I'm glad California regulators are focusing on the critical issue of what characters may appear in children's names. Does it ever occur to people in government that some things may not be their problem?
It's probably a good idea if government computers can keep track of the name, so a minimum requirement would probably be "can be represented by unicode glyphs". So attempts like Prince's should probably be disqualified. And even in the unicode set there are characters that may be problematic - Record Separators, Zero Width Space, Pile of Poo emoji springs to mind as examples, even if the later one might be doable. It's hard to address a letter to a person whose name just consists of a mix of different whitespace characters (especially when their neighbor is a different mix whitespace characters). So, yes, government probably should care about this, at least a little bit.
That said, Æ should probably be allowed. It's a standard character in several living languages.
> That said, Æ should probably be allowed
This may cause all sorts of issues, from typing a letter to issuing a passport.
Else than that, exactly what I was thinking.
And practically, in a world where people cross borders, where people come to this country for refuge and opportunity, how does it make sense to force them all to have only basic English characters in their names?
You’ve never interacted with the government or a large corporation, have you?
But in seriousness: it is their concern because changes that seem minor can require major changes to electronic systems, and allowing special cases that necessitate lookup in ways the electronic systems can't handle (perhaps even requring manual search through hardcopy!) really throw a star-mangled spanner in the works.
Naming is already a special case problem in Japan, where people are accustomed to having no idea how to pronounce most people's names because the parents used non-standard readings of the kanji characters and/or used kanji from a special exempted list of archaic kanji that almost nobody can read. If you're wondering why the government doesn't require people use only the official "common use" kanji, at least just for this one problem, then I should tell it has been tried — enough people raised a fuss about being unable to register their child's "perfect name" that gradually a list of "allowed only in names" kanji was created and expanded.
And if I recall correctly, when registering a name, you can specify a totally unrelated pronunciation using the simpler non-kanji phonetic characters, so even just "common use" kanji are almost "all bets off". A relative few kanji have such common pronunciation in names that they can 'usually' be guessed.
And the problem is the same with many Japanese place-names, having little or no correlation between written form and pronunciation or meaning.
So, why is the spelling of a chosen name any concern to a government? It gets crazy out there, in Name Land. How mäný variatǐons of spelliñg cån ße ællowèd before people give up on pronouncing it?
What's fascinating to me is that none of you consider that government might not need to have a list of everyone it governs, or that such a list might not need to be centralized or computerized. When faced with a facet of humanity that's too complex to be easily reduced to consistent data, private groups either do their best and work with what data they can extract, or else have people handle it, with our flexible, tolerant minds. When government is involved, though, the immediate response is, "We have to force people to be less complex!"
I'm beginning to see technocracy as the biggest threat to a diverse, human, and humane society.
There are quite specific rules:
The new name must be in the format {substring of original name 1}{?-}{substring of original name 2}, or you have to go through the much more arduous and expensive full name change process (though you get a 2 for 1 discount).