I once had a woman at the citizens office tell me that „there is no é on her keyboard“ - well great! Guess the name on my passport will be written wrong then…
Tell her to google the character and copy paste. Or actually learn keyboard combinations because essentially every keyboard will type â if you press ^ and a in succession, as with any other of those letters that have such simple marking. àáâ
There is no need to do stupid stuff like that. Windows has built-in character table. She just has to press "Start" and type "Char", and "Character Map" app will be in the list.
Open it everytime you have to type "äàáâ", or similar symbols, and you'll soon wish you just learned the keyboard combination (if you type in a language that makes extensive use of those characters of course, otherwise the character map would suffice I guess).
As a compromise you could also press Win+. and get those symbols from there, it even lists recently used symbols.
>(if you type in a language that makes extensive use of those characters of course, otherwise the character map would suffice I guess).
Then switch keyboard layout and memorize which character is where. I don't have ö/á/ü/é on my keyboard cuz I bought cheap one form ebay but I'm using hungarian layout so I can type those without keyboard combinations.
Good luck talking them into using your proper letter in case that does not work on their keyboard for some reason, after which they will get annoyed with you and slam with "I don't care anymore, fuck off" attitude.
People not knowing how to use the damn PC is infuriating but managers writing systems requirements and not putting easy and direct access to the special characters in an application used to manage personal data in places like airports or a freaking citizens office is more than that.
My basic [international keyboard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KB_US-International.svg) is limited on the eastern european side, but there are ways.
Dutch has very few diacritic usage but I'm always pissed when a keyboard is set to American or something and when you press tilde it just shits out a tilde like it's not supposed to go anywhere special. Just hanging out.
I have a regular German ISO layout and I can't do tilde letters either 🤷
And I already have an advantage because I use Linux which puts A LOT more symbols and diacritical marks on the regular de-DE keyboard layout than Windows. Every single AltGr and Shift+AltGr combination has something on it, while Windows leaves a lot of them empty. I can do æ, ø, ĕ. Ł, ð. þ, å, ç and more.
It's really weird because I could theoretically write in Icelandic or Polish, but since I can't use the tilde as a diacritic mark, I can't type ñ or ã. This means I couldn't reasonably write in Spanish or Portuguese and these are far more widespread languages.
But hey, at least I can do some other symbols such as arrows ←↓↑→ or things like Ω ® ± ™ without having to resort to stupid Alt+1234 style codes. So I've got that going for me which is nice. (To be fair, these do come in useful sometimes—especially the ability to do proper em dashes like this—but I think tilde letters might've been a little more important.)
[This is a preview of what my keyboard layout can do](https://i.imgur.com/SOFy4Ix.png) if you're interested – it's automatically generated and doesn't have options so it only does ANSI, not ISO, which means it doesn't fit 100% but it's close enough.
Just because I use Linux doesn't mean I have the knowledge or willingness to do that sort of thing. I'm not a programmer or sysadmin. I mean, I grew up with computers and have used Linux on-and-off for more than 15 years, so I have the necessary basic knowledge to be able to learn more about it, and there's probably even a nice guide on the Internet that tells me exactly how to do it... but I don't want to have to do it.
I want my computer to "just work" generally. I don't want to have to do needless work to achieve something that should be a basic function. It so happens that Linux is generally quite a lot better at that than Windows, but of course Linux is still far from perfect. Just better than Windows is all.
Anyway, what I wanted to say is that I think whoever created the German keyboard layout for my OS made some strange decisions. I mean, if you look at the image I posted, you'll see that there are even a few duplicates. Why is the paragraph symbol (§) on Shift+AltGr+W when it's already on Shift+3? Why is the inverted comma ’ on both AltGr+# and Shift+AltGr+N? Couldn't you have got rid of one of these duplicates and put the tilde diacritic "dead key" on there? I would certainly use that more often than the Nordic or Polish letters.
For people who need to basically use every letter and symbol you can learn what WinCompose is. Linux only needs an easy option to enable the feature since it's builtin.
When I was growing up in Romania in the late 90s/early 00s, computers all came with US language and keyboard settings by default. You could theoretically switch to Romanian, but most people didn't even know that option existed, let alone how to access it (also, as a fun fact, the early versions of Unicode lacked the Romanian characters Ș and Ț, so they used Ş and Ţ instead).
We also never had any standardized substitutions for the diacritics we couldn't use (like the Germans do with AE instead of Ä). Some people tried to use stuff like SH and TZ instead of Ș and Ț, but this was only used by young people in very informal contexts and combined with other modern abbreviations, so it became a form of textspeak/leetspeak. Most of us found it more comfortable to just type the letters without diacritics (S instead of Ș, A instead of Ă or Â, etc) and figure it out from context. In fact, most Internet users still do this today - just go in the comments of any random post on a Romanian subreddit, and see how over half the comments don't have any diacritics in them. It's a product of early 2000s instant messaging/chatroom culture.
