> The language rule is enshrined in law in B.C.'s Business Corporation Act, which states: "A company or extraprovincial company must display its name ... in legible English or French characters."
Most jurisdictions have official languages. There's room for discussion about colonialist and discriminatory causes and effects, of course. But it's not necessarily obvious that governments ought to accommodate n languages, or to what degree.
So it is probably a legal instead of a technical issue.
What happens when two laws come into conflict with each other? United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) vs the language rule
Technically the UN declaration is not legally binding, so there is no legal conflict.
Of course, that isn't meant to say that the declaration shouldn't be respected or that a government/nation might not face backlash for failing to respect it, but in a Canadian court I believe (IANAL) that the UN declaration would be effectively irrelevant.
Edit: I made this comment before reading the article; it appears BC has actually passed legislation requiring them to implement UNDRIP (https://declaration.gov.bc.ca/), so the parent's question remains valid.
> Technically the UN declaration is not legally binding, so there is no legal conflict.
Not even that, but I assume there isn't a line in UNDRIP that specifically says "Indigenous people should be able to register their businesses using their alphabets". My assumption is that it's a more general resolution, and details about what constitutes promoting revitalizing indigenous languages is up to national/local governments.
I think it would be good of the Canadian/BC governments to allow this sort of thing, but I doubt it would be a violation of the resolution, or even the spirit of it, to shelve that particular idea, in favor of others.
I think the reason they specify English or French characters is that Latin doesn't really specify what is allowed. French can use á or à or ç. Latin was generally written without diacritical marks by Romans with the occasional exception of the apex which looks similar to acute accents to me. If we're talking about modern Latin writings, things like macrons (a horizontal line above like ā) and even breves have been used (like ă). Would we be talking about the classical Latin alphabet which is missing the letters J, U, and W?
If we're talking about "Latin characters" in a colloquial sense, do we allow things like ñ? That's valid in the Spanish version of the latin alphabet, but not in standard English or French. French does use the accent tréma (¨) on certain letters, but not all letters. What about the German ẞ or Norwegian Ø? Are those latin characters? The Romanian ș? The Welsh Ŵ? The Czech Ď? The Polish Ł? The Maltese Ħ?
Specifying English and French is meant to add specificity to what is allowed. While so many languages use "Latin characters", they're often a bit different. I don't look at something in German and think "what on earth are those letters", but I might think "what is that ẞ and what are those dots?"
I'm not arguing that the law should specify how companies name themselves. I'm just saying that specifying English and French makes sense because specifying "Latin characters" leaves a lot to be desired. Do they mean to exclude "J"? Do they mean to exclude "ç"? Do they mean to include "Ł"? You might think that it's obvious what the latin characters are: they're clearly the set of characters that a native English or French speaker thinks is normal, right? As a native-English speaker, the Spanish "ñ" or the French "ç" seem familiar - I've seen them a bunch in my life and I know what they do. The Polish "Ł"? That's unfamiliar to me. What does the line do? I don't know.
They wanted to specify what was allowed and what wasn't allowed and "Latin characters" doesn't narrow it down enough - or potentially narrows it down too much by excluding many English and French words and names.
"Latin characters" is short-hand for "characters from the Latin script", which is not the same as the Roman alphabet. Your post reads a bit muddled because you seem to be under the impression that nothing is standardised and precisely defined and one couldn't simply look up whether a characters is Latin script or not. (All the examples you showed are.)
> What does the line do?
Name is "stroke", function is the same as for other (diacritic) marks, it indicates a variant from the base form. http://enwp.org/diacritic
If you're being pedantic, modern English uses Latin script and Arabic numerals in addition to a variety of special characters. English and French use alphabets which are derived from the Latin alphabet. The Wiki pages on the subject are quite good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_script
> If you're being pedantic, modern English uses ... Arabic numerals...
