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Comment by jasonjei | Hacker News Reader

While this might be an unpopular sentiment, I think ASCII name isn’t completely unreasonable.

In an effort to make it easier for people to communicate, we have designated English as the unofficial language for most open-source projects.

Most names can be romanized, and many people would have trouble typing 陳 or 石川 if they weren’t acquainted with Chinese or Japanese, and I think ASCII is a reasonable request.

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I don't think ASCII is unreasonable at all here! But the instructions could be worded in a way that it is possible to comply with them, instead of this formulation which is technically impossible for many people. It could say: something like "Please use your full legal name as the subject line of the message if it consists of ASCII characters, otherwise use an ASCII transliteration."

Agreed

For the record, my name only contains one non-ASCII character, an "í". So what I did was change it to an "i" for the email subject line, and in the body of the email point out I could not follow their instructions literally, and also told them what my legal name is.

Yeah but it's kind of a whole thing to respect people's autonomy to control their own names. Plus, you can just copy-paste.

Edit: Not to mention if you are asking for their "legal name" for legal purposes then you would have to accommodate any valid legal name in any country.

Having not studied Korean or Arabic, I would have a real hard time with copying and pasting, and knowing whether the name is a surname, or first name, or whether those cultures employ a first name or last name.

(For example, many Asian cultures with Chinese influence start their names with LASTNAME FIRSTNAME, so one might have a name of 蔡英文, where 蔡 is the surname, and 英文 is the given name. Japanese also has the same custom, 武金城, where 武 is the surname, and 金城 is the given name.)

That’s why I think a harmonized approach—even if it has a bit of English hegemony—is acceptable, just as we have done so in scientific journals and publications.

But romanizing doesn't solve any of those problems (except maybe having to copy/paste, but with uncommon/foreign names you'll have to re-look at it thrice either way). You're still gonna wonder if 'Sung' is the first, second or third name, because your mistake was assuming that it works like this in the first place.

If you read scientific journals, they have dealt with ASCII names, sometimes with last names in all caps, with the given name.[0]

For example, KANESHIRO, Takeshi, with the names of the authors of a paper.

[0] https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S0022247X9895987X?...

A better approach is just using whatever name they provide in full. If you need a short name (which is not the case in the original .txt file), ask for one. Just treat names like opaque blobs.

There's always a tradeoff between autonomy and practicality. Do we need to implement drawing for all "text" inputs (and outputs) so that people like Prince won't have any issues expressing their autonomy with something like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)#/media/File:...

(I'm aware that this was a stage name, but it is a legal name in the US)

Well, if you're fine with being occasionally called/written Yay-souwn (ah the mistakes that can crop in when translating names into languages with different phonetic constraints), I have no argument against that.

My parents have adopted romanized names. My last name is 洪 which in Pinyin is “Hong,” but in Taiwan, they’ve been using a mix of romanization schemes. In America, my name has been romanized to “Hung.” And I’m fine with that. And I don’t expect anyone to know how to write 洪.

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