You really wouldn't want to allow people to register names using any combination of Unicode characters, would you?

Does anyone happen to know what characters are acceptable in UK names? I'm guessing they wouldn't let you register a name consisting of a mixture of Syriac and Ogham characters.

What are the Chinese characters for: "Perfectly sensible name that we can't put here 'cos our computer system's a useless bag of shite".

Seems like a sensible compromise to me.

Reminds me of when "The The" played abroad somewhere (Moscow, IIRC?) that didn't have a single word for "The" in the language. They were billed as "Word that does not translate, word that does not translate".....

Mao Zedong (Wikpedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong contains the chinese characters)

That ought to mess with the Communist party's heads.

Sounds like they've got the two-way sets as featured in Orwell's 1984. That would be a good reason to call the station CCTV.

Perhaps he could change his name to '!' or 'Urinating Dog' as I believe the translation goes in the Forbiddern City.

Given that Birmingham has decided apostrophes are a no-go in street signs (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/30/brum_apostrophe_shocker/), and everyone's complaining about non-phonetic spelling and we can't do it anyway (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/09/spelling_woes/) let's just go the whole hog and abolish all letters entirely. We can make do with numbers. And if we did binary only, that would really keep things simple and then perhaps we could just get Skynet to do it all for us.

11

In the names Dalziel, Culzean and Menzies the z isn't really a z, it stands for a sound not present in the standard Latin alphabet used for English.

Which is why "Dee, yell, Cullyain and Ming-is" as pronounciations confuse folks

Actually, I think it's pretty clear that Jacqui Smith doesn't give a toss who gets shot by accident.

There's a similar problem with people who don't hyphenate double-barrelled names, and the fact that apostrophes screw up email systems and [often badly written] databases. <insert joke about calling your child a database function here>

When you go over to the continent it gets worse too -- then you have the "van de"s and "Van de"s and "Van De"s and those who put it as part of a surname and those who put it as part of the first name; and the letters with umlauts that appear in some places as the accented letter and others with a trailing "e".

Personally, I'm with the Chinese government on this -- the ID you use should conform to the rules of the systems it's used on -- after all it's only your "official name" that goes on it anyhow.

So what if my name was Mr Macclesfield? Would I suddenly become Mr MacClesfield instead, or would there be a permitted list of "Scottish" names?

Things like O'Leary are easy to pick up, though- there's an " O' " which I think is always followed by a capital. Perhaps when entering names into websites the Mac-Whatevers should include an apostrophe prior to capital characters, or the routines that take in the data could add it, allowing software further down the line to properly capitalise names?

@16-bit ASCII AC

Isn't that Unicode you just described?

What with the Olypics and China building shiney glass skyscrapers and every one walking around with the latests mobile phones its easy to forget what a Horrific country China is.

Im off to chance my name to:

0110110000110110010010100101001011001001001100 110101010011001010011100100100100010101001010 C

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/exploits_of_a_mom.png

According to yournotme.com there are already four Gregory Englands in the uk.

"What's so special about checksumming in China...?"

A popular method of checksumming is to weight the digits by place value, and then compute the remainder modulo 11 to append as a check character. This technique reliably catches transposition errors.

If I remember correctly that's how the ISBN checksum is calculated, and it's certainly the way my employer handles my employee ID, although they go one further and map the check character to an alphabetic A-L (omitting I for obvious reasons).

A friend recently had his name changed by deed-pole having had to suffer the humiliation for 38 years of being called John Shit. He complianed for years how the name was the subject of ridicule all through his school/college days and how he has struggled to get anybody to take him seriously.

He can now put his problems behind him having changed his name to.....Alexandros Shit!

I worked for the British Library years ago, and my boss was quite active in the Unicode consortium - because, apparently, chinese authors from a few hundred years ago had a tendency to make up completely new characters for their names (think Prince but more chinese and less purple). All well and good until you come to catalogue them.

Bit different these days - if you want to see software in China it has to support the GB18030 character set, which includes all the simplified/traditional ideographs plus arabic, english, cyrillic and other oddities required for one nation spanning lots of cultures (Yi syllabary, look 'em up). Maybe they just haven't updated their government systems yet...

Oh, I see someone else has already noted that the checksum in an ISBN number can sometimes be an X. Just as the usual casting out nines checksum only has nine possible values, its natural complement, to protect against two digits being swapped, needs eleven values to work.

However I might feel about the policies of the Chinese government, I don't recall anyone ever complaining that they required Tibetans to convert their names to Chinese characters; and, as well, GB18030 includes the Yi Syllabary and Radicals also found in Unicode, so people who aren't Chinese do apparently have the options of recording their names in their own scripts.

"However I love the racist attitude of the Chinese state. What happens to nationalised immigrants? Do they have to change their name too?"

Err - no, they just have to adopt Chinese characters to represent it. Good luck getting your UK driving licence issued in Azeri Cyrillic, though!

However I love the racist attitude of the Chinese state. What happens to nationalised immigrants? Do they have to change their name too?

Cameron Colley - actually, I would rather he kept up his record of having a silly name, rather than adopting my perfectly normal moniker.

xx

or if you prefer

x times x

or

100

or you could call me

C , [since this = 100 like all the above ]

The PSB's representative, Liu Xiqiu, countered that

"X is used to represent the number 10 as a single digit, but it is not part of a name"

"no , but C = 100 and is used as a name" says me." and is part of a name"!

All these issues of foreign names could be resolved quite easily if we just recorded names using the IPA - the International Phonetic Alphabet. You've all seen it - those collections of Roman letters intermingled with squiggly symbols, upside-down e's and a's etc, used to define the pronunciation of each word in every dictionary there is, and it has a symbol for just about every sound that a human being can utter. This way, no matter what sequence of sounds you choose to call your kid, it can be written down in a globally recognisable form and the correct pronunciation is inherent in the record. Then you can write the kid's name in Roman, Cyrillic, Mandarin, Nahuatl or whatever language you please, as long as that language supports the phonemes used.

"Perhaps the Chinese should come up with their version of the ASCII code, with 16-bit length. Instead of 256 characters, you would get 65536 characters, and a hell of compatibility headache. Instead of ASCII code you could call it ROSETTA Code, since it fits all the characters and all of pictograms, of all the languages, both dead and alive, including runic, pre-colombian Maya, and whatever-you-cant-name-due-lack-of-proper-name-in-our-alphabet."

Can't tell if you're joking, but it's called Unicode. And it kind of is a hell of a compatibility headache. They've even (unofficially I think) set aside a portion of the "user defined" area for Klingon.