Re: Personal names and forms of address

Barry,

Thanks for providing a much better explanation than I could have
(although I could add a few more nasty examples including
needing to know just when the name was used or fits in
historical context because, e.g., patronymics evolve into clan
names and then into "last names").  This problem is the king of
rat holes in the i18n area and one either needs to admit it is
unsolvable in the general case, develops a typology that is too
complicated for people to actually use, or goes looking for a
Procrustean Bed and associated instrument for torturing people,
names, or both.

best,
    john



--On Thursday, February 15, 2018 09:02 -0500 Barry Leiba
<barryleiba@computer.org> wrote:

>> Some specifications of other WGs came up with field names
>> "first name" and "last name". We advised them to use "given
>> name" and "family name". That was a long time ago, and is
>> actually not good enough.
> 
> Indeed; there are a lot of common assumptions about names
> based on what's typical in one's culture, and they don't
> necessarily apply to other cultures.  What is the "last name"
> of Joan Miró i Ferrà ?  If you change "last name" to "family
> name", that doesn't work for Björk Guðmundsdóttir :
> "Guðmundsdóttir" is a patronymic, not a family name. How do
> you fit the Burmese names "Nu" and "Thant" into any multi-name
> system?  And what on Earth do you do with Edward Albert
> Christian George Andrew Patrick David Saxe-Coburg and Gotha ?
> 
>> I think later, the advice was to have free-form fields for
>> names, maybe different fields for different usages (e.g. name
>> on billing address, name on bagde/lanyard,...). But I'm not
>> sure to what extent such advice was ever written up or
>> codified.
> 
> Best practice seems to be to have a free-form field with an
> optional field for "sort name" (which gives you hope of
> correctly sorting Joan Miró i Ferrà under "M" (not "F") and
> Otto von Bismarck under "B" (not "V")), and perhaps one for
> pronunciation hints.  But, of course, that's all too
> heavyweight for most usages.  It's too temptingly easy to fall
> back to the assumptions, which work for perhaps 99% of the
> people who use your system.
> 
> Barry
>

Received on Thursday, 15 February 2018 16:04:03 UTC