On 04/11/2014 09:38, "Finn Årup Nielsen" <fn(a)imm.dtu.dk> wrote:
On 11/03/2014 06:03 PM, Daniel Kinzler wrote:
Having a separate field for the surname in
general doesn't seem to
useful to me,
and could even be misleading. The concept of a "surname" as such is a
western
concept, and doesn't translate well to other culures. In fact, there
isn't much
we can assume about names at all, see
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-
names/
Perhaps it is better to call it "family name" rather than surname to
accommodate Asian ordering of given name and family name. Familienname
and nom de famille are "correct" in that sense.
If this is about sorting names in lists, then I am a big fan of the
MusicBrainz approach of a Sort Name field - this is a field than can be
used for sorting but doesn't typically get displayed - this makes it very
flexible and compatible with all kinds of different naming conventions
from around the world:
http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Style/Artist/Sort_Name
Examples:
Humfrey, Nicholas
Beatles, The
Connick Jr., Harry
nick.