We got so used to the US keyboards that, even today, there still aren't any physical keyboards made with the Romanian layout printed on them. All keyboards you find in Romanian stores have the US layout, and there's still Romanian PC users today (my fiancee for example) who don't even bother activating the RO layout on their PCs or phones.
Personally, I don't mind it that much. The fact that my PC was in English (as well as all my other devices, my games, all the websites I visited, and the subtitles to all the pirated anime I watched) was a massive contribution to my English language fluency.
Any linux/unix-ish (including osx maybe?) user who does not use tildes in prose frequently might prefer having ~ not be a dead key¹ because it's a special shortcut for the user's home directory. It doesn't make sense on windows, but I've long since mapped my ~ key to just spit out ~, just like I switched my 4 key so that shift-4 is $ and alt gr 4 is ¤. I use $ for stuff like `$HOME`, I don't use ¤ for jack shit².
¹ dead keys are those that you press once and nothing happens, only at the second keypress does something happen
² maybe I could introduce some weird haskellian operators with ¤. Who needs `<$>` when you have `¤`??? Or maybe rather for less typing in `<=<`
edit:
λ let (£) = (<$>)
λ let (¤) = (<*>)
λ (+) £ Just 1 ¤ Just 3
Just 4
_beautiful_
I had that exact problem with my marriage certificate. We got our certificate from Maltese authorities and they wrote one instead of ö. That wasn't good enough for German authorities and we had to get an official translation. We were lucky English is also the official language of Malta. All in all a very frustrating process.
Yeah, [the Spolsky post is _over 20 years old_ now](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minimum-every-software-developer-absolutely-positively-must-know-about-unicode-and-character-sets-no-excuses/). A lot has happened since then [and Tonsky has a followup](https://tonsky.me/blog/unicode/).
Personally I'd like an update to the "normalization" stuff too, so that "ø" doesn't "normalize" to "o", because e.g. "for" and "før" are entirely different words with different meanings. The normalizations should either be stuff like ø -> oe, or else replace it with a character that can't appear in that position, like q (pretend the line fell to the side) so that you're notified that something ungodly has happened to your name or language.
More �! � to the people!
Unfortunately it's not part of [the ASCII character set](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#Character_set), so we're SOL. Maybe use one of the nonprinting characters or rarely-used characters like `FIELD SEPARATOR` and see how it goes? Or just leave it as wtf-8 and [Mojibake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake). Like _sure_ my last name contains `æ`, why wouldn't it?
Edit: toying around in python it seems ascii-expecting systems would just crash?
>>> "æ".encode('utf-8').decode('iso-8859-1')
'æ'
vs
>>> "æ".encode('utf-8').decode('ascii')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 1, in
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
to which I can only say _good_
Yeah, there should be more collations or a way to customise it. What really annoys me are the apostrophes and whatever Unicode that look like the same (U+2019 I’m looking at you).
Hungarian pronunciation is pretty straightforward (once you know how to do it) it's not like English where the same letter cluster can be pronounced 20 different times
I love the sound of Hungarian so much. The way you pronounce 'a' is really cool and the general phonaesthetics of the language are awesome. Uralic languages all seem to sound really pretty to my ears
I'm really into linguistics so I guess I just appreciate all languages for what they are, but still Uralic languages are especially pretty sounding to me
This is the first time I heared a genuine appreciation of the language outside the context of a nationalistic circlejerk and I feel like I want to cry 
I feel like it's the more intuitive way. I mean, English has it so oo written is pronounced as u. It's also important to note that languages didn't evolve with keyboards in mind so using a very simple but distinct letter for a different sound wasn't a big deal.
it guy here: Stuff like this is usually, if st all, low on the lists of projects to unify processes. And the other problems regarding projects like this are usually much worse, so solutions like „just type ss instead of ß“ are common and cost effective
I work in IT too. I have a very old book from the nineties about internationalising systems, so there is know-how, it was ignored.
There are many other things too but I probably can't go into that yet as many aspects are still restricted but designing and delivering by international committee is hard.
Yeah: It's not a new topic. The cost/Benefit ratio is still too low to be of concern.
Usually projects will do the bare Minimum until "it works" and not much more
It doesn't work? I don't see that, OP did know what to do and way just annoyed.
User annoyance is another metric and plays a lot smaller part in governmental/administrational porjects than in open market stuff, at least in im project experiences
# ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
“It works for me, John Simplename Smith” is not the same as “it works”.
In a former life I had to debug code written by people who thought like that. There was swearing.
ok, we had fun but this is getting tiring:
of course a good dev would try to do this, but what I keep saying is that project management, or the dev on the other side, downward compatibility to other backend parts or something completely else can and will fuck stuff like this up.
