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Comment by nuc1e0n | Hacker News Reader

What the 'reasonable' character set for names should be is more a philosophical question than a technical one. I think the unicode set of characters fully contains it. But would someone declaring their name is a unicode emoji be 'reasonable'? I think it would not be. Perhaps only certain script ranges within unicode?

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Plenty of countries have relatively strict laws about legal names.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_law

Furthermore there is a standardized subset of Unicode codepoints which is intended to encompass all the legal names in Europe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_91379

> normative subset of Unicode Latin characters, sequences of base characters and diacritic signs, and special characters for use in names of persons, legal entities, products, addresses etc

Once you start taxatively naming "these are the Only Blessed Ranges," you'll be bitten by the usual brouhaha "email address ends with .[a-z]{2,3}". We all know how it went, and ".[a-z]{2,4}" didn't cut it, either, not even in 2000.

To add to the complexity, not all Chinese characters in use for names are representable in unicode. Perhaps at some point legal institutions must just define what the list of characters is that people can have as part of their name as listed on documentation. This reminds me of that 'what programmers believe about names' article from a while back.

> not all Chinese characters in use for names are representable in unicode

Why? How do you come to this conclusion?

Han unification[1] prevents the representation of all Chinese characters. There are multiple languages that use Chinese characters, but they don't all use the same characters. Unicode decided to only use Han Chinese characters, so names using other sorts of Chinese characters can't be written with Unicode. The Han "equivalent" characters can be used, but that looks weird.

Think of it as though Unicode decided that the letter "m" wasn't needed to write English text, since you can just write "rn" and it'll be close enough. Someone named "James" might want to have their name spelled correctly instead of "Jarnes", but that wouldn't be possible. Han unification did essentially this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification

I feel it's unlikely that this the explanation for what GGP had in mind. I postulate that names characters usually have no variants, thus do not undergo unification, or where there are variants, they are already encoded as Z variants, so the contention is also moot.

Prove me wrong with a counter-example.

https://soranews24.com/2014/02/13/japanese-woman-celebrates-...

First search result.

𫟈 is U+2B7C8 "CJK Unified Ideograph- 2B7C8". 𛁻 is U+1B07B "Hentaigana Letter To-5".

Both character fall into the first category I mentioned, no variants.

If so, I think they would just need to be added to Unicode. Do you have an estimate how many are missing?

I as an interested bystander estimate it in the order of 10⁵. Email Ken Lunde for better insights.

Note that GP claimed "not representable" (not "not represented"). Based on what I know, that claim feels quite wrong.

Even then there are plenty of legitimate scripts that are useless to an individual in practice. How am I going to read a name out in a waiting room if I cannot read the script? For some scripts I probably couldn't even perform a string match; certainly not against handwriting.

I think "reasonable" must be limited to the subset that the population of that country can reasonably be expected to be literate against; otherwise transliteration is necessary.

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