[crazygringo]

If you just use the {Alphabetic} Unicode character class (100K code points), together with a space, hyphen, and maybe comma, that might get you close. It includes diacritics.

I'm curious if anyone can think of any other non-alphabetic characters used in legal names around the world, in other scripts?

I wondered about numbers, but the most famous example of that has been overturned:

"Originally named X Æ A-12, the child (whom they call X) had to have his name officially changed to X Æ A-Xii in order to align with California laws regarding birth certificates."

(Of course I'm not saying you should do this. It is fun to wonder though.)

[Seb-C]

> I'm curious if anyone can think of any other non-alphabetic characters used in legal names around the world, in other scripts?

Latin characters are NOT allowed in official names for Japanese citizens. It must be written in Japanese characters only.

For foreigners living in Japan it's quite frequent to end up in a situation where their official name in Latin does not pass the validation rules of many forms online. Issues like forbidden characters, or because it's too long since Japanese names (family name + first name) are typically only 4 characters long.

Also, when you get a visa to Japan, you have to bend and disform the pronunciation of your name to make it fit into the (limited) Japanese syllabary.

Funnily, they even had to register a whole new unicode range at some point, because old administrative documents sometimes contains characters that have been deprecated more than a century ago.

https://ccjktype.fonts.adobe.com/2016/11/hentaigana.html

[crazygringo]

Very interesting about Japan!

To be clear, I wasn't thinking about within a specific country though.

More like, what is the set of all characters that are allowed in legal names across the world?

You know, to eliminate things like emoji, mathematical symbols, and so forth.

[Seb-C]

Ah, I see.

I don't know, but I would bet that the sum of all corner cases and exceptions in the world would make it pretty hard to confidently eliminate any "obvious" characters.

From a technical standpoint, unicode emojis are probably safe to exclude, but on the other hand, some scripts like Chinese characters are fundamentally pictograms, which is semantically not so different than an emoji.

Maybe after centuries of evolution we will end up with a legit universal language based on emojis, and people named with it.

[crazygringo]

Chinese characters are nothing like emoji. They are more akin to syllables. There is no semantic similarity to emoji at all, even if they were originally derived from pictorial representations.

And they belong to the {Alphabetic} Unicode class.

I'm mostly curious if Unicode character classes have already done all the hard work.

[account42]

I imagine at least Sealand has relatively lax (or at least informal) restrictions.

[poizan42]

You forgot apostrophe as is common in Irish names like O’Brien.

[bloak]

Yes, though O’Brien is Ó Briain in Irish, according to Wikipedia. I think the apostrophe in Irish names was added by English speakers, perhaps by analogy with "o'clock", perhaps to avoid writing something that would look like an initial.

There are also English names of Norman origin that contain an apostrophe, though the only example I can think of immediately is the fictional d'Urberville.

[lmm]

> I'm curious if anyone can think of any other non-alphabetic characters used in legal names around the world, in other scripts?

Some Japanese names are written with Japanese characters that do not have Unicode codepoints.

(The Unicode consortium claims that these characters are somehow "really" Chinese characters just written in a different font; holders of those names tend to disagree, but somehow the programmer community that would riot if someone suggested that people with ø in their name shouldn't care when it's written as o accepts that kind of thing when it comes to Japanese).

[crazygringo]

Ha, well I don't think we need to worry about validating characters if they can't be typed in a text box in the first place. ;)

But very interesting thanks!

[lmm]

> Ha, well I don't think we need to worry about validating characters if they can't be typed in a text box in the first place. ;)

They are frequently typed in text boxes, any software seriously targeting Japan supports them, you just have to use Shift-JIS (or EUC-JP). So your codebase needs to actually support text encodings rather than just blindly assuming everything is UTF-8.

[nicoburns]

Apostrophe is common in surnames in parts of the world.

[golergka]

דויד Smith (concatenated) will have an LTR control character in the middle

[crazygringo]

Oh that's interesting.

Is that a thing? I've never known of anyone whose legal name used two alphabets that didn't have any overlap in letters at all -- two completely different scripts.

Would a birth certificate allow that? Wouldn't you be expected to transliterate one of them?

[golergka]

I haven't known anyone like that either, but I can imagine how the same person would have name in Hebrew in some Israeli IT system and name in English somewhere else and then have a third system to unexpectedly combine them in some weird way.

[shash]

There’s this individual’s name which involves a clock sound: Nǃxau ǂToma[1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%25C7%2583xau_%C7%82Toma

[crazygringo]

Click characters are part of {Alphabetic}!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_consonant

https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/category/Lo

https://stackoverflow.com/a/4843363

[kens]

> There’s this individual’s name which involves a clock sound: Nǃxau ǂToma

I was extremely puzzled until I realized you meant a click sound, not a clock sound. Adding to my confusion, the vintage IBM 1401 computer uses ǂ as a record mark character.

[GolDDranks]

What if one's name is not in alphabetic script? Let's say, "鈴木涼太".

[crazygringo]

That's part of {Alphabetic} in Unicode. It validates.

[Mordisquitos]

> I'm curious if anyone can think of any other non-alphabetic characters used in legal names around the world, in other scripts?

The Catalan name Gal·la is growing in popularity, with currently 1515 women in the census having it as a first name in Spain with an average age of 10.4 years old: https://ine.es/widgets/nombApell/nombApell.shtml

[enriquto]

beautiful map of the Catalan Countries when you search for that name here

[jlhwung]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perri_6

[gus_massa]

Comma or apostrophe, like in d'Alembert ?

(And I have 3 in my keyboard, I'm not sure everyone is using the same one.)

[ahazred8ta]

Mrs. Keihanaikukauakahihuliheekahaunaele only had a string length problem, but there are people with a Hawaiian ʻokina in their names. U+02BB