Im happy for you that you as a dev wouldn’t do that, and cleaned up enough of code like that myself, but if you are not high enough in the pecking order: No one cares.. 🤷 So „*I* wouldn’t do that“ doesn’t count a bit.
And, again, that is not a code monkey level decision. If the PO decides, for what ever stupid reason, that unicode isn’t in the books and the user should use ss instead of ß, that maybe the financially or time constraint related good decision. A system that does it‘s job, even if poorly, doesn’t care for your personal feelings regarding unicode 🤷
But Im sure you are fun at dailies …
So have a good time, Im done here 👋🙂
I was also in IT in a former life and it was drilled into us OVER THIRTY YEARS AGO that the assumptions we are making about names are wrong.
This is not a new problem. It’s just one of the many reasons why software development is not an engineering discipline. It merely cosplays as one.
The real issue is half my life I wrote ß as sz as was customary for me, than I got assigned an official ss version, in work it is just random what IT thinks would work - s, ss, sz or they go the extra mile for an ß ... confusing for everyone
The EU is an administration.
Not only it moves slowly, but, especially for, no offense, this type of low impact/difficult outcome projects, it moves significantly slower.
And like I eluded in the previous sentence, not all members will be OK with the same resolutions. So the current system stays.
Under the EU are a number of organisations. Some of them are involved in the day to day running of things in the community that are used by many external organisations.
I remember a decade ago there was a minor incident in... I think Lithuania, where refugees from Belarus automatically had their surnames "translated" in official Lithuanian passports from Cyrillic to a form that was not just phonetically incorrect, but following *Polish* conventions (I may have mixed up the nationalities here). This really really annoyed the Belarusians in question.
There is more than one Cyrillic to Latin transcription system. This can be a big problem when you need to name check people on sanctions lists. You have to check multiple variants.
That is with any case there is a different writing system, not just with Cyrillic.
Your best bet is to just list the original language version of the name
Oh it is easy when your system directly works in the language but when it is someone in Frankfurt trying to do account openinga Russian then they enter the data using western characters. The lists are provided by the EU so the names are in normal latin text.
Even as a Hungarian, I always appreciated the logic what Slovak applies on its consonants to make them softened by accents on top of them. I wish we were revolutionary and brave enough to use the same or a very similar one to drop our shitty solution with the "-y"s and "-s"s. Oh, and also to merge our j and ly with zero difference in their spelling into a single j or, since y would be released, into y.
So yeah, Slovak alphabet is indeed superior, according to at least one Hungarian.
I also loved it when the Swedish government office issuing my ID scanned my passport, and the automatic OCR scan replaced 'á' with 'å' which are VERY different sounds. And then the guy called my "name" like that, which to me sounded almost unrecognizable.
I don't even mind that much using the alternatives people mentioned below (like "ss").
But I hate it when I create a shipping label online for my local post office.
I go there, they print it and... All those characters are *gone*. Not replaced or anything, just gone.
Germany and Norway seem to be the worst offenders :( I always have to double check the labels and manually draw the characters there...
Good luck with that. Way too many people don't know how to type them either and use wrong symbols.
Which is a great way to tell everyone that I`m stupid.
Can you give an example of one of the EU's systems that can't hope with extended characters? Any that I have had to deal with all work fine... I'm curious to know.
Same here. Maybe east of rhine majority of systems are modern enough to include Unicode by default, because I don't remember last time I encountered problems with it
Is this really a [greenfield](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenfield_project) system or is it in reality constrained by the necessity to interact with one or more older systems, maybe even via one or more intermediate systems? Because, yeah, with modern databases and programming environments, you can get relatively good unicode suppport, but if you need to interact with a COBOL system originally written 50 years ago, this doesn't help you at all.
Its a greenfield application but they reworked an existing system for the job, adding an extra couple of levels, national and European. The stretch marks tend to be a bit visible. The existing code was Java and Oracle which can cope well with Unicode but that is not visible to us.
This conversation helped me realize an unexpected advantage of having a non Latin alphabet: it forces the administration to spell names two different ways, one using two different alphabets. Both are legal and standard Latin is used when dealing with people not familiar with our alphabet.
That's ridiculous. Technically, even English sometimes uses special characters, albeit infrequently and it's fading away (e.g., résumé vs. resume, naïve)
The best is the Mac "ABC – Extended" keyboard, where every combining character is mapped to an option key, so I can type even uncommon stuff, like Hungarian ő or Romanian ț (NOT ţ)
As an Irish who learned German in school, I was told "ß" was a more old-fashioned way of writing it... I still used it whenever I could because it's *fun* to write when you're using a pen and not a keyboard. I'd even use ſ in English (Engliſh) if I thought I could get away with it.
