The government ate my name

ASCII, Diacritics, and Legacy Systems

• Many commenters report government and bank systems in the US, UK, and elsewhere rejecting accents (ä, ß, ñ, ü, Å, etc.) or multiple capitals, even for “international” transfers or passports.
• Technical back-and-forth clarifies that ASCII is 7‑bit, ü is not part of it, and many systems still act as if only typewriter characters are valid, regardless of whether backends could handle Unicode.
• Some note legacy encodings (code pages, EBCDIC) and very old COBOL / terminal workflows likely still in use.
• A few argue that if clerks can’t type characters, they will effectively disappear from records, no matter what the database supports.

Transliteration, Pronunciation, and Cultural Compromise

• Many people simplify or alter their own names abroad (drop accents, change vowels, adopt local pronunciations or English “equivalents”) because insisting on correctness is exhausting or impractical.
• Stories span German, Norwegian, Spanish, French, Polish, Russian, Greek, Chinese, Indonesian, and other contexts; people often maintain one “true” form and several “operational” ones.
• Several note that biblical and historical names have long been adapted differently across languages, undercutting the idea of one “real” name.

Gendered and Inconsistent Surnames

• Russian- and Slavic-style gendered surnames (Kuznetsov/Kuznetsova, Papadopoulos/Papadopoulou, etc.) cause cross-border problems: spouses and children can appear unrelated, and dual citizens can end up with different surnames in different countries.
• Some see this as pressure against gendered surnames; others argue it’s deeply grammatical and unlikely to disappear.
• Debate arises over how much governments should respect individuals’ preferred forms vs. enforcing local naming norms.

Mononyms, Format Assumptions, and Edge Cases

• Single-name people (common in parts of Indonesia and elsewhere) are often duplicated into first/last fields (e.g., “Mayawati Mayawati”) or given placeholders like FNU/LNU.
• Hyphenated and space-separated surnames, apostrophes, and multiple middle names routinely break forms, cause validation failures, and lead to inconsistent official records.

Bureaucracy, Corrections, and Law

• Multiple anecdotes describe mismatched names across passports, social security records, visas, and airline systems, leading to weeks of remediation, manual overrides, or even visa denial.
• Some jurisdictions make legal name correction/change relatively easy; others (e.g., parts of Europe) are highly restrictive or prescribe allowed names.

Data Modeling and Programmer Responsibility

• Several invoke “Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names” and argue that systems should treat “name” as free text plus an optional “calling name,” rather than rigid first/middle/last schemas.
• Others note that constraints often originate from law, policy, or client assumptions, but still see a duty for engineers to push back and design for cultural and linguistic reality.