Why is it my problem to make my children conform to government tracking and enumeration, rather than their problem that my children are hard for them to easily assimilate? Government exists for my children, not my children for government. Their technical problems are their problems, not mine.
And practically, in a world where people cross borders, where people come to this country for refuge and opportunity, how does it make sense to force them all to have only basic English characters in their names?
I'm not asking what is, but why it should be that way. Why should I name my children for the government's convenience? Why are Jürgen, Hafþór, Renée, or Noël unacceptable names?
The government(s) will be happy to receive & evaluate your generous donation of upgrades to the myriad existing record keeping systems, and further generous donations of your time to train all staff on how to enter and search for the additional written characters, so long as the process does not significantly disrupt operations. "Patches welcome!" (^o^)/
But in seriousness: it is their concern because changes that seem minor can require major changes to electronic systems, and allowing special cases that necessitate lookup in ways the electronic systems can't handle (perhaps even requring manual search through hardcopy!) really throw a star-mangled spanner in the works.
Naming is already a special case problem in Japan, where people are accustomed to having no idea how to pronounce most people's names because the parents used non-standard readings of the kanji characters and/or used kanji from a special exempted list of archaic kanji that almost nobody can read. If you're wondering why the government doesn't require people use only the official "common use" kanji, at least just for this one problem, then I should tell it has been tried — enough people raised a fuss about being unable to register their child's "perfect name" that gradually a list of "allowed only in names" kanji was created and expanded.
And if I recall correctly, when registering a name, you can specify a totally unrelated pronunciation using the simpler non-kanji phonetic characters, so even just "common use" kanji are almost "all bets off". A relative few kanji have such common pronunciation in names that they can 'usually' be guessed.
And the problem is the same with many Japanese place-names, having little or no correlation between written form and pronunciation or meaning.
So, why is the spelling of a chosen name any concern to a government? It gets crazy out there, in Name Land. How mäný variatǐons of spelliñg cån ße ællowèd before people give up on pronouncing it?
Why is everyone trying to convince me that handling names is hard for computer systems? That's obvious to everyone, even me.
What's fascinating to me is that none of you consider that government might not need to have a list of everyone it governs, or that such a list might not need to be centralized or computerized. When faced with a facet of humanity that's too complex to be easily reduced to consistent data, private groups either do their best and work with what data they can extract, or else have people handle it, with our flexible, tolerant minds. When government is involved, though, the immediate response is, "We have to force people to be less complex!"
I'm beginning to see technocracy as the biggest threat to a diverse, human, and humane society.