Well, if you want to be super pedantic:
Arabic numerals look like this:
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
٩ ٨ ٧ ٦ ٥ ٤ ٣ ٢ ١ ٠
and appear little-endian when reading.
The ones we use come from devanagari (brahmic) alphabets and look generally like this (though they arrived in Europe via islamic scholarship, hence the common name in some languages)
This begs the question: when nobody in the world speaks a language fluently and only three people speak it at all, who exactly benefits from the ability to register a business using the characters of that language?
This is a legal formality, after all. Surely they could use the actual characters of their language in marketing materials and so fourth, if not on their checks. Allowing the use of characters on legal documents that only three people in the world understand seems pretty problematic for obvious reasons.
If this is genuinely the obstacle preventing these folks from starting a business, I submit that they don't care about starting a business, they care about making a point. I guess that's fine, but I'm not convinced business registration is really the right venue for this particular issue.
Yes, they're just making a point and a stupid point too. In my native language, it's not customary to write names in all-caps nor to append the word "LIMITED" to them, yet that's what I have to do to register my business.
Where do you draw the line, though? In addition to the charset issue, they appear to actually have a law that requires business names to use English or French characters. That means no Greek, no Cyrillic, no Asian languages... at least not without Romanizing them. Presumably a Spanish speaker couldn't even use "ñ" in a business' registered name, which is pretty absurd.
How about other indigenous languages present in Canada that do still have wide fluency and use rates, but may use a different alphabet?
I get that there are practical problems dealing with characters that people aren't familiar with, but if colonialism and war hadn't wiped out a lot of these indigenous peoples and cultures over the last 500 years, maybe these languages would be more prominent. Saying, "we stole your land and supplanted your culture so you have to use our alphabet", is a pretty shitty thing to do.
I think the likely answer is going to be – no, they won't allow any language, they will keep to a restricted alphabet for company names, based on what characters are used in a list of allowed languages. What they'll do, is extend that list to include indigenous languages of British Columbia. So likely there will be a process, in which an indigenous community will submit an application to have its script allowed in company names (and possibly other names such as personal names). The government will ask professional linguists to advise on the application to ensure its correctness. Then the characters used to write that particular language will be added to the allowed list.
I think the argument is that the British Columbia government has a special moral duty to its indigenous peoples to help preserve their languages and culture, which justifies them going the extra mile to support the official use of their languages. I don't think it has the same moral duty to preserve Tibetan or Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji) so it would be justified in not extending this provision to those languages.
One potential issue I foresee is data interchange. I presume that British Columbia shares company data with other Canadian provinces, the Canadian federal government, probably even foreign governments (especially the US) and private sector firms (such as D&B Hoovers). What if the data interchange format doesn't allow these additional characters?
One solution is to give the company two names – its name in the indigenous language, and an English/French approximation to that. The system would store both names. Data interchanges which can't support the indigenous language characters would only receive the English/French approximation name.
>Saying, "we stole your land and supplanted your culture so you have to use our alphabet", is a pretty shitty thing to do.
Who is "we"? No one alive today stole anything.
Maybe it's more about the utility of the use of a common language and script that results in a functional society, and sometimes the boundary conditions of time and effort cause some scripts to be unsupported.
Multilingual legal registries are hard. (See: the EU.) The simplest answer is to devolve some business-registration powers to an authority that speaks the language. Having a registry administered by someone who does not know the language, let alone character set, is an invitation to fraudsters to create lookalikes and errors to go undetected.
There will be far bigger challenges than this in running her own business.
Next challenge: does QuickBooks accept hən̓q̓əmín̓əm̓ k̓ʷə́yecən as a valid business name? How fun is it going to be when the intuit customer support rep asks you for your business name and then to spell it?
Next challenge: How about Microsoft 365? You can't use hən̓q̓əmín̓əm̓ k̓ʷə́yecən as a tenant name:
I am completely sympathetic with her position. The psd agencies exist for the service of the citizenry, not to wedge one into Procrustean arrangements.
