[chernevik]

It is "proper" to make these transpositions in English. Whether, in the age of Unicode, it _should_ be, is another question.

Caveat: "proper" in English is somewhat loose, as writers can and do "properly" break the "rules" of English.

As an English writer I have two problems of politeness to you. One is spelling your name properly. Another is conveying to my readers how to pronounce your name properly. If I use the likes of "Knausgård", my readers haven't got much idea how to pronounce that. If I extend those principles to, say, Bengali or Chinese names, they'll have no idea at all.

Unicode certainly opens new questions. But you won't get very far acting as if the answers are obvious.

[Dewie2]

Thanks for you reasonable reply.

> Whether, in the age of Unicode, it _should_ be, is another question.

Characters like this aren't so exotic that the relatively new prolifeteration of the Unicode standards have made them possible to type and render - 8-bit ASCII contains "æøå". Not to mention all the other text encodings that at the least try to incorporate characters from Western European languages (Norwegian in this case being Western European).

Though I guess "disagreement" between text encodings about what is "å" has long been an issue, in a more cross-platform setting.

> As an English writer I have two problems of politeness to you. [...] Another is conveying to my readers how to pronounce your name properly.

I'd say that that is a lost cause in the written medium, across languages. No matter how you choose to write this particular name, American readers are probably going to be confused as to how to pronounce it. And if they think they've got a good idea, they are likely to be wrong. But that doesn't have to detract from the reading experience, since you don't have to "think out loud" words that you read. And I don't think that how the readers think the name is pronounced[1], in their own minds, is a matter of politeness to the owner of the name.

If the pronouncication of the name is important in some context, the writer can always try to write out what the phonetic equivalent would be, using syllables from English words. And then you're again free to write the name in the original, "proper" way throughout the text.

[1] "knaws-goard"? :)

[vilhelm_s]

I kindof believe this argument for Chinese and Bengali, but it doesn't seem true for å/aa. No matter which one you use I expect an English speaker would just read it as if it was a single "a", so which one you choose doesn't seem to make any difference.

(I guess the difference between a/å in Norwegian is something like path/all in British English? Does either of the transliterations really convey that?)