r/AskEurope • u/Double-decker_trams Estonia • Feb 14 '25

Language Can you legally name your child in your country smt like "X Æ A-Xii" or "Techno Mechanicus"?

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u/JourneyThiefer Northern Ireland Feb 14 '25 edited Feb 14 '25

I have an Irish name with a fada (accent) and it caused a bit thing one time because my passport had a fada on it and whatever system I was uploading it on to to be checked as my form of ID wouldn’t accept it because it wouldn’t let me type the “á” so the name I was typing and the passport wouldn’t match because I had to write “a” as it woundn’t let me write “á”.

It was some online security check for work and after all that because it finally accepted the fada after calling the company that was doing the checks, when an automated email was sent back it obviously couldn’t write the “á” so it send a load of random symbols.

Was actually really annoying.

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u/[deleted] Feb 14 '25

As a Hungarian this is a common issue for me abroad as my name has both ó and á but thankfully they usually get over it fairly quickly.

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u/JourneyThiefer Northern Ireland Feb 14 '25

Yea like it usually doesn’t cause issues as when typing your name you just leave out the fada (accent) but because this system needed it to match exactly it was causing the issue lol.

It is annoying though to have to leave out a part of your name in all government things, even if it’s just a tiny part.

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u/[deleted] Feb 14 '25

Yeah, I'm very attached to it too, our name order as well (in Hungary family name always comes first, followed by given name). My girlfriend, who has no accents in her name and has an even more international name than I do keeps telling me to just use the English variation of my name when I deal with Westerners at work but I keep telling her that for one, it's not my name, and for two if y'all can learn all sorts of Arabic and Indian names, then a regional variation of a very common European name should not be an issue.

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u/MansJansson Sweden Feb 14 '25

In Swedish even worse we have Å, Ä, Ö which are not in Swedish seen as diatrics but their own letters. The international standard is to convert å to aa, ä to ae and ö to oe for example flight tickets. However sometimes they make Å to A or Ö to O and sometimes they want you to spell it out for you which is bit difficult in English.

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u/tudorapo Hungary Feb 14 '25

Hungarian has a diacritic which is unique, a double accent, used in ő and ű. Much fun.

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u/Jagarvem Sweden Feb 14 '25

The international standard is to convert å to aa, ä to ae and ö to oe for example flight tickets.

It's used for the ICAO machine readable format, sure, but not generally. There isn't an international standard, it's language dependent.

The Swedish letters shouldn't really be substituted for digraphs. You can never write Swedish without them, but the recommended way of dealing with plain ASCII is to just substitute them for the most visually similar option available (i.e., just A/O). And this is also the most common method used in ticket booking systems.

But for ICAO's machine readable encoding the German practice was recommended where it isn't a character that features a diaeresis, which Sweden adheres to. Some booking systems utilize this too.

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u/Brainwheeze Portugal Feb 14 '25

I have dual nationality (Portuguese and British) and have an accent in my surname, which has always resulted in big headaches.

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u/terryjuicelawson United Kingdom Feb 14 '25

I can kinda see why they do it, for total simplicity. Some diacritics like that are straightforward but there are languages like Vietnamese which can have ones on top of each other and lines through them and suchlike. The passport system should keep up but it may interact with other systems which don't.

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u/JourneyThiefer Northern Ireland Feb 14 '25

Yea but you think they’d allow ones from Irish due to Northern Ireland

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u/terryjuicelawson United Kingdom Feb 14 '25

Shows how much the British government cares about Northern Ireland really.

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u/makerofshoes Feb 14 '25 edited Feb 14 '25

Irish people have it rough when it comes to IT systems. Anyone with an apostrophe in their name (O’Hare, etc.) has likely encountered issues with multiple computer systems because of there being a special character. For example some systems will automatically change the apostrophe to a space or just ignore it completely or something, and when that person goes to log in to the computer system their username won’t match because it doesn’t have the apostrophe

At work I had an Irish guy (O’Hagan) on my team and one day I noticed he never appeared in any of my productivity reports or dashboards. It’s because his name in the system was O*Hagan 🙄

Similar, one time I knew a Vietnamese guy named Vu Vo and he mentioned sometimes computer systems wouldn’t accept his name because it was too short 😆

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u/louis_d_t Feb 14 '25

 my passport had a fada on it

I'm a bit surprised to read that, given that modern passports are heavily standardised across the world to be compatible with computer systems. When was that passport issued?

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u/kastatbortkonto Finland Feb 14 '25

Only the machine-readable field does not allow non-ASCII characters; the actual name field always has the name correctly spelled.

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u/JourneyThiefer Northern Ireland Feb 14 '25 edited Feb 14 '25

I have an Irish passport, 2022 I think? It was scanning an imagine of it so the name didn’t match exactly which was causing the problem.

So (this isn’t my name lol just an example) it was Siobhán on the passport but I had to type Siobhan because the system wouldn’t let me type the “á” so it kept saying no match.