Re: Surnames and indexing white pages

[David Herron <[e-mail]>]

It is good to run across someone else who's been angered over the eurocentricism
apparent in the X.400/X.500 spec's .. the same comments about the name
structure which you said for X.500 is also true for X.400.

One of my hobbies is Medieval Recreation.  That is, I study (free time allowing)

how people lived in the Middle Ages and attempt recreation of these things.
If you wander over to rec.org.sca you'll find some friends of mine ;-).  One
of the things I study is naming practices, what sort of names did people use
in the middle ages, and the structure and grammar thereof.  This hardly makes
me any kind of Linguist, but more of an extremely interested hobbyist.

I'm not about to suggest restructuring of the personal name attributes to
support medieval names.  Everything which John Gottschalk just mentioned
is very true.

There are a number of name styles which I'm aware of.  The `surname' system
familiar to us is just one and was imposed on us at some point in history
(to make some legal/genealogical things easier).

The `patronymic' or `matronymic' systems are what John was talking about
with either `bin' or `bintu' (those are middle eastern).  It's just like
he says, in a patronymic society you take your fathers name and make it
into the `son of' form (genitive) (and matronymic societies do this with
mothers name).  I understand this is still done in Iceland besides the middle
eastern examples which John mentioned.

In some cultures (medieval Wales for instance) the patronymics can go back
for multiple generations (John ap George ap Lloyd ap Llewellyn .. for instance).

I haven't studied many non european systems.  I recently took a class on
medieval Japanese names, however.  Those had five components which I don't
clearly remember right now, most especially the order.  However one was
from the `clan' you were a member of.  Another was for the branch of government
(society?) you worked in.  Another for your ranking.  Another for something
which served as `given name' but translated as "son #1", "daughter #2".  etc.

Then there are `occupational' (John the Smith became John Smith when
organized surnames were imposed on us).  And from descriptive bynames
(John Goodheart).  And from locations (Jack London for instance).  But these
all fit the model which X.500 uses, especially since those were what was
imposed as surnames.

Now..  is any of this actually a problem?  Do the perceived needs for X.500
require that the children of one person be listed in the directory
in a way allowing easy finding of them?  Or is the real need in lookups
and so you want to specify a useful presentation order of the components?
Or will there be legal/genealogical reasons why it will be requested
that parent/child relationships be shown in X.500?



To my understanding a good generalization of personal names is

	to allow for `n' components (n is pretty small but varies
	from culture to culture.. the largest value I know of is 5)

	specification of presentation order and which component(s) is/are
	used for sorting.

I suspect this isn't the place to raise these issues.  Since the Person
class is defined in X.500 it is *that* committee to which these issues
are brought.

<- David Herron <[e-mail]> (work) <[e-mail]> (home)
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