--On Tuesday, November 4, 2025 08:56 +1300 Brian E Carpenter <[email protected]> wrote:
> [Incidentally, the macron on that Māori salutation has its own > typographical history. When Māori was first written down in the > 19th century, there was no macron (which lengthens the vowel). > It seems to have been first used early in the 20th century > but was unusual, since a lot of printing presses couldn't handle > it. Sometimes long vowels were indicated by doubling them: Maaori, > but that was relatively uncommon. In recent years, the macron > has mostly taken over, helped of course by modern I18N technology. > However, some Maaori iwi (tribal groupings) still prefer the > double vowel usage and as a result, so do some local government > agencies. So, if we ever have an RFC author with a Māori name > including a long vowel, the RPC will need to look into all this.] In a way, this is the opposite of your Bing Liu example. In that case, we have two different people with the same name and your expectation (and mine) is that the names in Chinese characters are the same. It suggests three possibilities for parenthetical notes for one of them that might be of interest if they were using those Chinese characters, with the other one somehow paralleling): (Bing Liu) -- preserves the ambiguity (Bing (Remy) Liu) -- borrowing from the datatracker (Bing Liu, [email protected]) One might imagine even more cases if one or them had chosen to adopt an English-style name that was not even approximately a transliteration. In the Māori case of multiple ways to write/transcribe the name of one person, which I suspect is at least as common globally, the problem would be to be sure the author (and the RPC) standardized on the same form. Unless that were done, our optimism about different types of search engines sorting all of these things out might be a tad too optimistic. Guess I'd better finish and post my more direct response to Martin. john -- rswg mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
