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The government ate my name

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Re: The government ate my name

#11

Post by Y_Y »

c0balt wrote: post #2

Interesting article, I've had some similar (though significantly less severe) experiences with having ä and ß in my names, it seems many U. S. companies are just unwilling/incapable of going beyond ASCII. The government being this sloppy at getting accents right is surprising, I would expect them to value accuracy and a clean paper trail when handling names. http://archive.today/5h4v2

I know these characters now have lives of their own, but they emerged as shorthands for "ae" and "ss" respectively (where the first s was the long kind that looks like an 'f').

My understanding is that they are still phonetically entirely equivalent. How does it feel to have to substitute them into your name? (Or do you have a different recourse?)

Re: The government ate my name

#12

Post by dustincoates »

Moving to a country that doesn't speak English has taught me just how many pronunciations of my last name there are. It's never really bothered me, though, and 90% of the time I'll introduce myself with the "wrong" one. It's easier for everyone.

Re: The government ate my name

#13

Post by pavel_lishin »

dustincoates wrote: post #12

Moving to a country that doesn't speak English has taught me just how many pronunciations of my last name there are. It's never really bothered me, though, and 90% of the time I'll introduce myself with the "wrong" one. It's easier for everyone.

Samesies; when I moved to Texas, people put the accent in my name on the wrong syllable, but after awhile that began to sound more natural than my name with the accent in the correct place but with an American accent. "PAYvel" sounds worse to me than "PahVEL", so I go by the latter - presumably fucking it up for every Pavel that comes into these people's lives after me.

Re: The government ate my name

#14

Post by fguerraz »

Fairly usual stuff, I can relate to that!

I was born in France, I then had my last name changed to add my mother’s maiden name to my last name, and I can legally use either, my French id shows my name and my “usage name”.

Fast forward a few years, I settled in the UK, got naturalised, they dropped all the diacritics and kept only my “usage name” as my last name. You can also change name as many times as you like in the UK, they really don’t care, they’re pretty good at tracking it.

I then got my Italian citizenship by ancestry and there they’re the exact opposite of the British: only under very specific circumstances can you change your name, it has to be a matter of life and death pretty much. So they took my original French name, including the diacritics that nobody knows how to type on an Italian keyboard.

Now I live in Italy, with a different name than my British name, or my French “usage name”, and I have to explain to the clerks how to find me on their system (with my tax code) because they can’t type my name properly.

Re: The government ate my name

#15

Post by immibis »

comrade1234 wrote: post #4
c0balt wrote: post #2

Interesting article, I've had some similar (though significantly less severe) experiences with having ä and ß in my names, it seems many U. S. companies are just unwilling/incapable of going beyond ASCII. The government being this sloppy at getting accents right is surprising, I would expect them to value accuracy and a clean paper trail when handling names. http://archive.today/5h4v2

The USA government can't even handle ü. I was filling out a simple form to replace my damaged passport. I live in Zürich but it couldn't handle the umlaut. I never know what to do in this situation - do I use 'ue' instead, which is most common in Europe, or do I just use 'u' which is wrong but usually works in America. I didn't even bother checking with 'ue' and just went with 'u' Ü isn't even a special character or…

ü is not part of ascii. Are you thinking of latin-1?

Re: The government ate my name

#16

Post by comrade1234 »

immibis wrote: post #15
comrade1234 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The USA government can't even handle ü. I was filling out a simple form to replace my damaged passport. I live in Zürich but it couldn't handle the umlaut. I never know what to do in this situation - do I use 'ue' instead, which is most common in Europe, or do I just use 'u' which is wrong but usually works in America. I didn't even bother checking with 'ue' and just went with 'u' Ü isn't even a special character or…

ü is not part of ascii. Are you thinking of latin-1?

Oh that makes sense. ASCII is 7-bit. so they could be depending on old 7-bit databases.

Re: The government ate my name

#17

Post by integralid »

comrade1234 wrote: post #4
c0balt wrote: post #2

Interesting article, I've had some similar (though significantly less severe) experiences with having ä and ß in my names, it seems many U. S. companies are just unwilling/incapable of going beyond ASCII. The government being this sloppy at getting accents right is surprising, I would expect them to value accuracy and a clean paper trail when handling names. http://archive.today/5h4v2

The USA government can't even handle ü. I was filling out a simple form to replace my damaged passport. I live in Zürich but it couldn't handle the umlaut. I never know what to do in this situation - do I use 'ue' instead, which is most common in Europe, or do I just use 'u' which is wrong but usually works in America. I didn't even bother checking with 'ue' and just went with 'u' Ü isn't even a special character or…

ASCII is a 7-bit code. Ü is not a part of ASCII any more than say Ł is (it's in one of many 8-bit extensions of ASCII)

Re: The government ate my name

#18

Post by nradov »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #7

There's an analogous problem for Russians, and presumably folks from other Slavic-language countries. Our last names are gendered; if Ivan Kuznetsov marries Elena, her last name becomes Kuznetsova. (And their children would have gendered last names, too - little Borya Kuznetsov and little Masha Kuznetsova.) So Russian families who move to America have a choice - either deal with people and systems who assume that mar…

As a related issue, some Slavic language countries require foreign documents to be transliterated into the Cyrillic alphabet, which doesn't contain exact equivalents for certain English alphabet letters. They usually end up using the closest phonetic equivalent but this often causes bureaucratic hassles.

Re: The government ate my name

#19

Post by daemonologist »

comrade1234 wrote: post #4
c0balt wrote: post #2

Interesting article, I've had some similar (though significantly less severe) experiences with having ä and ß in my names, it seems many U. S. companies are just unwilling/incapable of going beyond ASCII. The government being this sloppy at getting accents right is surprising, I would expect them to value accuracy and a clean paper trail when handling names. http://archive.today/5h4v2

The USA government can't even handle ü. I was filling out a simple form to replace my damaged passport. I live in Zürich but it couldn't handle the umlaut. I never know what to do in this situation - do I use 'ue' instead, which is most common in Europe, or do I just use 'u' which is wrong but usually works in America. I didn't even bother checking with 'ue' and just went with 'u' Ü isn't even a special character or…

There's no ü in ASCII (the 1967 US-ASCII everyone thinks of, anyways, which is all you can expect from the government). It's in ISO 646:CH though, where it replaces '}', and in Latin 1.

Re: The government ate my name

#20

Post by xg15 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #7

There's an analogous problem for Russians, and presumably folks from other Slavic-language countries. Our last names are gendered; if Ivan Kuznetsov marries Elena, her last name becomes Kuznetsova. (And their children would have gendered last names, too - little Borya Kuznetsov and little Masha Kuznetsova.) So Russian families who move to America have a choice - either deal with people and systems who assume that mar…

This sounds as if it could slowly erode the whole "gendered surname" concept even in the origin countries (e.g. Russia)

If you can treat the gendered name simply as a grammatical construct, things are easy - and a "name" like "Elena Kuznetsov" would simply be a grammatical error and never occur as a real name.

However, now people from abroad visit the country or possibly even (re-)immigrate and suddenly you do have real-live "Elena Kuznetsovs" - in addition to the regular gendered names. This sounds pretty complicated to keep track of.

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