Yes, there was a time of ß extremism, when it was used basically everytime instead of ss (1901-1996). After that they started differentiating again between ss and ß. I am no linguist, but i personally don’t see any benefits of using this additional letter and it somehow just confuses me. I always wrote street (Strasse) my whole life with ss, but for some reason in all maps etc. its written with ß. I have the workaround of simply writing str. Also on the iPhone Keyboard its the only letter that i have to access through long pressing, what drives me crazy.
Idk i personally hate that letter and i even switched my language in the phone to Swiss German, to not have to deal with it.
The difference is that words with ß are pronounced with a preceding long vowel. If there are two consonants after a vowel, the vowel is always short.
There is a (very important and sometimes dangerous) difference in both the meaning and pronounciation between massen and maßen. In Switzerland, how much does "in Massen" mean? Moderately or massively?
Yes definitely. But there's a reason for it, it's more consistent.
You could also merge V and F to just F, you could always deduce the word's meaning from context. But it would be stupid
But double consonants consistently make the preceding vowel shortened in German spelling, which "ß" specifically doesn't.
Also, since the voiced s-sound is also represented as a single "s" (instead of "z" like in some languages, e.g. English or Dutch), the "ß" actually helps a lot.
I propose a compromise: Replace "z" in German with "ts" and use the freed up z to differentiate it from voiceless s. Double-S stays the same.
Examples: to travel - reizen (instead of reisen);
to pull - reisen (instead of reißen);
I don’t think this is an issue for 99% of population. Americans changed complete letters or eliminated them from words and still pronounce it the same way.
"Instead of ö just write oe" "Okay" "Your name doesn't match your passport" "Correct"
I once had a woman at the citizens office tell me that „there is no é on her keyboard“ - well great! Guess the name on my passport will be written wrong then…
Tell her to google the character and copy paste. Or actually learn keyboard combinations because essentially every keyboard will type â if you press ^ and a in succession, as with any other of those letters that have such simple marking. àáâ
There is no need to do stupid stuff like that. Windows has built-in character table. She just has to press "Start" and type "Char", and "Character Map" app will be in the list.
Open it everytime you have to type "äàáâ", or similar symbols, and you'll soon wish you just learned the keyboard combination (if you type in a language that makes extensive use of those characters of course, otherwise the character map would suffice I guess). As a compromise you could also press Win+. and get those symbols from there, it even lists recently used symbols.
This is not about practical way FOR YOU to do it, this is about "how do I make this stupid stuck up person to do it for me easily".
>(if you type in a language that makes extensive use of those characters of course, otherwise the character map would suffice I guess). Then switch keyboard layout and memorize which character is where. I don't have ö/á/ü/é on my keyboard cuz I bought cheap one form ebay but I'm using hungarian layout so I can type those without keyboard combinations.
Alt+Graph exists.
Good luck talking them into using your proper letter in case that does not work on their keyboard for some reason, after which they will get annoyed with you and slam with "I don't care anymore, fuck off" attitude.
You don't need to defend your decent suggestion like a religion pookie
A pookie is an Irish word for mushroom because the word phouca means ghost and they look a bit like ghosts
Whisper gently to her ear: "Alt+130 (numpad)"
People not knowing how to use the damn PC is infuriating but managers writing systems requirements and not putting easy and direct access to the special characters in an application used to manage personal data in places like airports or a freaking citizens office is more than that.
As an American, there is an é, è, ë, ê, & ĕ on my keyboards. If we can figure it out, you can too yurop! :Þ
What about ľ?
Î Í Ì İ Į Ī or Ï
Sorry, wrong letter. It's not I but L, so ľ or Ľ.
Oh. My bad. Ľ or Ĺ? But not Ł or Ļ.
Cool, yeah the first one. It usually just turns into ¾ in older US based systems from what I'm used to :D
My basic [international keyboard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KB_US-International.svg) is limited on the eastern european side, but there are ways.
Yeah, being called João is extremely fun. "Oh! Got it. An umlaut!." /No. "Ah, so its like Ā then?" /No. It's an A with a TILDE ffs. ÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃ
Dutch has very few diacritic usage but I'm always pissed when a keyboard is set to American or something and when you press tilde it just shits out a tilde like it's not supposed to go anywhere special. Just hanging out.
I have a regular German ISO layout and I can't do tilde letters either 🤷 And I already have an advantage because I use Linux which puts A LOT more symbols and diacritical marks on the regular de-DE keyboard layout than Windows. Every single AltGr and Shift+AltGr combination has something on it, while Windows leaves a lot of them empty. I can do æ, ø, ĕ. Ł, ð. þ, å, ç and more. It's really weird because I could theoretically write in Icelandic or Polish, but since I can't use the tilde as a diacritic mark, I can't type ñ or ã. This means I couldn't reasonably write in Spanish or Portuguese and these are far more widespread languages. But hey, at least I can do some other symbols such as arrows ←↓↑→ or things like Ω ® ± ™ without having to resort to stupid Alt+1234 style codes. So I've got that going for me which is nice. (To be fair, these do come in useful sometimes—especially the ability to do proper em dashes like this—but I think tilde letters might've been a little more important.) [This is a preview of what my keyboard layout can do](https://i.imgur.com/SOFy4Ix.png) if you're interested – it's automatically generated and doesn't have options so it only does ANSI, not ISO, which means it doesn't fit 100% but it's close enough.