I wonder if she he would agree to a temporary use of a name written in punycode if the province agreed (under legal penalty) to upgrade their systems within some reasonable (multi-year) time.
Sadly, governments are almost always procrustean in their nature because they are bureaucratic. That doesn't have to be the case; the superior alterative being cybernetic governance, but we just don't see that and I don't suspect we ever will.
punycode means that the back end doesn't need to be changed, only the front end. So instead of saying that it's temporary, they can say that k̓ʷə́yecən is the legal name, but that old systems will display it as xn--kwyecn-xycd22mcf until they are upgraded, and promise under legal penalty to upgrade the systems that do display it wrong.
"Cheyenne Cunningham speaks the down-river dialect of hən̓q̓əmín̓əm̓, a language she's been piecing together since she was seven.
Not a single person in her Katzie community, east of Vancouver, is fluent, but she's been picking it up since taking hən̓q̓əmín̓əm̓ classes at her community school when she was a child.
Cunningham was taught by two teachers who learned from the last two remaining hən̓q̓əmín̓əm̓ speakers, and she is now considered a language keeper in her community."
Someone expects huge modifications for a language with three speakers?
This "preserving indigenous languages" thing has reached the point of absurdity. As a hobby or a historical study, fine. As a communications tool, there's no one to talk to.
I agree in general, a language of three individuals should maybe not be accustomed to officially by the government. But in this case it seems that the effect is a bit larger than that, as everything not in the Roman alphabet is blocked. I thought we programmers already knew how to handle more alphabets, so we should just change systems for humans to work with everyones alphabet already.
Would it be a good thing if businesses could be registered in all international character sets? I could see this causing problems. Government officials are only going to be needed to speak the official languages. How would they even refer to these entities they can't read?
I wonder how many officials are capable to inputting name correctly from paper form if it is written from international character sets... Sometimes you have to limit people's freedom to protect them from risks.
Given that accepting non-Latin characters would likely require an overhaul of the business registration office's IT systems, they could also add a field where the registrant could additionally input the name using IPA[0] or even just a romanized/anglicized version. Someone who isn't familiar with the native alphabet or language could refer to that.
East/Southeast Asian and Slavic names are routinely mispronounced, even when transliterated to the Latin alphabet. This isn't even a problem unique to non-Latin alphabets. I butcher the pronunciation of some French names, for example, and with many Scandinavian words I don't even know where to start.
I wish I'd been named drop tables; or something to interfere with search engines and newspapers. My friends could call me anything so it wouldn't matter socially.
Is Prince's legal name [Insert Symbol Here], or is it 'The Artist Formerly Known as Prince'?
> Is Prince's legal name [Insert Symbol Here], or is it 'The Artist Formerly Known as Prince'?
He never changed his legal name, only his stage name.
Governments won't let you legally change your name to just anything. If the computer systems they use to generate drivers licenses and passports can't accept your new name, you can't have it. While the rules vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, very often, bureaucrats and/or judges have to review and approve your new name, and they will reject names that are unpronounceable, cannot be written in the standard alphabet, are offensive, or are just plain too weird. English-speaking countries generally speaking are relatively liberal on choosing names; some European countries are much more restrictive, even telling parents "you can't name your child that because it is not on our list of approved names".
Actually, some states here in Australia ban the use of "Prince" as a name (e.g [0]). That's because it is considered a royal title, not a name. So if Prince had been born in Australia (Prince was not just a stage name, it was his legal first name) he could never have been called that. However, although you can't legally call your child that, it still can be your legal name if you immigrate from a jurisdiction in which that name is allowed. (Interesting hypothetical: what if Prince had moved to Australia and had a son that he wanted to call Prince Jr? Probably the bureaucracy would have denied it, but you can appeal to the courts, and there's a chance the courts might decide it would be legitimate to make an exception in such a case.)
> "You just about wiped us out, the least you can do is let us use our language."
