False Assumptions About Names

[deirdre]

I loved this article about names four years ago, and it continues to be relevant.

There are entire novels in the comments.

As someone whose name is frequently misparsed (my name is “Saoirse Moen, Deirdre” not “Moen,Deirdre,Saoirse”), I feel their pain.

Yes, the article is written for programmers, but it’s still useful for writers. We all carry assumptions about names.

Offhand, I can’t remember what language it was that someone filed a bug about where they had to use a non-Unicode font. Even Dhivehi/Thaana was added to Unicode in 1999, and that’s a pretty obscure script. (pic) I just remember being pretty impressed that there were still living languages where that was the case.

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.