Comment by derefr

I feel like there has to be some level of triviality at which the harm is no longer being caused by the attempt to systematize something, but rather by a small group of people refusing to be systematized not out of cultural heritage et al, but rather purely out of the (inane) human desire to feel special by intentionally doing something in a way nobody else does it.

Language and writing exist to communicate, using patterns of signals that have shared meaning and recognition; things like alphabets and vocabularies are effectively (loose, overlapping, diasporic) consensus-state autoencoding models. They only work to compress meaning, when there are rules for said compression that generalize, and which don't have as many exceptions with their own separate symbols as there are words/names needing to be encoded.

Most countries don't allow you to just make up your own novel graphemes when writing a name on a birth certificate. And nobody is asking for that, either. (Presumably because living in a world where that was allowed would be horrible: you'd no longer being able to error-correct when reading, because any given mysterious squiggle in the middle of a word or name, might be exactly what some unknown-to-you-or-anyone-other-than-the-author character is supposed to look like. Is that "o with a curlicue" written here just a semi-cursive attempt at writing an "o" — or is it an "o" with a novel accent marker, one that appears nowhere else, but which must be preserved nevertheless to properly record this person's name?)

Instead, legal names are (in every country I'm aware of) required to be spelled using the character-set of the country you're entering a legal relationship with by being born / immigrating / etc. America? Legal names using the Latin alphabet. Japan? Legal names using characters from this set: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jinmeiy%C5%8D_kanji

Note, though, that legal names are representations of names. They aren't encodings of names. Your legal name is a distinct thing from your name, just as your credit-card number is a distinct thing from your name. It's an applied-for + registered + assigned systematic identifier for you — a bit like a domain name, or a vanity license-plate number. Which means that your legal name is not a lossy or lossless encoding of your name. It's, per se, a nickname. It doesn't have to have anything to do with your name. (And it often doesn't; immigrants often choose legal names entirely distinct from what they / their home country thinks of as their name.)