Karl Eichwalder wrote:
Timwi <timwi(a)gmx.net> writes:
You are suggesting we sort by first name?
Yes.
How are people supposed to find a celebrity if
they only know their
surname (which is more common than knowing only their first name)?
A full text retrivial system would surely help.
Certainly, but designing for what you don't have is not always
productive. Meanwhile, as we are holding our breath . . .
The (western) concept of first and surname is just one
system and often
it is pretty obscure. In some countries the "van", "de",
"von",
etc. predicates are part of the surname (prefix, suffix?), in other
countries they are an appendix to the first name.
Prefix. (A suffix comes at the end of the name; as in the feminine
Petrova.) The prefixes will always be a problem. If we aren't sure
between Beethoven and von Beethoven, how will the user know that he
should look it up under Ludwig.
Medieval names will continue to be listed under the "first" name, but
that's because they didn't use family names then.
The surname often changes - tell me the surname of
Ludwig Tieck's sister
;) Okay, men an women devoted to a religious life tend to change
their name as well - but they give up on their old name completely.
The custom varies. In practice we use the name by which they became famous
Esp. since we are an online-medium we are free to
ignore the "official"
writing system. Readers can find the info easily (even if they are
forced to use an external search engine).
Using you as an example Eichwalder gave me 22,000 Google hits, Karl gave
me 10,000,000 hits. If I want to find you I'm not going to start by
searching for Karl. Maybe the "online medium" you are thinking of is a
fortune teller. :-)
Ec