To be clear, no one is preventing them from using the language, only registering a business in a particular character set. Also, respectfully, (and I'm sure I'll be downvoted into the ground for asking, but) I don't understand the ethical calculus that faults living groups of people for things some other group of people (albeit with the same label) did centuries ago. The only way I can make it make sense is if we pretend that human beings are fungible tokens within their identity groups. I'm only digressing because this sort of rationale seems to keep coming up these days and I don't understand it.
You mean the orthographic written form of the language that was codified by same "wiper outers" to help preserve it?
I wonder how other words in the same language have been written to use them as business names (non or less orthographic versions). Or considering typewriters and computers have long been useless with non-standard character sets, how the words were depicted when using those tools. Presumably there's some rendered form of the words that makes use of UTF-8, right?
There's some internal debate about this in the Jewish community. Many Russian Jews were actively speaking Hebrew and publishing, for instance, Hebrew newspapers while western European Jews were mostly speaking Yiddish. Regardless I think my point is that language is a really important part of culture and saying "only 3 people speak this" doesn't ring true to me as a good reason not to treat any language as culturally important or relevant.
Huh? It was used in religious services before that and many people could speak/understand it. I don't think its dead until people actually stop using it.
Why is it ridiculous to try to keep your culture and heritage alive? Just because your country spent over 100 years trying to eradicate indigenous culture with residential schools, doesn't mean you should move on.
Because your culture is either your day-to-day life, or it's a performance you put on to self-reenforce your identity. If the later, it's not important and you can relegate it to a historical observation.
In this case, if they're trying to hold onto it that means it's not part of daily life. They're adding friction to people's lives and wasting children's learning time on trivia.
Also, let's talk performative political correctness for a moment. Any other message is racism of low expectations. "Natives can and should live in the wild because that's their way." -- TooManyPeople
It's race-focused and thus ridiculous. The best life outcomes (in Canada and everywhere) are in the cities and by-definition, not related to native culture or practices. Poor non-indigenous people know this and move there for opportunity. We shouldn't burden indigenous people with this ahistorical and racist expectation that they'll forego their potential to live in the wood and manage nature, speaking dead languages. Natives are people, not political points.
> There's no reason not to allow Unicode characters, and Unicode already allows that alphabet to be used.
No reason besides the fact that Unicode characters can cause countless errors in legacy systems downstream.
Perhaps the money that could be spent on supporting arbitrary renditions of indigenous languages in non-standard latin-derived characters would be more wisely spent on supporting those communities directly.
> No reason besides the fact that Unicode characters can cause countless errors in legacy systems downstream.
All systems worthwhile have been using UTF-8 since the 1990s. There is no excuse for legacy systems handling business applications not to handle UTF-8.
> All systems worthwhile have been using UTF-8 since the 1990s.
That's irrelevant. You can rest assured that in any larger government system some information must travel through the equivalent of a chimpanzee trained in Baudot code.
In which case the problem is with the government (that already supports French symbols, mind), not with the person hoping to have sensible support for names.
Of course the problem is with the government. That's not my point.
My point is that there are plenty of reasons why this kind of name is not supported. Besides the legacy computing reasons, having a name that only a handful of people in the whole world could spell out is going to cause problems.
Fixing this problem would cost real money that could be used on other things. Perhaps the indigenous community should be consulted on their most pressing issues before enshrining the right to have these characters in a business name.
I'm guessing the system was built to handle extended (8-bit) ascii, which contains the accented French characters. Upgrading a system of this size (and potentially many other systems it needs to trade information with) to support UTF-8 would be a very large undertaking.
It should have been built to support UTF-8 in the first place and should be upgraded, but the time it will take to do that will not help this person. With any luck, it may help someone else in the future though.
Unicode lets you record the data but does not address the societal problem of record keeping in a way that all staff can use.
