Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!think!barmar
From: barmar@think.COM (Barry Margolin)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Standardizing Email?
Message-ID: <27078@think.UUCP>
Date: 30 Aug 88 23:06:01 GMT
References: <788@vsi.UUCP> <79700010@p.cs.uiuc.edu> <738@etive.ed.ac.uk>
Sender: news@think.UUCP
Reply-To: barmar@kulla.think.com.UUCP (Barry Margolin)
Organization: Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 47

In article <738@etive.ed.ac.uk> jcb@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Julian Bradfield) writes:
>Well, without thinking about it, I can come up with the following
>problems: how would you deal with
>
>The Duke of Bedford
> (English peers have surnames, but don't use them)
>Fernando Colon de Lopez y Garcia
> (will you put all of the last names in the surname field? Omit the
>"de Lopez y Garcia"? or what?)
>Vigdis Finbogadottir
> (Icelanders don't have surnames, only patronymics, and they're listed
>under their name, not under their patronymic)

Well, what do standardized, printed forms look like in those
countries?  In America, most forms that one fills out have only three
spaces for the parts of a name: first name, middle initial, surname.

This must be a real bitch for database designers.  What do they do?

If I want to look up the Duke of Bedford in a British phone book, what
do I look for?  And in response to the other posting, where someone
said that Arabic names include all the ancestors, what does that phone
book look like?  Does everyone get a page to himself?

The point is that organizing names is nothing new.  Phone books have
been around for decades, and organizations have been filing personal
data in computers for years.  Any existing solutions for breaking down
names are applicable.

>I'm sure if I knew about more countries, I could come up with more
>naming schemes! But even if the `standard' is intended solely for
>American use (the structuring you give seems to be only for American
>Anglo-Saxon(ized) names), not everybody in the U.S. has an American name!

I seriously doubt that there is anything in the X.400 standard that is
intended to be biased in favor of Americans.  CCITT is an
international standards body, made up mostly of representatives of
EUROPEAN PTT's.

Perhaps this area of the standard will be revisited at some point.  No
one can actually use these forms of O/R Names until Directory Services
is designed and implemented, and that won't be for a while.

Barry Margolin
Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar@think.com
{uunet,harvard}!think!barmar