Bert Albert? That is an utterly brilliant name.
My dad worked with a bloke called Egbert. As a nickname, everybody called him Egbert NoBacon.
Egbert didn’t quite get the joke, however; he always referred to himself as Egbert and NoBacon.
It’s like Bond Jamesbond
I had a boss who’d named her daughter “Madison”. She told me, “But I wasn’t copying all the other Madisons out there. I named her after the mermaid in Splash!” 
I couldn’t even answer her.
Most often when you encounter problems like ‘the system won’t let you have that character in your name’, it’s simply an indication of bad database design, primarily that the designer used ‘name’ as a part of primary key or something - rather than creating a unique and arbitrary identifier for each record - just a serial number - the designer went through a thought process like:
We’ll just use full name as the key. It’s not like there are going to be two people called John Smith…
…what’s that? There are two John Smiths? The name is the primary key and needs to be unique. Can we persuade one of them to change his name to Jack? Or maybe we’ll just call one of them John Smitha and the other John Smithb…
… They didn’t like that? OK, well it’s not easy but I think we can use a compound key by combining full name with date of birth; it’s not as though there are going to be two people named John Smith who were born on the same day!
When they should have just created a meaningless key that uniquely identifies the record. If the person changes their name, the record is still the same record, but people keep being tempted to use a meaningful value for the record ID.
Well, apparently not the builders of our subdivision, which has a number of ponds–one of which is named Sarah’s Pond and one of which is Sallie’s Pond! (Well, it was a farm before, and I suppose it’s possible “Sarah” was the mom and “Sallie” was the daughter, but it still always makes me snicker.)
“Peg” is the only one of those I know. The only Mollies I know have that as their given name. Don’t know any Sallies or Hals. Haven’t even considered “Hal” to be short for anything.
My legal first name is a three letter name that is a common nickname for a variety of other more traditional names. I have several friends that use this name as their name, but for all of them it is a nickname. My parents may have been somewhat limited in their thinking almost 60 years ago. I have had in depth conversation with my mother as to the reasoning, and she consistently has said, she just liked it.
Throughout my adult life, friends assume that my name is a nickname and many of them have attempted nickname me one of the longer more traditional names in an attempt to assume what my “real name” is. I find it humourous.
I have only met one other person whose parents were limited in their thinking similar to mine and has the same legal name as I do.
Thanks. I too was in IT and understand all that, but I’m sure somebody will gain from the further backstory. Dumb DB design is a perennial problem, although (I hope) less common now on greenfield development. But the legacy is out there and it has teeth.
Another factor is simply the widespread existence of legacy stuff. Databases and applications designed in the days of ASCII or EBCDIC that have been patchworked forward into being mostly Unicode capable. (with many tech side-trips and dead ends along the way that us older IT folks recall, but that don’t matter to the general audience here).
So now the systems are sorta-Unicode but with various gaps and bugs and conversions and workarounds that TPTB there decide to paper over with restrictive data entry policies, not with more complete bug fixes or system replacements. Or even simply have policies left over from the earlier restrictive character set era that they’ve never seen fit to relax for fear of exactly how badly their hundreds or thousands of interlocking systems dating from the 60s through to last month will choke on the occasional umlaut or accent grave, much less an ß. So the policy remains out of bureaucratic fear and inertia.
And as commented by somebody upthread, for US use there are a lot of ordinary European names containing characters for which there isn’t a button on the usual US keyboard for them. Companies and especially governments choosing not to bother with them weird furrin things makes a lot of sense for their convenience, albeit not for their customers’.
It’s not that hard to enter ü on a US keyboard once you know how. As in one extra keystroke. Although I’ll note that on basic US Windows out of the box there aren’t OS-wide standard keyboard shortcuts (beyond the stupid-cumbersome Alt and numpad method) although US Office has them OOB. You can enable them in US Windows easily enough, if you want to bother. But of course that introduces other side effects and training requirements.
I’m 99% clueless on the UK standard PC keyboard, nor UK-standard Windows, but a quick glance suggests that OOB it supports the diacritics for Gaelic & Welsh, but not other Euro-languages. So the situation for you folks is akin to the situation for us folks.
I can certainly comprehend, if not fully condone, the e.g. bureau of driver’s / driving licenses / licences choosing to sidestep the whole mess.
All names are shortened versions of Elizabeth.
They might have to settle for “Bort” in novelty license plates.
In the 1950’s, my mother named her first child Deborah and then the last three (including myself) were given three-letter diminutive names. She said it took less time to write them.
That’s the sensible way. This just reminds me of my ranking of names from “nice guy” to “dictator”.
Worst names would be things like Adolph or Karl. We figured the very best, most happy name was “Bob”. “Bob” just makes you smile. You will never see “Bob - the Impaler”.
When I was very young my best friend was named Steve, and it was made clear to me that his name was not Steven (or Stephen), it was Steve. I can’t go back to him now to find out what the real deal was (if it was personal preference or birth certificate official) as I have long since lost contact, but even back then this practice was not unheard of.
How about Bob the Hun?
Actually my dad was a Hal. But it comes with a bit of a backstory. My grandfather was named H.C. - just the initials (why, I don’t have a clue), and when he was drafted into the Army, they basically made him put names on the form- apparently an initial wouldn’t do.
So one of the names he chose was “Hal”, because he apparently knew or had known someone named Hal he admired.
I never found this out until my grandmother was in her 90s- it did explain why she always called him HC, and other people used Hal or HC interchangeably. I had always thought it odd that she called him by his initials, but once I realized that was his actual name, it made sense.
He is a parody. See - people are taking advantage of a nice simple rule.
Fine. However, I have seen names “made up” by the parent(s) that were words already but unknown to the namers. The example that I best remember is Chimera (pronounced shuh mare uh). I really don’t think they would have picked that spelling if they had checked a dictionary first.
Same with my Daddy’s name.
He had to pull out a name to match his initials at induction.
He explained it was because there were so many(13 live births)his Mother just thought it was easier. The oldest was Jr. to his Dad. The girls were named a single first name. (Their maiden name would become the middle name upon marriage)Most just simple everyday names. One Pegalene. I thought was weird. Some odd reason she was called Aunt Lee.
The rest of the boys were initials.
I don’t know if his story is true or they were just recorded as initials for ease.
All the sibs called the boys initials.
JC-PT-RC-RT, the Jr. to Dad was Junior. Weird calling an uncle, Uncle Junior.
My Son-of-a-wrek is junior to his Dad. He is called his Initials. Sometimes when I tease him I call him Junior.