Re: Name Terminology

Carved in mystic runes upon the very living rock, the last words of
Wolfgang Zenker of rec.heraldry make plain:

> Methuselah Jones <methuselah@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Carved in mystic runes upon the very living rock, the last words of
>> George Lucki of rec.heraldry make plain:
>
>>> With the expanding list of not only particles but patronymics,
>>> articles, etc. I am a liitle confused as to what categories of
>>> things you are including - it seems like you are looking to identify
>>> any short string of letters that can be potentially (correctly or
>>> not) detached from a surname.
>
>> That's correct. It's for a program that breaks a name down into its
>> various parts, and it needs to be able to identify these items as
>> part of the surname. It's easy for a human to look at a name like
>> "Eddie Van Halen" and see this, but to a computer it's just a bunch
>> of letters. So, basically I need to tell it "If the penultimate group
>> of letters is in this list, make it part of the surname; otherwise
>> assume it's a middle name."
>
> This could work if your program knows from which language the name
> comes; otherwise there could be some confusion. I have met people
> from Vietnam with "Van" as a middle name.

"Van" can be a Western name too: Van Johnson, for example. That was one
of the first things that occurred to me when I had the idea to try to
figure out this name part.

It's clear that, without some pretty powerful AI, it just isn't going to
be possible to handle every case every time, 100% perfectly.

But that's OK. What I have now is serviceable. This is an issue that
confronts progammers all the time -- weighing possibilities against
practicality. When I'm developing an application for a client, very often
the client or I will think of a scenario that could possibly arise in the
use of the program, and then we discuss how likely it is, and the
consequences of not handling it, and weigh that against the time it would
take to write the code to handle it.

So, this little bit of code won't handle every conceivable case which
might possibly arise, but it will now handle far, far more cases than it
would when I first posted my question in here, and for that I thank
everyone who responded.

--
Methuselah
"Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of
throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned."
-- Buddha
.

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