Don't validate names, use transliteration to make them safe for postal services (or whatever). In SQL this is COLLATE, in the command line you can use uconv:

>echo "'Lódź'" | uconv -f "UTF-8" -t "UTF-8" -x "Latin-ASCII"

>'Lodz'

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poincaredisk 7 months ago | parent | next [-]

If I ever make my own customer facing product with registration, I'm rejecting names with 'v', 'x' and 'q'. After all, these characters don't exist in my language, and foreign people can always transliterate them to 'w', 'ks' or 'ku' if they have names with weird characters.

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notanote 7 months ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The name of the city has the L with stroke (pronounced as a W), so it’s Łódź.

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poincaredisk 7 months ago | parent [-]

And the transliteration in this case is so far from the original that it's barely recognisable for me (three out of four characters are different and as a native I perceive Ł as a fully separate character, not as a funny variation of L)

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Muromec 7 months ago | parent | next [-]

The fact that it's pronounced as Вуч and not Лодж still triggers me.

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pavel_lishin 7 months ago | parent | next [-]

I just looked up the Russian wikipedia entry for it, and it's spelled "Лодзь", but it sounds like it's pronounced "Вуджь", and this fact irritates the hell out of me.

Why would it be transliterated with an Л? And an О? And a з? None of this makes sense.

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cyberax 7 months ago | parent | next [-]

> Why would it be transliterated with an Л?

Because it _used_ to be pronounced this way in Polish! "Ł" pronounced as "L" sounds "theatrical" these days, but it was more common in the past.

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Muromec 7 months ago | parent | prev [-]

It's a general pattern of what russia does to names of places and people, which is aggressively imposing their own cultural paradigm (which follows the more general general pattern). You can look up your civil code provisions around names and ask a question or two of what historical problem they attempt to solve.

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aguaviva 7 months ago | parent | next [-]

It's not a Russian-specific thing by any stretch.

This happens all the time when names and loanwords get dragged across linguistic boundaries. Sometimes it results from an attempt to "simplify" the respective spelling and/or sounds (by mapping them into tokens more familiar in the local environment); sometimes there's a more complex process behind it; and other times it just happens for various obscure historical reasons.

And the mangling/degradation definitely happens in both directions: hence Москва → Moscow, Paris → Париж.

In this particular case, it may have been an attempt to transliterate from the original Polish name (Łódź), more "canonically" into Russian. Based on the idea that the Polish Ł (which sounds much closer to an English "w" than to a Russian "в") is logically closer to the Russian "Л" (as this actually makes sense in terms of how the two sounds are formed). And accordingly for the other weird-seeming mappings. Then again it could have just ended up that way for obscure etymological reasons.

Either way, how one can be "irritated as hell" over any of this (other than in some jocular or metaphorical sense) is another matter altogether, which I admit is a bit past me.

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aguaviva 7 months ago | parent [-]

Correction - it's nothing osbcure at all, but apparently a matter of the shift that accord broadly with the L sound in Polish a few centuries ago (whereby it became "dark" and velarized), affecting a great many other words and names (like słowo, mały, etc). While in parts east and south the "clear" L sound was preserved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ł

	▲	int_19h 7 months ago \| parent [-]
		Velarized L is a common phoneme in Slavic languages, inherited from their common ancestor. What makes Polish somewhat unusual is that the pronunciation of velarized L eventually shifted to /w/ pretty much everywhere (a similar process happened in Ukrainian and Belarusian, but only in some contexts).

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int_19h 7 months ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Adapting foreign names to phonotactics and/or spelling practices of one's native language is a common practice throughout the world. The city's name is spelled Lodz in Spanish, for example.

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cyberax 7 months ago | parent | prev [-]

Wait until you hear what Chinese or Japanese languages do with loanwords...

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7 months ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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notanote 7 months ago | parent | prev [-]

L with stroke is the english name for it according to wikipedia by the way, not my choice of naming. The transliterated version is not great, considering how far removed from the proper pronunciation it is, but I’m sort of used to it. The almost correct one above was jarring enough that I wanted to point it out.

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ajsnigrutin 7 months ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, that'll work great..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%8Celje

echo "Čelje" | uconv -f "UTF-8" -t "UTF-8" -x "Latin-ASCII"

> "Celje"

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

(i mean... we do have postal numbers just for problems like this, but both Štefan and Stefan are not-so-uncommon male names over here, so are Jozef and Jožef, etc.)

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jeroenhd 7 months ago | parent | next [-]

If you're dealing with a bad API that only takes ASCII, "Celje" is usually better than "ÄŒelje" or "蒌elje".

If you have control over the encoding on the input side and on the output side, you should just use UTF-8 or something comparable. If you don't, you have to try to get something useful on the output side.

	▲	ajsnigrutin 7 months ago \| parent [-]
		This depends. Everyone over here would know that "ÄŒelje" (?elje) is either čelje, šelje or želje. Maybe even đelje or ćelje if it's a name or something else. So, special attention would be taken to 'decypher' what was meant here. But if you see "Celje", you assume it's actually Celje (a much larger city than Čelje) and not one of those variants above. And noone will bother with figuring out if part of a letter is missing, it'll just get sent to Celje.

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Muromec 7 months ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Most places where telling Štefan from Stefan is a problem use postal numbers for people too, or/and ask for your DOB.

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ajsnigrutin 7 months ago | parent [-]

I don't have a problem from differentiatin Štefan from Stefan, 's' and 'š' sound pretty different to everyone around here. But if someone runs that script above and transliterates "š" to "s" it can cause confusion.

And no, we don't use "postal numbers for humans".

	▲	Muromec 7 months ago \| parent [-]
		>And no, we don't use "postal numbers for humans". An email, a phone number, a tax or social security number, demographic identifier, billing/contract number or combination of them. All of those will help you tell Stefan from Štefan in the most practical situations. >But if someone runs that script above and transliterates "š" to "s" it can cause confusion. It's not nice, it will certainly make Štefan unhappy, but it's not like you will debit the money from the wrong account or deliver to a different address or contact the wrong customer because of that.

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account42 7 months ago | parent | prev [-]

So? Names are not unique to begin with.