A French couple have been banned from naming their baby boy Fañch.
The court in Quimper ruled that the new parents weren’t able to use the character ñ (called a tilde) in their baby’s name.
“The principle according to which babies’ names are chosen by their mothers and fathers must have limits when it comes to using a spelling which includes a character unrecognised by the French language,” the court in the town of Quimper, in northwest France, ruled, according to the Guardian.
The character, used in Spanish and Portugese, indicates nasalisation, for example being pronounced as ‘ny’ in señor.
The baby, born in May 2017, reportedly already has an identitiy card and passport with a tilde on it.
The boy’s father, Jean-Christophe Bernard, told The Guardian: “He will have his tilde, that’s for sure.”
This isn’t the first time a court has ruled on banning a baby name.
In April 2016, a high court judge banned a mother from Wales from calling her baby twin girl Cyanide (her brother was named Preacher).
The woman argued that the name had “positive connotations as the poison that ended the life of Adolf Hitler, the Nazi leader”.
But, according to The Telegraph, the court of appeal upheld earlier rulings and prohibited the mother from using the name due to potential “emotional harm” the name would cause the girl later in life.
And, according to The Mirror, a set of parents in Denmark chose to ignore the list of 7,000 approved names in the country, and instead chose to call their offspring, Anus.
Possibly the strangest of baby name of all times is: ‘Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116’, which was banned in Sweden back in 1996, according to BBC News.
Apparently, it is pronounced Albin. The parents were subsequently fined £450.