Icelandic girls can't be called Harriet, government tells family
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Let's, for a thought experiment, go on a bit of a slippery slope and consider someone whose name is outside Unicode's BMP. Would you support it too? What about a name that can't be normalised to Normalisation Form C, but only with composing diacritics? How about the topic of Han Unification - the TRON character set containing code points that aren't in Unicode? What about someone whose name has a transliteration that would blow Soundex out of the water, not that that's a particularly hard thing to do to begin with?
However, why should the government make those decisions?
As a follow-on question to someone who gives a perfectly good answer that is convincing and reasonable, should that answer also apply to destination countries if someone travels or emigrates? i.e. should Iceland's (or Norway's, or Mexico's or Burma's) country decide what name I get to bring with me? (that they already do in some cases is not a valid answer!)
Names are used differently in Iceland, they always reference to people by the first name. There are thousands of pre-approved names by the way: http://www.nordicnames.de/wiki/Icelandic_Names
Icelanders also speak on their in-breath, I tried that just now and it seems like it might be possible to kill people by naming yourself a certain word they have to say while breathing inwards. (joking, kind of)
I'm not trying to be mean but this in no way relates to anything Hacker News is about.
It's a very slipper slope to cat pictures.
Personally I found this interesting and educational. The conflict between preservation of a society, language and its heritage against the personal freedom of parents to name their children. Quite different from cat pictures I'd say.
I'm not sure they should be (despite the irony this presents).
This is not a serious "personal liberty issue" or "government oppression", have you seen the shit happening in the rest of the world?
I do believe the TSA stories represent a danger.
If there's a road from hacking to politics, it's
probably civil liberties.
So I would be somewhat careful about using that reasoning.
Disagree. It's a news story that relates to namespaces, encoding algorithms, language-independent operation, and the occasional need to hack around arbitrary bureaucratic restrictions/conventions. Could easily prompt interesting discussion that sheds light on related issues.
The Icelandic legal system's odd restrictions on allowable names are only a couple steps removed from the problem of computer systems that require people to have a middle initial (even if they have no middle name) or that prevent umlauts in a lastname field.
I'm not an expert in Icelandic by any stretch, but I think the problem here is that names are used in declensions in everyday speech. Which means that "Harriet" isn't painless, from a linguistic point of view. It sort of "breaks" the language. It returns an error, so to speak.
This is an imperfect analogy, but imagine if I were to name my son "Michael's." Not "Michael," but "Michael's," which is essentially a possessive tense. That would create some odd headaches in certain conversational and written contexts. It's hard to understand from the perspective of English, because in most cases, we don't use declensions in proper nouns. In theory, you could probably force Icelandic to work around foreign words and names, just as English has worked around and incorporated foreign words and names. But English has a long history of doing that, and the population of English speakers worldwide is enormous and heterogeneous.
I'm opposed to the Icelandic Naming Committee's position here. Seems they could stand to be a little more flexible, and/or to recognize that this inflexibility breeds more inflexibility, recursively. But I guess that's their goal. Linguistically, they are extremely conservative and would prefer their language remain static. English is pretty much the opposite: unregulated, as it were, and constantly evolving.