British Columbia has a very large population of Chinese speakers. If you allow multiple language script for every language you would still need a transliteration in English or French, since they are the common denominator languages. Same is true to for Cyrillic, Arabic and Korean, all of which are well represented in modern day Canadian society.
Some years back the City of Richmond BC was having difficulty in the fire department because they could not identify the names of some local businesses that called in because the signs were all in Chinese script. :)
Not sure how that has been or was actually rectified.
I think you've touched on two separate issues. The first is with human interactions with the businesses (firefighters finding the building), the second is dealing with official paperwork and interactions (filing for the license, etc).
The former has various solutions depending on the situation (ex: numbered street addresses, logos, internationalized names, etc).
The later, and one the article is dealing with, is mostly solved by the fact that all business licenses (at least in BC) have a unique "business number" assigned by the city in which you acquire your license. Other than the initial data entry of the name and it being displayed reasonably on forms, any need to identify the business during an interaction can fall back to the business number if the representative does not know how to pronounce, spell or type the name. In fact, I suspect most government employees just type the business number in anyway because it's fast, easy and doesn't involve trying to spell whatever post-modern spelling they used to get an available domain name.
This is something that could've easily been done back in the days of pen and paper, why shouldn't it be possible now? Technology is supposed to make things easier, not harder.
Was it done in pen and paper? I doubt it.. Imagine trying to decipher someone's handwritten rendition of hən̓q̓əmín̓əm̓ k̓ʷə́yecən. Good luck. I imagine there were restrictions on character set, name length, and other attributes in the days of pen and paper as well.
The system is probably old and written for ISO-8859-1 or similar. French diacritics are supported and... that's it.
B.C. system has to be upgraded to Unicode. While the web world might've finally gotten everything to be Unicode with utf-8 encoding being predominant, these government systems have not.
Improving them requires lots of tax dollars, which aren't spent on cost centers like computer systems unless they're forced to.
And yes, getting all the systems that are potentially nationwide would require years to fix it all. Every single place where these names are stored or transmitted would need to be upgraded to support Unicode.
But let's make things worse. If they file a document in court, do the court systems handle unicode encodings? Do the fonts?
Just using unicode would be a disaster. It still has to be constrained and the law should and does define what characters are allowed. If company names can have emojis or multi-layer stacked diacritics or text direction changing between left-to-right and right-to-left in the middle of the name, or an invisible word joiner character, nobody will be able to make sense of them. Names are for humans, so they have to be in human language.
The language migth be "native", but the alphabet isn't - hən̓q̓əmín̓əm̓ k̓ʷə́yecən - obviously it's derived from "foreign" (Latin) alphabet. Nothing "local" about it. They could just as easily pick a few different letters to transliterate the language to...
It's a tragedy, but the fact is the language is already dead and they're Weekend at Bernie's-ing it to generate press coverage. Having to use a legal name that isn't identical to the actual name of your business is a minor inconvenience that people have been dealing with for decades if not centuries.
Sure, the written language is Latin derived (as are most native american written languages). But that could have occurred a hundred years ago, I don't see how that makes it a "made-up" problem. Take, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary , for instance
That's the difference between an indigenous language and not.
The goal of recognizing the UN resolution wasn't that anything an indigenous person wants has to be accommodated, but that indigenous traditions must be recognized and allowed. Otherwise a native could learn Lojban and force the government to recognize it.
If anything the 'made up problem' here is that a bureaucracy is effectively stamping out a culture or part of a culture from engaging in business, due to a legibility problem in a computer system.
Think about how profoundly strange this is. An entire traditional human way of expression is closed off to a people because the administrators of the city cannot handle to input a bunch of characters into a machine.
I'm truly fascinated that people seem to think the sane response to this is to defer to the word processor
To me this sounds perfectly reasonable. Even if technically possible sometimes logistically it makes no sense. We still aren't fully digital and name that your average official can not input is something that will cause problems in future. This is name of legal entity, for example let's say you see name printed somewhere, how would you search for it? Or do data entry if there is bunch of these?
