No, it doesn’t. Even if Zoe and Zoë have the same thing on their driver’s license, they can have different names.
Someone earlier mentioned Dan not being short for Daniel. This is because דן is indeed its own name, and it is a different name from Dan-short-for-Daniel. But דן has to write his name as Dan in English, and then explain to people than in fact it is not pronounced Dan, but דן (rhymes with “done”" but the cut to the N is harder)
Right, and why is it appropriate to draw the line at Roman/Latin derived alphabets but not appropriate to draw the line at the English alphabet? Those are both arbitrary lines to draw.
From the perspective of data entry, the line between “English” and “non-English” is far clearer than the line between “Any letter from any Latin-derived language” and “Any letter derived from a language other than Latin”, because English/NonEnglish reflects the reality of the keyboards being used for data entry (and possibly the software handling the data) while Latin/NonLatin is completely arbitrary - if I am doing data entry I will need to use a virtual keyboard or something to type ö just as much as I would need it to type ח.
I think something like two fields, “Traditional Name”, and “Lexicographic Name” would be useful. The traditional name could include letters and characters from any language, while the lexicographic name would be restricted to A-Z*. For people who care about specific spellings, they’d have an official document supporting it. And the government would have a compatible spelling for their databases.
*California driver licenses don’t even allow lower case letters.
I had a class with a kid who, on the first day, was addressed as Jeffery, told the teacher the “ery” was silent. The teacher got po’d at him, because the class all laughed. Jeeze, lady, at least give him props for having a sense of humor. She was not a very good teacher either.
You know the current mayor of San Francisco is London Breed, right?
This actually illustrates a point I want to make. When names first appear, they may seem strange or odd. But over many decades, they may get to the point where they are unremarkable. A good example is the feminine name “Madison”. As you no doubt know, the name was totally made up in the movie “Splash”. Nowadays it is so unremarkable that there have been politicians named Madison, and nobody blinks at the name.
I did not. But thank you. And it was an honor to play straight man for you.
Seriously, I do agree w your second paragraph completely.
I’m gonna switch sides a bit and argue alongside @Babale that the real value to stopping at the (current diacritic-free) English alphabet for US use is the low state of education and literacy in our goofy country.
As to all manner of bureaucracy, consistency is more important than correctness. If we can’t get our great unwashed army of clerks to know about tildes & umlauts and okinas and accents grave and ague, well, there’s a reason “You can’t fight City Hall” is a truism.
This is probably the best option. “Traditional name” allows all of Unicode, and Lexicographic is the official simplification of that to plain old A-Z plus maybe hyphen and apostrophe. Not that these restrictions are solely for computer convenience, but they and their operators are an inevitable part of our modern civilization-scape.
There! now that that’s solved, let’s turn our attention to the varying cultural conventions of given names, surnames, and all the other sorts of names, some of great length & complexity, and how to shoehorn them into databases designed by the ill-informed and operated by the illiterate.
Which is why the French supreme court in that aforementioned case ruled that a kid could officially have a “ñ” in his name (efforts and arguments to the contrary being a transparent attempt to suppress minority languages), and why I brought up Iceland, with its reputedly strict Naming Committee which explicitly does allow foreign names.
Note, incidentally, that Unicode adds new characters and scripts all the time. Chorasmian? No problem. Newly-coined Chinese character? Got you covered. Klingon? Not legit, officially rejected
Some years ago, when I did a name change, I took a family surname as my middle name. In Canada, the accent is allowed, but only coincidentally (because it matches a valid character in French). In the US, there is no consideration. So technically my two passports have two different names. It’s never an issue, as English speakers usually genuinely don’t understand that an accented letter is distinct from a non-accented one, and think of it more as an ornament.
I left that part out for brevity, but yeah. One of the cool thing about Unicode is that it’s constantly expanding as human orthography does. Which of course does require some attention on the part of every software developer & device owner to ensure they stay up to date or somebody’s name is going to look something like
1993 was a dozen generations ago in computer time. Prince had to resort to floppy disks to distribute his symbol. Today it would be a click away from anyone. And 1993 was a dozen generations ago in social terms. Renaming oneself with a symbol only computers could use? So weird that the establishment wondered about his mental state. Today it’s surprising that influencers haven’t jumped on it.
I’m thinking about ѹ, which is my mood most of the time.
I have a good friend named River. When I first met her, the name sounded odd, but now, after knowing her for years, it’s just her name. I think the same is true of any strange name. When you hear it a lot over time, it’s not strange anymore.
And honestly, why not? Why can’t someone just be Bert?
Especially as someone who merely shortened their name to Bert might actually be Bertrand, Albert, Egbert, Englebert, Aethelbert, Robert, Gilbert, Filbert, Wilbert, Osbert, Cuthbert, Hubert, Humbert, Norbert, etc - if ‘Bert’ is short for basically any string containing the sequence b-e-r-t, then it makes sense to me that one of those possible strings should be allowed to be the null case; Bert is short for Bert.
