On 18 Dec 2007, at 12:53, Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven wrote:
-On [20071214 19:24], Geraint North ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
So in your example, I (as a reader) would want consistency between
van
Beethoven and Van Zandt - I don't care how they like their name
printed, I
just want to be able to find the "Van someone" that I vaguely
remember in
the list. Indeed, if we were treating the references list like an
Index
(another structure optimised for human-search), each name would
appear
twice.
That's what you want, however, in the Netherlands the van part of
the family
name carries no meaning. Someone called Peter van Zandt would be
sorted under
the Z, not the V. And the same applies for some other countries.
Take for
an even nicer example a Dutch woman who married this Peter van
Zandt: Ineke
ten Bravoure-van Zandt. These so-called 'tussenvoegsels have no
meaning when
it comes to sorting. So if you would sort Peter van Zandt under the
V, you'd
boggle the minds of the Dutch readers at least. So they, as readers,
would
want that consistency intact. ;)
Absolutely (but I didn't know about the married name convention,
interesting). This is why I think that the sorting of names is of
very limited use in electronic publications, as I, as a reader really
need to search for the name fragment that I remember, because I don't
know all of these conventions.
Thanks,
Geraint North
Principal Engineer
Transitive
* The leader in cross-platform virtualization
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