Initials

[Vladimir Ivanov]

 By this message I would like to begin a discussion (if it would be found appropriate here and hasn’t been done earlier) about the rules of writing initials in various scripts. To make it clearer I’ll try to describe our everyday problems for Russian names and their transliterations in References and Bibliographies. I would be very grateful if someone could answer me then any of the following questions: 1) What are the rules for writing initials in your own language? 2) Are there any differences in rules for writing initials of foreign and domestic names? 3) Do you use different types of transliteration in different types of documents? 4) Does your grammar prohibit Russian-like rules for writing initials (i.e. may we apply our rules for initials when we write articles in your language)? 5) Is the problem of line breaking and “soft space” (as described below) relevant for your language?   Definition for Russian initials: An initial is the first letter of the first name with a period after it like “A.” in “A.Sokolov”. Initials are: the first letter of the first name and the first letter of the patronymic name with a period after each of them like “A.V.” in “A.V.Sokolov”. (Letter N will be used to show format like N.N.Nn…n). These rules are applied not only to Cyrillic, but to other transliteration scripts too. Variants like N. N. Nn…n, N.N. Nn…n with spaces between initials and the last name can be found. But nowadays spaceless form N.N.Nn…n is used more often. Thus we get to N.[ ][N.[ ]]Nn…n. Some people with rare names like Vsevolod prefer two or more letters of their names to be shown in order not to be mixed up with frequent names like Vladimir, e.g. Vs.Safronov. It gives us N[n].[ ][N[n].[ ]]Nn…n. In Bibliographies the books are sorted by last names, so there we can see Nn…n[,] N[n].[ ][N[n].[ ]] with optional commas after the last name. It is not allowed to break the line after the first initial like this: N. N.Nn…n. But it is common to break the line after the second one like this: N.N. Nn…n. The last case can be simulated as N[n].[ ][N[n].[ |CR]]Nn…n. In such cases hyphens adjacent to CR are not allowed. Foreign names are usually initialed in the same way. Tomas Alva Edison becomes T.A.Edison. The exception is letter “J” because it represents two phonemes from the point of view of Russian phonetics. John Reed is shortened to Дж.Рид in Cyrillic script. I suspect that something else is meant by initials in English. My Webster's dictionary says that initial is: a) the first letter of a name; b) pl: the first letter of each word in a full name. Nothing is mentioned about spaces and periods, no examples are provided. During registration some applications ask the user to enter initials. In this field usually “N.N.” is not accepted neither in Cyrillic, nor in Latin (I have not tried Arabic). It is difficult to guess what format is expected. Are there English standards for initials? Are there international rules for that? Format “NN” in applications is accepted instead, but that’s a mistake from the point of view of Russian rules. In diplomatic and consular affairs Russian names must be transliterated in a French-oriented way, otherwise they are English transliterated. For instance, the name “Ч.Айтматов” can look like “Tch.Aytmatov” in foreign passport, which will be normally equal to “Ch.Aytmatov” in Bibliography. It is convenient to put after Russian initials some zero width control character that can be called “Soft Space”. It must act like Soft Hyphen (i.e. not effective in the middle of a line, but allowing line breaking), and must be invisible at the edge of the line. Is there such a character in Unicode? Can it be found in text processors? Now we have to do the required line breaking manually. It is not wise to overload hyphenation rules with it, because language-independent direct control of this feature for all scripts is needed. Thank you in advance, Vladimir Ivanov