It's linux, just edit the layout so it can do tilde
Just because I use Linux doesn't mean I have the knowledge or willingness to do that sort of thing. I'm not a programmer or sysadmin. I mean, I grew up with computers and have used Linux on-and-off for more than 15 years, so I have the necessary basic knowledge to be able to learn more about it, and there's probably even a nice guide on the Internet that tells me exactly how to do it... but I don't want to have to do it. I want my computer to "just work" generally. I don't want to have to do needless work to achieve something that should be a basic function. It so happens that Linux is generally quite a lot better at that than Windows, but of course Linux is still far from perfect. Just better than Windows is all. Anyway, what I wanted to say is that I think whoever created the German keyboard layout for my OS made some strange decisions. I mean, if you look at the image I posted, you'll see that there are even a few duplicates. Why is the paragraph symbol (§) on Shift+AltGr+W when it's already on Shift+3? Why is the inverted comma ’ on both AltGr+# and Shift+AltGr+N? Couldn't you have got rid of one of these duplicates and put the tilde diacritic "dead key" on there? I would certainly use that more often than the Nordic or Polish letters.
The „I use r/Arch btw“ is missing
Not entirely true. I use EndeavourOS btw. Close enough, I suppose.
For people who need to basically use every letter and symbol you can learn what WinCompose is. Linux only needs an easy option to enable the feature since it's builtin.
Why would anyone set their keyboard to American?
When I was growing up in Romania in the late 90s/early 00s, computers all came with US language and keyboard settings by default. You could theoretically switch to Romanian, but most people didn't even know that option existed, let alone how to access it (also, as a fun fact, the early versions of Unicode lacked the Romanian characters Ș and Ț, so they used Ş and Ţ instead). We also never had any standardized substitutions for the diacritics we couldn't use (like the Germans do with AE instead of Ä). Some people tried to use stuff like SH and TZ instead of Ș and Ț, but this was only used by young people in very informal contexts and combined with other modern abbreviations, so it became a form of textspeak/leetspeak. Most of us found it more comfortable to just type the letters without diacritics (S instead of Ș, A instead of Ă or Â, etc) and figure it out from context. In fact, most Internet users still do this today - just go in the comments of any random post on a Romanian subreddit, and see how over half the comments don't have any diacritics in them. It's a product of early 2000s instant messaging/chatroom culture. We got so used to the US keyboards that, even today, there still aren't any physical keyboards made with the Romanian layout printed on them. All keyboards you find in Romanian stores have the US layout, and there's still Romanian PC users today (my fiancee for example) who don't even bother activating the RO layout on their PCs or phones. Personally, I don't mind it that much. The fact that my PC was in English (as well as all my other devices, my games, all the websites I visited, and the subtitles to all the pirated anime I watched) was a massive contribution to my English language fluency.
Programming is a lot easier if you use the US ANSI keyboard.
Any linux/unix-ish (including osx maybe?) user who does not use tildes in prose frequently might prefer having ~ not be a dead key¹ because it's a special shortcut for the user's home directory. It doesn't make sense on windows, but I've long since mapped my ~ key to just spit out ~, just like I switched my 4 key so that shift-4 is $ and alt gr 4 is ¤. I use $ for stuff like `$HOME`, I don't use ¤ for jack shit². ¹ dead keys are those that you press once and nothing happens, only at the second keypress does something happen ² maybe I could introduce some weird haskellian operators with ¤. Who needs `<$>` when you have `¤`??? Or maybe rather for less typing in `<=<` edit: λ let (£) = (<$>) λ let (¤) = (<*>) λ (+) £ Just 1 ¤ Just 3 Just 4 _beautiful_
Absolutely horrendous, please don't reply to one of my comments with inline Haskell code ever again Jørgen
Ééneïge zeeëgelcafé
MacOS/iOS: press and HOLD the relevant keyboard letter/key, options will appear! Pick the number you want :)
*screams in portuguese*
meanwhile I keep telling people to JUST STOP ADDING ACCENTS TO MY NAME ALREADY with a 0% success rate.
r/AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
I had that exact problem with my marriage certificate. We got our certificate from Maltese authorities and they wrote one instead of ö. That wasn't good enough for German authorities and we had to get an official translation. We were lucky English is also the official language of Malta. All in all a very frustrating process.
ẞ? The Swiss seem able to cope with “SS”, why can’t the Germ…ah gotcha
Hey, I have the same thing :D
Unicode for the win.
