Also kudos to amazon for handling the query 'Knausgård' solidly - this may be common place but its the first I've needed it. 'http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dap...
Edit: I would add that I'd like to know more about how cases like this would be handled automatically - account lookup would need to find both spellings depending on how it was entered? Are the extended characters allowed in usernames? I've seen forum confusion where accounts were spoofed by slightly off unicode letters, ex. 'Α' (Greek U+0391) and 'A' (Latin, U+0041).
Caveat: "proper" in English is somewhat loose, as writers can and do "properly" break the "rules" of English.
As an English writer I have two problems of politeness to you. One is spelling your name properly. Another is conveying to my readers how to pronounce your name properly. If I use the likes of "Knausgård", my readers haven't got much idea how to pronounce that. If I extend those principles to, say, Bengali or Chinese names, they'll have no idea at all.
Unicode certainly opens new questions. But you won't get very far acting as if the answers are obvious.
> Whether, in the age of Unicode, it _should_ be, is another question.
Characters like this aren't so exotic that the relatively new prolifeteration of the Unicode standards have made them possible to type and render - 8-bit ASCII contains "æøå". Not to mention all the other text encodings that at the least try to incorporate characters from Western European languages (Norwegian in this case being Western European).
Though I guess "disagreement" between text encodings about what is "å" has long been an issue, in a more cross-platform setting.
> As an English writer I have two problems of politeness to you. [...] Another is conveying to my readers how to pronounce your name properly.
I'd say that that is a lost cause in the written medium, across languages. No matter how you choose to write this particular name, American readers are probably going to be confused as to how to pronounce it. And if they think they've got a good idea, they are likely to be wrong. But that doesn't have to detract from the reading experience, since you don't have to "think out loud" words that you read. And I don't think that how the readers think the name is pronounced[1], in their own minds, is a matter of politeness to the owner of the name.
If the pronouncication of the name is important in some context, the writer can always try to write out what the phonetic equivalent would be, using syllables from English words. And then you're again free to write the name in the original, "proper" way throughout the text.
[1] "knaws-goard"? :)
(I guess the difference between a/å in Norwegian is something like path/all in British English? Does either of the transliterations really convey that?)
Or is perhaps the issue that the linguistic side-track is about a non-English language, on an English speaking site, and so is judged to be too off topic? In that case all I can say is that is completely on me if only that initial mention was enough to be too off topic. But it is only partly on me when considering the whole discussion, since discussions take on a life on their own. Especially when they turn out to be somewhat controversial. :)