Re: [Jmap] JSContact: gender property

[Robert Stepanek <[e-mail]>]

Hi Andreas,

On Thu, Dec 23, 2021, at 3:51 PM, Andreas Hauser wrote:
> Not only is there grammaticalGender but also salutations often differ based on relationship, like "Dear Robert" / "Dear Sir“ or „Lieber Robert“ / „Sehr geehrter Herr Stepanek“.

Agreed (I am a German native speaker, too).

> To make this most useful in practice, a field for salutation might be considered, taking variables for first name (e.g. %FN), nick name and last name (e.g.%LN): „Dear %FN“, „Dear Professor %LN“ etc.

I agree with Neil that the JSContact spec does not seem the right place for this. Such templates should rather go in the applications and services that build on the contacts data. Note that some of the template language that you suggest is covered by the Unicode Person Name Formatting spec: https://www.unicode.org/review/pri434/ We made sure that the naming properties in JSContact use the same terminology to interoperate with that PRI434.

What we might consider instead is to allow setting modifiers on the grammatical gender:

grammaticalGender:
  - gender:  ("animate", "female", ...") (mandatory)
  - modifiers (optional): list of
      - value
      - type ("formality", "deixis", "number")
   
where

"formality": allows values "intimate", "familiar", "distanced"
"deixis": allows values "proximal", "medial", "distal"
"number": allows "singular" and "plural"

This should cover a good number of human languages. However, I am not a linguist and I am afraid none on this mailing is either?

Cheers,
Robert