Theerasak Photha wrote: > On 10/7/06, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > >>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. > > > Family name comes last in some Asian countries as well. :) > > It might also be prudent to consider that, e.g,, some Tamils only have > a last name for legal purposes and traditionally go by a single name. > Lots of possibilities to consider. > > >>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). > > > Also 'da' for Portuguese, which means roughly same as > Nederlands/Vlaams. Maybe. As usual: IANAE. > > >>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? > > > Good question, but IIRC, family name comes first followed by any other > given names, just as in a literary index written in English: e.g., > Truman, Harry S > > What if you're Ho Chi Minh? Do you get to list aliases indefinitely? LOL > It seems like some sort of free text search on a "full name" field looks like the only realistic globally-acceptable (?) option.
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