Comment by jake_morrison
4 years ago
In the 90s I worked on a project to digitize land registration in Taiwan.
In order to record deeds and property transfers, we needed to enter people's names and official registered addresses into the computer system. The problem was that some people used non-traditional writing variants for their names, and some of their birthplaces were tiny places in China with weird names.
Someone might write their name with a two-dot water radical instead of three-dot radical. We would print it out in the normal font, and the people would lose their minds, saying that it was wrong. Chinese people can be superstitious about the number of strokes in their name, so adding a stroke might make it unlucky, so they would not buy the property.
The customer went to the agency responsible for managing the big character set, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNS_11643 Despite having more characters than anything else on earth, it didn't have those variants. The agency said they would not encode them, because they were not real characters, just printing differences.
The solution was for the staff in the office to use a "font maker" program to create a custom font with these characters. Then they could print out the deeds using a Chinese variant of Adobe Acrobat, and everyone was happy.
That's a great story. The inability to represent a name with standard characters reminds me of when Prince changed his name to a symbol and they had to send all of the media floppy disks containing a custom font with a single character.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/04/princes-legendary-fl...
Are you acquainted with Freur (which means, "Underworld 0.5" - Rick Smith and Karl Hyde in the '80s)?
"Freur", or, "The squiggle we chose as the name for a band but that CBS Records insisted should at least have a pronunciation".
I see it is not in Unicode (well, you can never really know if you do not try), nor I can find pieces to reconstruct it.
The "freur" in foreground: https://d4q8jbdc3dbnf.cloudfront.net/user/6885/edb290c6183ac...
Yikes. If somebody hasn’t written a “falsehoods programmers believe about human writing systems” document this would make for a good start.
It deserves its own entry in "falsehoods programmers believe about names" lists too.
It's already there, #11 "People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points."
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"If the character isn't in Unicode it's in CNS-11643" apparently is also false.
I've been told that this is also an issue in Japan, except the reason might more often be a matter of pride than superstition. It is supposedly one reason (of a few) why fax machines are still in common use in Japan.
Later versions of Unicode support "Variation Forms" of Han characters as a way to be able to encode different variations. They are encoded as a Variation Selector code (U+E01000 and up) after the Han character. The forms are listed separate from Unicode versions in the "Ideographic Variation Database" <https://www.unicode.org/ivd/>. So far, it contains characters from a couple of Japanese dictionaries, a Korean and one from Macao/Hong Kong.
I knew someone who added an accent character to their name because everyone pronounced it wrong. She met someone bilingual who shot back that if she wants it pronounced that way she needs to add an aigue. So she did, and everyone still pronounced her name wrong.
In fact going any place with her very nearly became an “are we living in a simulation” crisis for me because the number of times she would say her name and the other person would say it back incorrectly was… upsetting. The degree to which some people butchered her name, especially combining half of her first and last name into a completely different name, made us joke about buggy NPCs.
I could imagine how in some cultures writing it incorrectly hurts as much as pronouncing it incorrectly. Or possibly moreso in places where multiple plausible pronunciations have to be negotiated via an introduction, which is the case in China, is it not?
In Poland people have a neat life hack for that problem. They have other names for non-polish folk to use. Eg pawek, tomek, bartek rather than have people mangle their real name.
My name got changed when I moved to Spain and it never bothered me, while I have met people who took great offence at the use of standard nicks that they had not explicitly sanctioned in advance. I know a guy who makes a new name up for everyone he meets. Like or lump it. If you are too sensitive about your name, you risk people not using it at all.
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People are just incredibly dense sometimes. My wife has a name that's one letter different from a more common name, but clearly different in pronunciation.
Nevertheless there have been countless times where people automatically substitute the more common name, or even worse in text messages manage to misread it and reply incorrectly.
It sometimes upsets her. The npc analogy is very apt, i guess many people are just very preoccupied?!
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My last name isn't English, and doesn't follow English pronunciation rules. I've long ago accepted the minor annoyance of people neither knowing how to spell or pronounce it.
There's a trick in Chinese to explain which character you are referring to when it could be any number of homophones- you repeat it as part of another well-known word. To use a crap analogy, you might say "Je like Jeep" or Ge like geography" if your name is Jennifer or Gene. The latter is a bad example since Gene is itself a single syllable, but hopefully it is illustrative enough. On the other hand, if you have a special stroke in a common character (or remove a stroke, as in the post above), I am guessing it's harder to explain.
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Forgot which country (iran, turkey..) but one diacritic on a phone text got a girl killed because it altered the meaning one word. Turning the sentence from loving to threatening or insulting.
That sounds terrible, however, it's important to remember that diacritics don't get people killed, the person who decides to kill ultimately needs to stop themselves.
No, "diacritics don't kill people, people kill people" is not an important life lesson. It is a reductive just-so generalization of basic common sense that obscures more than it enlightens.
The important thing for engineers to note is a technical shortcoming caused a tragic misunderstanding. Focusing instead on the well-known fact that some people have poor impulse control, knowing full well that is a non-controllable input, instead makes an excuse for poor engineering and implicitly expresses powerlessness to do anything about the problem.
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Ya, I don't see that happening in authoritarian countries.
As a contrived example if you had a symbol for 'happy' you want to be very cautious that it doesn't get converted to 'gay' because in your language gay and happy mean the same thing, in some repressive regime it means the leadership gets to execute you with the approval of the law.
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Even to a lesser extent, it's easy to forget how a small mistake can have a butterfly effect in other cultures.
https://gizmodo.com/a-cellphones-missing-dot-kills-two-peopl...
Disussed on HN in 2008:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=226853 (18 comments)
In Spanish, dropping one diacritic (~) changes "How old are you?" to "How many anuses do you have?".
In English, dropping one diacritic changes "Where's the rosé?" to "Where's the rose?", and changes "My maté is cold" to "My mate is cold."
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There was a great thread on HH about names and falsehoods programmers believe.
You’ve added to it, as custom fonts wasn’t one covered.
I think it’s this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18567548
Edit: and it’s there, #11.
That sounds equally fascinating, and a little madding.
Yep, and with pictographic writing systems it's a lot more common than latin... but even here we have X Æ A-12 Musk, and Prince's name symbol.
Heck, my initials are totally non-standard.
> Chinese people can be superstitious about the number of strokes in their name, so adding a stroke might make it unlucky
Why am I not surprised in the slightest?