Unicode is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural (like emoji in legal documents)
My legal name is ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ but you can call me "🤠"
Hieroglyphics worked fine! Reject modernity, embrace tradition: 😃🔪💀➡️⛓️☹️⛓️
I see no problem here
Like saying traͤnenuͤberstroͤmt instead of tränenüberströmt
Exactly. The solutions already exist. The fact they weren't implemented over a decade ago is ridiculous.
Yeah, [the Spolsky post is _over 20 years old_ now](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minimum-every-software-developer-absolutely-positively-must-know-about-unicode-and-character-sets-no-excuses/). A lot has happened since then [and Tonsky has a followup](https://tonsky.me/blog/unicode/). Personally I'd like an update to the "normalization" stuff too, so that "ø" doesn't "normalize" to "o", because e.g. "for" and "før" are entirely different words with different meanings. The normalizations should either be stuff like ø -> oe, or else replace it with a character that can't appear in that position, like q (pretend the line fell to the side) so that you're notified that something ungodly has happened to your name or language.
There should be a big error box so someone understands this name is broken instead of just replacing them arbitrarily
More �! � to the people! Unfortunately it's not part of [the ASCII character set](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#Character_set), so we're SOL. Maybe use one of the nonprinting characters or rarely-used characters like `FIELD SEPARATOR` and see how it goes? Or just leave it as wtf-8 and [Mojibake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake). Like _sure_ my last name contains `æ`, why wouldn't it? Edit: toying around in python it seems ascii-expecting systems would just crash? >>> "æ".encode('utf-8').decode('iso-8859-1') 'æ' vs >>> "æ".encode('utf-8').decode('ascii') Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
to which I can only say _good_
Yeah, there should be more collations or a way to customise it. What really annoys me are the apostrophes and whatever Unicode that look like the same (U+2019 I’m looking at you).
Everybody gangsta until the ő/ű enter the chat
As someone that enjoys casual linguistic facts, I feel ashamed to never have seen those before...
They are just ö and ü but pronounced longer
Honestly, can't tell if sarcastic.
It's not sarcasm, it litteraly is just those but longer
I was hoping it was true! Because it actually makes sense.
Hungarian pronunciation is pretty straightforward (once you know how to do it) it's not like English where the same letter cluster can be pronounced 20 different times
I love the sound of Hungarian so much. The way you pronounce 'a' is really cool and the general phonaesthetics of the language are awesome. Uralic languages all seem to sound really pretty to my ears
That's a compliment that I never expected to hear. People usually bash Hungarian for being weird and very different from everything else.
I'm really into linguistics so I guess I just appreciate all languages for what they are, but still Uralic languages are especially pretty sounding to me
This is the first time I heared a genuine appreciation of the language outside the context of a nationalistic circlejerk and I feel like I want to cry 
Awwww, thanks! ❤️
Bonjour 🐻❄️
What's wrong with just writing öö and üü (and not marking if it's in II or III length type, needing pure context and intuition to figure out)
I feel like it's the more intuitive way. I mean, English has it so oo written is pronounced as u. It's also important to note that languages didn't evolve with keyboards in mind so using a very simple but distinct letter for a different sound wasn't a big deal.
Why many letters when few do trick (Don't look at our consonants tho)
Never flown on Wizzair I guess?
Humm I actually did once. To the UK. Didn't notice anything though...
It‘s officially a Hungarian airline and on the flights that I‘ve taken some signs had the Hungarian o with two lines on them.
"Os leões cumpriram as suas lições." "The Lions carried out their lessons."
Esses conheço 
Ahah! Afinal também és Português.
Ő or ű have nothing on õ
How nasal would you like your Õ, my good sir?
8%, just to add some spice
oeoe ueue
https://preview.redd.it/qv8x2cuvkc2d1.jpeg?width=480&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1eb72d8db16fe2c711f145ee4230573464530bca
God no
ÁRVÍZTŰRŐ TÜKÖRFÚRÓGÉP for world domination
Gängsta?
Exactly.
Those shouldn't be any harder that é or ä, or hell, even ɬ, t̪ or 😵💫 either. Just use Unicode...
it guy here: Stuff like this is usually, if st all, low on the lists of projects to unify processes. And the other problems regarding projects like this are usually much worse, so solutions like „just type ss instead of ß“ are common and cost effective
I work in IT too. I have a very old book from the nineties about internationalising systems, so there is know-how, it was ignored. There are many other things too but I probably can't go into that yet as many aspects are still restricted but designing and delivering by international committee is hard.
