamon 12y ago
    As they relate to technology, yes. That one qualifier is what separates HN from every other political board out there. Flagged for that reason - this is just plain old politics.
  - diminoten 12y ago
    Personal liberty issues etc., are fairly regular subjects on HN? I'm not sure they should be (despite the irony this presents).
  - dm2 12y ago
    A loose naming regulation in an absurdly cold country which already has strange customs isn't important news by any stretch of the imagination. This is not a serious "personal liberty issue" or "government oppression", have you seen the shit happening in the rest of the world?
  - 12y ago
quink 12y ago
Fair enough, I disagree with the Icelandic government here. However... It's a name that's not native to the language. Let's, for a thought experiment, go on a bit of a slippery slope and consider someone whose name is outside Unicode's BMP. Would you support it too? What about a name that can't be normalised to Normalisation Form C, but only with composing diacritics? How about the topic of Han Unification - the TRON character set containing code points that aren't in Unicode? What about someone whose name has a transliteration that would blow Soundex out of the water, not that that's a particularly hard thing to do to begin with?
- jeremysmyth 12y ago
  Excellent points, all, and a valuable comment as a result. However, why should the government make those decisions? As a follow-on question to someone who gives a perfectly good answer that is convincing and reasonable, should that answer also apply to destination countries if someone travels or emigrates? i.e. should Iceland's (or Norway's, or Mexico's or Burma's) country decide what name I get to bring with me? (that they already do in some cases is not a valid answer!)

20 points by dsego 12y ago

Bearing an icelandic middle name seems like a painless workaround, it's kind of beautiful to acknowledge your icelandic roots that way too, isn't it?

jonnathanson 12y ago
Or the reverse: caving in and picking an Icelandic first name, but keeping Harriet as the middle name, and calling her Harriet in everyday circumstances. I'm not an expert in Icelandic by any stretch, but I think the problem here is that names are used in declensions in everyday speech. Which means that "Harriet" isn't painless, from a linguistic point of view. It sort of "breaks" the language. It returns an error, so to speak. This is an imperfect analogy, but imagine if I were to name my son "Michael's." Not "Michael," but "Michael's," which is essentially a possessive tense. That would create some odd headaches in certain conversational and written contexts. It's hard to understand from the perspective of English, because in most cases, we don't use declensions in proper nouns. In theory, you could probably force Icelandic to work around foreign words and names, just as English has worked around and incorporated foreign words and names. But English has a long history of doing that, and the population of English speakers worldwide is enormous and heterogeneous. I'm opposed to the Icelandic Naming Committee's position here. Seems they could stand to be a little more flexible, and/or to recognize that this inflexibility breeds more inflexibility, recursively. But I guess that's their goal. Linguistically, they are extremely conservative and would prefer their language remain static. English is pretty much the opposite: unregulated, as it were, and constantly evolving.
stefantalpalaru 12y ago
Not really. That "middle name" becomes your only legal first name and the unofficial one is only an alias with no legal value.

dm2 12y ago

If a name isn't legal then there is an "Icelandic Naming Committee" which can approve the child's name. Names are used differently in Iceland, they always reference to people by the first name. There are thousands of pre-approved names by the way: http://www.nordicnames.de/wiki/Icelandic_Names http://www.nordicnames.de/wiki/Icelandic_Names Icelanders also speak on their in-breath, I tried that just now and it seems like it might be possible to kill people by naming yourself a certain word they have to say while breathing inwards. (joking, kind of) I'm not trying to be mean but this in no way relates to anything Hacker News is about. It's a very slipper slope to cat pictures.

gingerlime 12y ago
personal liberty issues and freedom from censorship, government oppression and the likes are fairly regular subjects on HN. I don't think this is vastly different. Personally I found this interesting and educational. The conflict between preservation of a society, language and its heritage against the personal freedom of parents to name their children. Quite different from cat pictures I'd say.
- Karunamon 12y ago
  As they relate to technology, yes. That one qualifier is what separates HN from every other political board out there. Flagged for that reason - this is just plain old politics.
- diminoten 12y ago
  Personal liberty issues etc., are fairly regular subjects on HN? I'm not sure they should be (despite the irony this presents).
- dm2 12y ago
  A loose naming regulation in an absurdly cold country which already has strange customs isn't important news by any stretch of the imagination. This is not a serious "personal liberty issue" or "government oppression", have you seen the shit happening in the rest of the world?
- 12y ago

quink 12y ago

Fair enough, I disagree with the Icelandic government here. However... It's a name that's not native to the language. Let's, for a thought experiment, go on a bit of a slippery slope and consider someone whose name is outside Unicode's BMP. Would you support it too? What about a name that can't be normalised to Normalisation Form C, but only with composing diacritics? How about the topic of Han Unification - the TRON character set containing code points that aren't in Unicode? What about someone whose name has a transliteration that would blow Soundex out of the water, not that that's a particularly hard thing to do to begin with?

jeremysmyth 12y ago
Excellent points, all, and a valuable comment as a result. However, why should the government make those decisions? As a follow-on question to someone who gives a perfectly good answer that is convincing and reasonable, should that answer also apply to destination countries if someone travels or emigrates? i.e. should Iceland's (or Norway's, or Mexico's or Burma's) country decide what name I get to bring with me? (that they already do in some cases is not a valid answer!)