
Icelandic girls can't be called Harriet, government tells family - dsego
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/26/iceland-strict-naming-convention-cardew-family
======
quink
Fair enough, I disagree with the Icelandic government here. However... It's a
name that's not native to the language.

Let's, for a thought experiment, go on a bit of a slippery slope and consider
someone whose name is outside Unicode's BMP. Would you support it too? What
about a name that can't be normalised to Normalisation Form C, but only with
composing diacritics? How about the topic of Han Unification - the TRON
character set containing code points that aren't in Unicode? What about
someone whose name has a transliteration that would blow Soundex out of the
water, not that that's a particularly hard thing to do to begin with?

~~~
jeremysmyth
Excellent points, all, and a valuable comment as a result.

However, why should the government make those decisions?

As a follow-on question to someone who gives a perfectly good answer that is
convincing and reasonable, should that answer also apply to destination
countries if someone travels or emigrates? i.e. should Iceland's (or Norway's,
or Mexico's or Burma's) country decide what name I get to bring with me? (that
they already do in some cases is not a valid answer!)

------
dm2
If a name isn't legal then there is an "Icelandic Naming Committee" which can
approve the child's name.

Names are used differently in Iceland, they always reference to people by the
first name. There are thousands of pre-approved names by the way:
[http://www.nordicnames.de/wiki/Icelandic_Names](http://www.nordicnames.de/wiki/Icelandic_Names)

Icelanders also speak on their in-breath, I tried that just now and it seems
like it might be possible to kill people by naming yourself a certain word
they have to say while breathing inwards. (joking, kind of)

I'm not trying to be mean but this in no way relates to anything Hacker News
is about.

It's a very slipper slope to cat pictures.

~~~
gingerlime
personal liberty issues and freedom from censorship, government oppression and
the likes are fairly regular subjects on HN. I don't think this is vastly
different.

Personally I found this interesting and educational. The conflict between
preservation of a society, language and its heritage against the personal
freedom of parents to name their children. Quite different from cat pictures
I'd say.

~~~
dm2
A loose naming regulation in an absurdly cold country which already has
strange customs isn't important news by any stretch of the imagination.

This is not a serious "personal liberty issue" or "government oppression",
have you seen the shit happening in the rest of the world?

------
kzrdude
Bearing an icelandic middle name seems like a painless workaround, it's kind
of beautiful to acknowledge your icelandic roots that way too, isn't it?

~~~
jonnathanson
Or the reverse: caving in and picking an Icelandic first name, but keeping
Harriet as the middle name, and calling her Harriet in everyday circumstances.

I'm not an expert in Icelandic by any stretch, but I think the problem here is
that names are used in declensions in everyday speech. Which means that
"Harriet" isn't painless, from a linguistic point of view. It sort of "breaks"
the language. It returns an error, so to speak.

This is an imperfect analogy, but imagine if I were to name my son
"Michael's." Not "Michael," but "Michael's," which is essentially a possessive
tense. That would create some odd headaches in certain conversational and
written contexts. It's hard to understand from the perspective of English,
because in most cases, we don't use declensions in proper nouns. In theory,
you could probably force Icelandic to work around foreign words and names,
just as English has worked around and incorporated foreign words and names.
But English has a long history of doing that, and the population of English
speakers worldwide is enormous and heterogeneous.

I'm opposed to the Icelandic Naming Committee's position here. Seems they
could stand to be a little more flexible, and/or to recognize that this
inflexibility breeds more inflexibility, recursively. But I guess that's their
goal. Linguistically, they are extremely conservative and would prefer their
language remain static. English is pretty much the opposite: unregulated, as
it were, and constantly evolving.

