I don’t know that I agree with this, but I could be convinced.
My perspective is, you can spell those names using standard English letters, and you can use any name you want while entering it into the system using English letters.
For example, let’s say your name is חגי. That’s going to be impossible to spell in English; there is no ח sound. חגי will have to make do with “Hagai” which is pronounced completely differently. An H is not a ח, but by convention when anglicizing Hebrew names you plug in a H for a ח.
Similarly צבי will have to go by “Tzvi” because there is no letter for the צ sound in Hebrew.
Meanwhile, Wallace who goes to Israel will have to go by וולס or something similar, because Hebrew doesn’t have a W so we improvise with a וו.
As long as California is fine with you naming your kid María, חגי, François, צבי, and Jörg (that’s quite the family ) I don’t think making you standardize the letters you use to officially enter the name into the system is at all like restricting actual names.
But I am open to an alternate perspective on this!
At my last condo residence one of the nice old men was named “Adolf”. He and his wife were originally Austrian, had lived all over including South America, and had settled in the USA probably 50 years ago.
Based on his age and birthplace, he was almost certainly named in honor of a more famous Adolf. It seemed … impolitic … to ask him though.
Very well said.
And as to California’s restrictions…
While I can understand why they did it, and the reason they had to accept apostrophes (e.g. “O’Malley”), that did leave a rather large IT security hole there:
For those who aren’t techies, one of the ways for malicious attackers to slip something evil into many common database systems is to stick an apostrophe in an unexpected place. Which triggers confusion in the computer about what is data to be stored versus what is (malicious) commands to be executed. This was a very common attack in the early days of the www until all the programmers learned that they needed to plan for malicious input anywhere and everywhere.
It still happens occasionally. This comic dates from when that worldwide learning was still in full swing. Oops.
All this ideology doesn’t hit the mark for me, because all I care about is how the name will affect the child and all other considerations, including the parents’ dearest wishes, should be subverted to that. Give me one example of a case where a child’s interests were harmed because they were not given a particular name. Not being able to put an umlaut (the two dots above the “o” in Jörg) is not a reason to justify naming a kid “Qwerty” or “M2N 2R2” or “#$*@(!”. Quite frankly, “Jörg” can be transliterated to “Joerg”.
Yes, because your actions affect another individual, one who you didn’t have to have, who didn’t make you bring them into the world, and who starts off weak, vulnerable, and not only physically but also emotionally dependent on you, through no fault or agency of their own. I think I hold a different axiom than you do. For me, raising a child is not a right, even in the case of a perfect parent. It’s a privilege. Before people start putting words in my mouth, I’m not suggesting that the state should take away children from their parents and raise them in institutions or anything like that. Merely that parents should see their role as one of duty and trust rather than a personal entitlement, approach their role as parents with humility, and whatever decisions they must make with regards to their child as mere necessity, and not as a right they have over another human being’s life. I invite those who don’t like that to simply not have kids.
Full disclosure, my children (born in California) have Korean middle names, transliterated into English letters. I don’t consider it an important distinction.
But some in the Latino community do consider it important. Allowing diacritics in official names comes up regularly. I don’t think the state’s reasoning to keep the restrictions stands up to legal scrutiny.
I agree with this, but as I tried to explain earlier, only the parents can actually do this. All naming laws that I’m aware of regulate something other than the child’s interests. We trust parents to deal with all aspects of their child’s life and it’s only when they fail that the state intervenes.
Here is a fundamental disagreement. It’s a basic human right to have children (and also to not have children). There’s a reason authoritarians regulate reproduction and child raising.
Above, I quoted Czech laws where the state intervenes pre-emptively by placing some limits on what you can name a child, and DPRK quoted Finnish laws that are similar. If you read those posts, you are now aware of laws that were drafted at least in part with a view to regulating a child’s interests, I.E. to minimize the chance that their name will cause ridicule and confusion. And you don’t think that California’s laws that limit diacritics were at least partly drafted with a view to the child’s interests? You don’t think it’s a practical thing to bear a name that is legible and at least somewhat easy to pronounce in the English speaking world, that doesn’t ridicule you by including numbers and hashtags, etc.? Of course that’s in the child’s interests. Plus, your “We trust parents to deal with all aspects of their child’s life and it’s only when they fail that the state intervenes.” is very much a libertarian (read conservative) American view. It goes against the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (a treaty ratified by all sovereign states in the world with the sole exception of the United States), according to which, among other things, the best interest of the child should be the primary consideration in all decisions affecting them.
We may always disagree on this point. For me, having a child is a privilege and a trust, not a right. A book which advances this point very eloquently, and which I would particularly recommend to American readers is Jeffrey Shulman’s The Constiutional Parent.
I agree completely with your sentiments, but I might tweak this bit just a tad.
IMO the whole situation is more like this:
All naming laws that I’m aware of regulate something other than the child’s interests. We trust parents to deal with all aspects of their child’s life and it’s only when they fail that the state intervenesshould intervene. But in the case of naming laws they proactively intervene clumsily and culturally insensitively for reasons that (at least in the USA) are often ill-disguised religious or racial prejudice.