Place names around vancouver already often are in native languages (presumably not this one) often having signs using the same alphabet as this article is about.
Canada's laws and systems don't have to be compatible with UNDRIP. Look at what Canada's official statement of support for UNDRIP says:
"Although the Declaration is a non-legally binding document that does not reflect customary international law nor change Canadian laws, our endorsement gives us the opportunity to reiterate our commitment to continue working in partnership with Aboriginal peoples in creating a better Canada."
This is maddening. Related: Did you know in California, your name can't have accents? You know, like the ´ and ˜ in Spanish. Good thing there aren't any Hispanic folks there. /s
People, design your systems to conform to reality. Don't make other people bend to fit your lazy design. Yes, it will be more complicated. Yes, it will be more work. Tough noogies. That's what you signed up for.
I wrote extensive app logic using utf-8, trial-by-fire ? commercial use of the app in Thailand (I'm American) - it was well-received. I fully support educational applications in utf-8 by default, and educational principles for all people at all skill levels in almost every case.
BUT parent comment blurs important distinctions in the rush to lecture the software developers of the world. As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, legal documents are not the same as educational material, and territory is not universally multi-lingual based on a whim.
Different people can call you by different names. Same with companies and governments. It's not like the name the government addresses you by is your real name.
I don't really get the outrage, I've always been perfectly fine being addressed
by the government and other organizations without the diacritics in my name. In
fact I far prefer that to their placement being mixed up by human error (or a
wrong diacritical mark being used, etc).
I once tried to register a business using an emoticon as the company name. I read all the guidelines and relevant legislation and, as far as I could see, there was no rule prohibiting it. The automated system accepted it, but it was rejected in the final manual review. I can't remember the exact reason; it was something catch-all like "not suitable".
This discussion reminds me why we keep getting students kicked off Facebook for having "fake names". Yeah, 3 people are fluent and they are trying their best to spread it again and this is a step. I love people paying lip service to human rights when self-naming is basically the only way to reestablish a sense of self.
My initial thought is they must not be using Unicode, but then I wondered if Unicode has the characters for hən̓q̓əmín̓əm̓. I did a quick search, but didn’t find an answer. Does anyone know if there is a definitive list of all languages that are supported by Unicode?
If it wasn't in Unicode it's highly unlikely your computer could render it to you in your own comment. The Canadian system very likely doesn't support Unicode, or intentionally limits the supported character set.
This should not be shocking to anybody that has worked on or with government software. One group of my collegues is working on migrating a mainframe cobol application to a new stack. A year in and they are still trudging through requirements gathering.
Tbh I wouldn’t be surprised if a similar issues from many large enterprise corporations either. I’ve worked in both and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone think about this stuff.
Surely there is some canonical ASCII representation they could use that is equivalent to the Doing Business As. Seems like a reasonable compromise while the ultimate problem is handled by a Unicode migration.
punycode or something similar is very likely to be the technical solution to the problem so that only the front end has to be fixed rather than the backend and everything that talks to the backend. And it's probably better to let the punycode leak through in a few places in order to solve the problem expeditiously.
As many others here have eloquently identified, this is a made up problem.
But it does serve a purpose. To make "strawmen" real. When someone needs to rage against the "non-sensical, ultra-sensitive left", this is the sort of stuff they can Google to make their point.
CBC gets to make money from clicks, but also serves those in power by helping to distract away from actual socialist critiques of the present federal "leftist" government. This isn't just some "never ascribe to nefarious reasons what could be better explained by stupidity" thing. It happens too damn often.
> The language rule is enshrined in law in B.C.'s Business Corporation Act, which states: "A company or extraprovincial company must display its name ... in legible English or French characters."
Most jurisdictions have official languages. There's room for discussion about colonialist and discriminatory causes and effects, of course. But it's not necessarily obvious that governments ought to accommodate n languages, or to what degree.