We would have loved to name our son after my grandfather, but his name includes non-ASCII characters so we went with his middle name instead.

Good old grampa \NUL\BEL\ACK would be rolling in his gràve if he knew that foreigners with non-ASCII names had taken over his country.

Oh the little Bobby Tables right https://xkcd.com/327/

This is the kind of compromise I'd never take. (Yet still a million times closer to my world view than the decision I mentioned. Guess I'm stubborn in some topics.)

Why not just use a spelling without accents?

This may lead to confusion. In Spanish, for example, Pena and Peña are not the same.

You could still anglicize it, could you not? E.g. Peña would become Penya or similar.

Tell that to Denver.

In some places there is an officially acknowledged list of valid given names (for citizens born in the jurisdiction). (eg. Hungary), and that format of the name might not be on it. Elon Musk would be in trouble here naming his children.

It is a debatable practice, yet I think this is somewhat protecting the children from silly decisions of parents (some example from Hungarian tabloid media where parents were outraged: Fradi / Fradika (from the slang name Fradi of the FTC football club, without and with diminutive appendix), Traktorka (tractor with diminutive appendix), various names from soap operas, WoW characters, Satan.

So think of the children! :) But really, this is the other end of the spectrum. And this (giving especially weird names to children) is a fine recipe for making the child subject to bullying in my opinion.

Having a list of approved names is too draconian IMO.

Australia seems to have a good policy where any name is allowed, as long as it isn't offensive or too silly.

Musk's children's name would be fine, for example, while calling a kid Hitler would not be.

I can accept this, but who decides what is too silly? Like here it is already clear from the allowed names list (reviewed, extended every year actually, and contains some quite silly entries already in my opinion.)

Also we have the idea of "nameday" which is minor occasion for celebration and giving small gifts every year, based on the person's given name, and the calendar contains the mapping between names and dates, one without an official name would be in trouble getting that free a bottle of wine :D

Well, it's not so much about 'silly', silly is fine, Musk's names would be silly, it's more about ensuring the kid won't have a guaranteed bad start to life with a crappy name like "hatesjews". On the other hand if you call a kid 'boggle', they might get teased, but might own it and be super cool and love it.

IMO only the names that would be damaging beyond a reasonable doubt should be prohibited.

Also, the nameday idea sounds cool :)

ASCII only and easy to pronounce in English were the two main criteria I had when naming our kids.

I heard stories where parents thought this and ended up naming their kid... Joel.

Growing up in Ireland in the 80s/90s, the only Joel we were familiar with was “Billy Joel”. On Irish radio, his surname was universally pronounced as two clearly distinct syllables: Jo-Elle. It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that a work colleague from another country pointed out that we were all saying it wrong.

Even the Icelandic singer, Björk sometimes had her name pronounced more correctly by DJs. I guess the diacritic was a big clue that the vowel is not pronounced like the ‘o’ in “fork” (the most common way her name was pronounced) and pretty much everyone knew that the ‘j’ sounds like a ‘y’ in English.

I legally changed my name about twenty years ago, after experiencing multiple days of wasted effort dealing with systems that a) couldn't render my name correctly and b) couldn't cope with fact that their incorrect rendering of my name might not match other legal documents that correctly render my name, or incorrectly render it in a different way.

> Yeah, some people think about their heritage as not compatible with the brave new world, so get rid of it. I know people giving their child dedicatedly ascii-only name common in the USA to make sure their children won't have a "weird name" when going to the USA.

And? That's what I did - a simple name that he won't have to repeat, spell out for English speakers, not have to spell out for many non-english-speakers, or have trouble non-latin scripts.

Anything you can do to make your child's life easier trumps any value you think they might get from maintaining cultural or traditional links with a mostly dead past.