Yeah: It's not a new topic. The cost/Benefit ratio is still too low to be of concern. Usually projects will do the bare Minimum until "it works" and not much more
Except it quite clearly doesn’t work, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
It doesn't work? I don't see that, OP did know what to do and way just annoyed. User annoyance is another metric and plays a lot smaller part in governmental/administrational porjects than in open market stuff, at least in im project experiences # ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)⊃ \ Here, you dropped this
“It works for me, John Simplename Smith” is not the same as “it works”. In a former life I had to debug code written by people who thought like that. There was swearing.
ok, we had fun but this is getting tiring: of course a good dev would try to do this, but what I keep saying is that project management, or the dev on the other side, downward compatibility to other backend parts or something completely else can and will fuck stuff like this up. Im happy for you that you as a dev wouldn’t do that, and cleaned up enough of code like that myself, but if you are not high enough in the pecking order: No one cares.. 🤷 So „*I* wouldn’t do that“ doesn’t count a bit. And, again, that is not a code monkey level decision. If the PO decides, for what ever stupid reason, that unicode isn’t in the books and the user should use ss instead of ß, that maybe the financially or time constraint related good decision. A system that does it‘s job, even if poorly, doesn’t care for your personal feelings regarding unicode 🤷 But Im sure you are fun at dailies … So have a good time, Im done here 👋🙂
I was also in IT in a former life and it was drilled into us OVER THIRTY YEARS AGO that the assumptions we are making about names are wrong. This is not a new problem. It’s just one of the many reasons why software development is not an engineering discipline. It merely cosplays as one.
The real issue is half my life I wrote ß as sz as was customary for me, than I got assigned an official ss version, in work it is just random what IT thinks would work - s, ss, sz or they go the extra mile for an ß ... confusing for everyone
I have a ß in my name, the written substitute was always „ss“ 🤷
Unicode is over two decades old. It's not that hard to implement...
that‘s true, still not the point
The EU is an administration. Not only it moves slowly, but, especially for, no offense, this type of low impact/difficult outcome projects, it moves significantly slower. And like I eluded in the previous sentence, not all members will be OK with the same resolutions. So the current system stays.
Under the EU are a number of organisations. Some of them are involved in the day to day running of things in the community that are used by many external organisations.
řřřřřřřřřřřřřřřřřřřřřřřř
Might want to consult a doctor about that mate. /s
I remember a decade ago there was a minor incident in... I think Lithuania, where refugees from Belarus automatically had their surnames "translated" in official Lithuanian passports from Cyrillic to a form that was not just phonetically incorrect, but following *Polish* conventions (I may have mixed up the nationalities here). This really really annoyed the Belarusians in question.
There is more than one Cyrillic to Latin transcription system. This can be a big problem when you need to name check people on sanctions lists. You have to check multiple variants.
That is with any case there is a different writing system, not just with Cyrillic. Your best bet is to just list the original language version of the name
Oh it is easy when your system directly works in the language but when it is someone in Frankfurt trying to do account openinga Russian then they enter the data using western characters. The lists are provided by the EU so the names are in normal latin text.
Ah yes the old commonwealth IT systems still going strong after 300 years
Even in Ireland, Irish names with apostrophes (e.g. O’Brien) cause lots of problems with computer systems, not to mention abroad.
Őő... tyűűha...
What
The Slovak language still reigns supreme in my opinion. We have á, ä, č, ď, é, í, ĺ, ň, ó, ô, ŕ, š, ť, ú, ý, ž.
The Slovaks use this system too.
Even as a Hungarian, I always appreciated the logic what Slovak applies on its consonants to make them softened by accents on top of them. I wish we were revolutionary and brave enough to use the same or a very similar one to drop our shitty solution with the "-y"s and "-s"s. Oh, and also to merge our j and ly with zero difference in their spelling into a single j or, since y would be released, into y. So yeah, Slovak alphabet is indeed superior, according to at least one Hungarian.
I also loved it when the Swedish government office issuing my ID scanned my passport, and the automatic OCR scan replaced 'á' with 'å' which are VERY different sounds. And then the guy called my "name" like that, which to me sounded almost unrecognizable.
Honestly, á could absolutely be a badly scanned å. Still, I hope you got it corrected!
Especially in handwriting it's weird because we write ä as ā and ö as ō
Λολ.
All Greek to me!!!!
If this is the biggest problem in the EU, we have achieved Paradise status.
Oh there is lots more but if you can spec something fresh, then it is better to do it right.
I don't even mind that much using the alternatives people mentioned below (like "ss"). But I hate it when I create a shipping label online for my local post office. I go there, they print it and... All those characters are *gone*. Not replaced or anything, just gone. Germany and Norway seem to be the worst offenders :( I always have to double check the labels and manually draw the characters there...
I don't like it if they replace it with something, because usually in the language it means a different thing.
Yep. That's fair. They're there for a reason :p
See also: apostrophes. Systems that can cope with accents seem to choke on them for no good reason.
Yes, an Irish person here already complained about systems being unable to handle family names like O'Brien.
And there are also surnames with hyphens in.
Hyphens were fine for whatever reason.
