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Comment by Chilko | Hacker News Reader

> Officially change my name?

My German last name also contains an ü, so when we emigrated to an English-speaking country and obtained dual-citizenship we used 'ue' for that passport and I now use 'ue' on a day-to-day basis. This also means I have two slightly different legal surnames depending by which passport I go.

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At least German transliteration is 1-to-1. Slavic names among others often have multiple transliterations available. The Russian name Валерий can be rendered for example as Valery, Valeriy, or Valeri. It's very confusing for documents that require the person's name.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Romanization_of_Russ...

Also don't forget Chinese, which due to different romanizations or different dialects being used for the romanization, can result in different outputs depending on whether a person is from PRC, ROC, Macao, Hong Kong, or Singapore.

That's the English transliteration. Don't forget that other Slavic languages also transcribe according to their own rules.

For example in Czech, Валерий would be transliterated as Valerij because "j" is pronounced in Czech as English "y" in "you".

There's an ISO standard for this. Can't find it but I am 100% sure for russian for example.

Transliteration is a two way street. Non-Russian names get transliterated into Cyrillic inconsistently as well.

just out of curiosity, can you port the ue back to Germany (or wherever) or will they automatically transform it to ü? (could you change your name in a German speaking country to Mueller et al?)

In Germany, there are some names that use ue, ae or oe instead of ü, ä, ö, and you run into issues with some systems wrongly autocorrecting it to the umlaut. Usually not a big deal, but having the umlaut is less error prone than the transliteration in Germany.

The most famous German poet is (probs) Goethe. Still written with oe to this day.

There are old houses in the US that have bronze placards on them that say, "George Washington slept here."

Goethe is so famous that in Heidelberg, Germany, there is a building with a placard that says, "Goethe almost slept here."

It was an inn and he was supposed to spend the night but was unable to.

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