Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote: > In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Steve > Holden wrote: > > >>John Machin wrote: >> >>[lots of explanation about peculiarities of people's names] >> >>While I don't dispute any of this erudite display of esoteric >>nomenclature wisdom the fact remains that many (predominantly Western) >>databases do tend to use first and last name (in America often with the >>addition of a one- or two-character "middle initial" field). > > > Just because most Western designers of databases do it wrong doesn't mean > that a) you should do it wrong, or b) they will continue to do it wrong > into the future, as increasing numbers of those designers come from Asian > and other non-Western backgrounds. > I quite agree: my comment was really intended to highlight the fact that most Western database designers (myself included) do tend to be quite locale-centric. I haven't any experience with Eastern design, so can't say whether the same holds true. > >>So, having distilled your knowledge to its essence could you please give >>me some prescriptive advice about what I *should* do? :-) > > > Has anyone come up with a proper universal table design for storing people's > names? > > Certainly "first name" and "last name" are the wrong column names to use. I > think "family name" and "given names" would be a good start. For the > Icelanders, Somalians and the Muslims, their father's name goes in > the "family name" field, which makes sense because all their siblings (of > the same sex, at least) would have the same value in this field. > > I wonder if we need another "middle" field for holding the "bin/binte" part > (could also hold, e.g. "Van" for those names that use this). > > There would also need to be a flag field to indicate the canonical ordering > for writing out the full name: e.g. family-name-first, given-names-first. > Do we need something else for the Vietnamese case?
You'd think some standards body would have worked on this, wouldn't you. I couldn't think of a Google search string that would lead to such information, though. Maybe other, more determined, readers can do better. regards Steve -- Steve Holden +44 150 684 7255 +1 800 494 3119 Holden Web LLC/Ltd http://www.holdenweb.com Skype: holdenweb http://holdenweb.blogspot.com Recent Ramblings http://del.icio.us/steve.holden -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