I agree that parents should / ought treat it as a privilege and a trust. They are undertaking this birthing and raising task not for themselves, but for the benefit of the new person they’re creating and starting out.
Just like a financial trust, the only interests that really matter are those of the trust beneficiary: the child. The parents are merely trustees empowered to act for the benefit of that beneficiary. And if someone is not willing to adopt that trustee mindset, then they, and the world, would probably be better served by that person passing on parenthood.
Having said the above, creating children is very close to the most basic of human rights. By “right” we mean something that can be limited or prohibited only in the very most extreme of circumstances and only for the very best of uncontroversial reasons.
So I do NOT see that “privilege and trust” are antithetical to “right”.
Just as some folks are prone to interpreting the word “privilege” to mean “something that can be extensively controlled or prohibited for any reason or no reason at the whim of authority”, others are prone to defining “right” as “something anyone can, and should do in whichever random (and probably selfish) way they choose, and no one may offer an opinion on whether that way is wise.”
Both of those are caricatures which exclude a gigantic middle. But they are popularly held caricatures. IMO we should all operate in that middle.
I don’t know whether the reasoning stands up to legal scrutiny or not - but let’s just say that a government, any government has no restrictions on names whatsoever. You can name your kid anything you want, and it can have a accent , an umlaut , or even be a symbol that you made up. That’s just fine - but how do you get that unique symbol on an English keyboard ? Or even get someone else to handwrite it correctly ? My kids have Chinese names written in Chinese characters* but I certainly cannot write them correctly , why would I expect some random person at the hospital or bureau of vital records to be able to do so? The correct spelling of my German surname has an umlaut over the “o” which is normally rendered by “oe” when an umlaut can’t be used ( like on an English typewriter keyboard) but apparently whoever started keeping records in the US didn’t know that, so my name now just has an “o”. If you somehow get “Jörg” in the birth certificate but it’s written as “Jorg” everywhere else, (School records, medical records, driver license, bank accounts) then what difference does the birth certificate make?
* Not their legal names, but let’s pretend they are. My husband might be able to write them.
First of all, in 2023, it’s not that you can’t type ö, it’s that you can’t be bothered to type ö.
Either we have one correct spelling for names, or we allow an anglicised version alongside the original. Forcing people to conform to the tyranny of typewriter keyboards from fifty years ago is silly.
All naming laws that I’m aware of regulate something other than the child’s interests. We trust parents to deal with all aspects of their child’s life and it’s only when they fail that the state should intervene. But in the case of naming laws they proactively intervene clumsily and culturally insensitively for reasons that (at least in the USA) are often ill-disguised religious or racial prejudice.
My phraseology is mainly an exercise in humility that I wish to inculcate in the parent.
I’m focused more on the aspect of raising the child than the actual act of reproduction. I don’t mean that anyone should be prevented from copulating, but I do agree with society placing serious duties on parents with respect to their children, doing everything in its power to compel parents to exercise those duties, and preventing parents from harming their children.
Let’s say that I wanted to name my kid חגי, but I wasn’t satisfied with Hagai, because H is not the same as ח; should I be able to insist that the government allow me to legally call him חagai?
When studying language, the sound that ח makes is often rendered as /χ/; can I call my kid /X/agai?
The line has to be drawn somewhere, and I don’t see why including letters that happen to be rendered as English letters with squiggles on them is something we should obviously do, or that we violate rights by not doing it, but including letters that don’t have an English equivalent at all is somehow totally different.
The line has to be drawn somewhere, and I am not persuaded that drawing it to not include either ö or ח is racist but drawing it to include ö but not ח is somehow better.
I went to grade school with a girl named Trudy. This was her legal name. The problem was that this was a Catholic school, and her mother had to fight a constant battle with the nuns who kept insisting that “Trudy” was a nickname, and that her “real name” had to be Gertrude because Catholic children had to be named after a saint.
In my view, it’s no different to restrict the umlauts than it is to require 王涛 to be transliterated into Wang Tao for state record keeping purposes. It’s fundamentally a sort of information management issue- the state can’t really have every possible combination of characters from every language on earth and be able to search, index, sort, etc… all of them reasonably.
So they’ve got to pick one, and they’ve picked American English, because they’re in the US.
(apologies to any Chinese speakers- that’s from Googling, so it may not be perfect).
My son in law is named Bert. Just plain old Bert. But to add confusion to his name, his middle name is Albert. His older brother is name Al, it’s not short for any other name. He doesn’t have a middle name either.
This argument is simply drawing the line at the Roman / Latin alphabet rather than merely the English alphabet. That is, the roughly 26 letters (there’s more than 26 if you count þ etc.) that are used in languages written in scripts derived from Latin.
Hebrew, Korean, and other alphabetic and syllabic scripts not derived from Latin can be excluded on that basis, particularly since there are well-established conventions for transliteration.
Chinese, which isn’t written with an alphabetic or syllabic script, nevertheless has a well-established transliteration.
A no-diacritics system forbids quite traditional anglophone names like Zoë, where the diaeresis is key for the pronunciation.
) I don’t think making you standardize the letters you use to officially enter the name into the system is at all like restricting actual names.