Dave Kemper <[email protected]> writes:
I consider it a sign of respect for volunteer
contributors to spell their names correctly, even names that can
be
transliterated to an ASCII approximation.
Agreed. Transliteration is often inexact, which is why there are
e.g. multiple transliterations of the Hebrew word חֲנֻכָּה. English
Wikipedia transliterates it as 'hanukkah' for the purposes of the
title of the relevant page, but it's also transliterated as
'chanukah', 'chanuka', 'hanukah' and several more. Wikipedia
notes:
[T]he letter ḥeth (ח), which is the first letter in the Hebrew
spelling, is pronounced differently in modern Hebrew (voiceless
uvular fricative) from in classical Hebrew (voiceless pharyngeal
fricative [ħ]), and neither of those sounds is unambiguously
representable in English spelling.
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanukkah#Alternative_spellings
So there's no straightforward transliteration for people with
Hebrew names that contain 'ח'.
The Wikipedia page for Latin-1 ("ISO/IEC 8859-1") notes a number
of European linguistic communities that have to use what it
describes as "typographical approximation" in the context of that
encoding:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-1#Languages_with_incomplete_coverage
This is probably a good point to bring up the "Falsehoods
Programmers Believe About Names" page, which amongst other
falsehoods, lists:
People’s names are written in ASCII.
People’s names are written in any single character set.
People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points.
--
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
Barriers to reading UTF-8 text files are few in 2026.
Indeed, in 2026, >99% of Web pages are encoded in UTF-8:
https://w3techs.com/technologies/cross/character_encoding/ranking
Alexis (flexibeast).
