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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

> One naming law that some found restrictive was California's ban on diacritical marks, such as in the name José. For over 30 years, the Office of Vital Records in the California Department of Public Health required that names contain only the 26 alphabetical characters of the English language. The law, however, was amended in 2017 to require the usage of diacritical marks to be properly recorded by the State Registrar

This was because the software couldn't handle it, but what software engineer wrote software to handle names in California that couldn't handle Spanish names of all things!?

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The software engineer who wrote the code back in the 70's and only had ASCII available.

Lookup ASCII 130

Everything over 127 is part of Extended ASCII which, as far as I can tell, was introduced by IBM in '81.

There were certainly other proprietary 8-bit extensions of ASCII before IBM's.

I'm sorry, my computer is not 8-bit clean

ASCII is a 7-bit character set, though there are a number of different 8-bit extensions of ASCII that are sometimes incorrectly called ASCII.

It's funny in the Chinese article the authorities rejected the name "赵C" because they said their system can't handle latin characters (but can handle complex encoding of Chinese characters)

Not even ASCII, but likely a 6-bit encoding (think Base64), since names are not case-sensitive and storage was far more expensive.

Since names are often assumed to be not case-sensitive.

Although every once in a while you still see a system that renders names in all uppercase, with the lone exception of a lowercase c in Scottish surnames starting with Mc-.

Or a 12-row encoding¹, if California kept records in the BC era (before computers).

¹ https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/punched-cards/2/8...

I have seen software in Canada that cannot handle accented characters. This is in a country where a quarter of the population is French. Case in point:

> Sudbury (Ontario, Canada) woman supports petition to add accents to French names on government I.D.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/petition-french-names...

Many “falsehoods programmers believe about names[1]” are pure implicit bias. Software written before Unicode was an assumed default to handle names in California by a bunch of privileged white guys who don’t know any Latinos is almost guaranteed to be wrong, unless the software authors are particularly focused on inclusion for reasons other than personal or vicarious experience.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18567548

Or alternatively, memory and storage was hideously expensive and the programmers were limited to what they could support.

and their biased support was for anglo names?

I don't think allowing non-english characters in legal names is a rabbit hole Americans should be ok with opening.

Hafþór is a perfectly fine name!

speaking of icelandic naming rules being pretty draconian..

Yes, most people on this forum would find that their name is not on the icelandic list (But if lucky, there might be a similar one).

One reason is that they want names to have endings that work well with icelandic grammar (forming genitives and other cases).

https://www.nordicnames.de/wiki/List_of_approved_Icelandic_f...

https://www.nordicnames.de/wiki/List_of_approved_Icelandic_m...

I imagine trying to purge voter roles when someone moves form one state to another. But the different states allow different characters. In Florida we start allowing emoji.

Why? We don't have a national language, why should names be limited to english characters?

Of course we have a national language, but it's de facto rather than de jure.

The lack of an official language should not be confused with the lack of a national language. There is definitely a (deeply entrenched) national language.

Let's assume that's true.

English characters include vowels with a diaeresis, as Chloë and Zoë for first names, and Brontë for a last name. The New Yorker and a small number of other publications continue to use the diaeresis for words like coördinate. English also uses non-ASCII characters in a number of loan words, like née and açaí.

A quick check of the members of the US House, I see Raúl Grijalva of AZ, Tony Cárdenas, Linda Sánchez, and Nanette Barragán of CA, Jesús "Chuy" García of IL, Ben Ray Luján of NM, Nydia Velázquez and José E. Serrano of NY, and Jenniffer González of PR.

9/438 members is about 1%.

A check of geographical names shows places in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, New Mexico, and elsewhere with non-ASCII characters in them.

That strongly suggests that "(deeply entrenched) national language" of the US does not restrict itself to ASCII letters when it comes to naming, but - like loan words - includes words and orthography from other languages.

Does that include spaces and dashes? No "Billy Bob" or "Sue-Ellen" ?

Plenty of people already have these names ( Beyoncé to pick somebody famous, born in Texas ). What is your reasoning why they shouldn't be allowed anymore?

https://www.babygaga.com/25-names-that-have-more-than-letter...

That we should have a simple standard so that names serve their purpose: everyone should be able to read them, distinct names should not be confused for each other, and the same name should always be written identically. Yes, I'd support banning spaces and dashes - speaking as someone who's obliged to use a mispronunciation of my own name because that was what was reported to the authorities when I first moved here.

So only one version of "Joe" and "Jo" or "Matthew" and "Mathew" ?

I think this will happen right after the US adopts Metric Time.

Lots of nice countries to live in do that.

The Jons and Johns of the world will never let your vision come to be.

To the extent than names are part of official government records, the government needs to set some limits for what it's systems can handle.

I think emojis and cyrillic alphabet characters should be kept out, for example.

I have seen increasing number of people using emojis as a word or username replacement. Given how well it works in many context, I disagree with excluding emojis.

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