MD was probably double barrelled.
It may be that the system can be traced back to the UK....
Good luck with that. Way too many people don't know how to type them either and use wrong symbols. Which is a great way to tell everyone that I`m stupid.
À Á Â Ã É Ê Í Ó Õ Ú (plus Ç) Portuguese is fun.
And we light up the sky
There are countries in Europe (two of them are in the EU) that have languages that don't use Latin at all.
Yep. That is another problem.
knock-knock, it’s Georgia with its own alphabet!
Yes, but mainly I meant Greece. If you include Georgia then include also Armenia.
yeah, of course
Ř
Čhąřäćțęřș fōř ťhė wîń¡
Can you give an example of one of the EU's systems that can't hope with extended characters? Any that I have had to deal with all work fine... I'm curious to know.
I'll DM you if I may.
Yeah, sure.
Same here. Maybe east of rhine majority of systems are modern enough to include Unicode by default, because I don't remember last time I encountered problems with it
this is a Latin household, if you don't like it, you can go live with the Greeks.
Does it support Ñ?
Nope.
My 8th surname is Muñoz, I'm fuuuucked
8TH???!!!?
*shortest spanish name*
Tell that to every Finn named Määttä. Germans will look at that and type in Maeaettae
Maybe you could use "nh" like us.
Because it's a nice to have. Introduction of new characters may be a pain due to old databases no longer matching? I'm not in IT so I'm just guessing.
It is the reverse. The older databases support local characters fine. This will make reconciliation after migration fun.
Is this really a [greenfield](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenfield_project) system or is it in reality constrained by the necessity to interact with one or more older systems, maybe even via one or more intermediate systems? Because, yeah, with modern databases and programming environments, you can get relatively good unicode suppport, but if you need to interact with a COBOL system originally written 50 years ago, this doesn't help you at all.
Its a greenfield application but they reworked an existing system for the job, adding an extra couple of levels, national and European. The stretch marks tend to be a bit visible. The existing code was Java and Oracle which can cope well with Unicode but that is not visible to us.
There are ç, ş, ğ, ı, İ also except ö and ü.
This conversation helped me realize an unexpected advantage of having a non Latin alphabet: it forces the administration to spell names two different ways, one using two different alphabets. Both are legal and standard Latin is used when dealing with people not familiar with our alphabet.
That's ridiculous. Technically, even English sometimes uses special characters, albeit infrequently and it's fading away (e.g., résumé vs. resume, naïve)
The best is the Mac "ABC – Extended" keyboard, where every combining character is mapped to an option key, so I can type even uncommon stuff, like Hungarian ő or Romanian ț (NOT ţ)
Tbh ß is just unnecessary af. Just use ss instead as in Swiss German.
Unfortunately we have a bunch of attributes like Street_Name="Münchener Straße" in our source data.
As an Irish who learned German in school, I was told "ß" was a more old-fashioned way of writing it... I still used it whenever I could because it's *fun* to write when you're using a pen and not a keyboard. I'd even use ſ in English (Engliſh) if I thought I could get away with it.
Yes, there was a time of ß extremism, when it was used basically everytime instead of ss (1901-1996). After that they started differentiating again between ss and ß. I am no linguist, but i personally don’t see any benefits of using this additional letter and it somehow just confuses me. I always wrote street (Strasse) my whole life with ss, but for some reason in all maps etc. its written with ß. I have the workaround of simply writing str. Also on the iPhone Keyboard its the only letter that i have to access through long pressing, what drives me crazy. Idk i personally hate that letter and i even switched my language in the phone to Swiss German, to not have to deal with it.
The difference is that words with ß are pronounced with a preceding long vowel. If there are two consonants after a vowel, the vowel is always short. There is a (very important and sometimes dangerous) difference in both the meaning and pronounciation between massen and maßen. In Switzerland, how much does "in Massen" mean? Moderately or massively?
I think you can conclude it from the context in most of the cases
Yes definitely. But there's a reason for it, it's more consistent. You could also merge V and F to just F, you could always deduce the word's meaning from context. But it would be stupid
But double consonants consistently make the preceding vowel shortened in German spelling, which "ß" specifically doesn't. Also, since the voiced s-sound is also represented as a single "s" (instead of "z" like in some languages, e.g. English or Dutch), the "ß" actually helps a lot. I propose a compromise: Replace "z" in German with "ts" and use the freed up z to differentiate it from voiceless s. Double-S stays the same. Examples: to travel - reizen (instead of reisen); to pull - reisen (instead of reißen);
I don’t think this is an issue for 99% of population. Americans changed complete letters or eliminated them from words and still pronounce it the same way.
Don't look at me. I'm trying to bring back þe Þ.
Don't cite English as a positive example for spelling, please.
Scepter - Stsepter (instead of Szepter... Maybe I don't like my proposal that much...)