[Gramps-users] Thoughts on names...

[Don A. <don...@co...>]

This is in response to an interesting discussion on gramps-users about 
the handling
of names in Finnish, and how GRAMPS has a few deficiencies in this area. 
Sorry
I've been out of the discussion so far. I'm on vacation this week and 
1400 miles
from home (over 2200 km for those of you outside the US), so I haven't 
been keeping
up on my email. I tend to get anywhere from 20-50 gramps-related emails 
per day, so
I can build up quite a back log.

 From what I can see, gramps is kind of unique in that it is a genealogy 
program that is
not regional. Most of the programs that I have encountered then to be 
focused on a
particular region, such as the US, Sweden, or various other countries. 
When a program
does this, a lot of the diversity that you find in the world does not 
need to be handled.

GRAMPS is being used across countries, languages, and cultures. It seems 
to me that
it needs to adapt to this a bit better. We've started this with the 
relationship calculators
and with some improvements on how we handle translations in reports, but 
we still have
a long way to go.

Names appear to be one of the issues we need to tackle. From the current 
discussion,
it looks like there is a quick fix by adding a new field. While this may 
fix the current
issue under discussion, I'm not sure this is the right way to go. It 
adds a "band-aid" to
fix one problem. Soon, we'll have to add a "band-aid" to fix another. I 
think we need
to take a step back and look at the larger picture.

Lets face it. Names are complicated. Not the name style with which you 
are familiar -
after all, that makes perfect sense. But everyone else in the world just 
doesn't get it, do
they?  :-)

 From my perspective, there are two major issues:

1) Name "parts"
2) Name display/sort

Name parts are all the little bits that make up a name. Name display is 
how the
name is shown on the screen or in reports. On this side of the pond, we 
typically
have First Name, Middle Name, and Last Name. For example, in my case:

First Name : Donald
Middle Name : Norman
Last Name : Allingham

Other cultures, however, may not have the concept of a "Last Name". Or maybe
there are other names as well that aren't used in the anglo tradition. 
The GEDCOM
6.0 spec gives the example of the African "day name", which has no 
corresponding
item in the Anglo/American tradition.

Name display and sorting is also a problem. In my case, my name would be 
displayed
as "Donald Allingham" (FirstName LastName), and sorted as "Allingham, 
Donald"
(LastName, FirstName).  In some cultures (I'm not sure, but I think it 
is common in
some areas of the Middle East), a name would be represented as "LastName 
FirstName"
instead of "FirstName LastName". I assume that it would also be sorted 
as "LastName
FirstName"

I've been looking at the GEDCOM 6.0 specification, and it tries to 
handle some
of this. Name parts are assigned "levels", based off how the name 
represents itself
in its own culture.

I think that this might be a good way to go for GRAMPS. GRAMPS could have
you select your default name style (Anglo, Arabic, Chinese, Finnish, 
etc.), and the
display could adapt based on your preference. For any particular name, 
you could
change the name style.

So as a possible example, in my case:

First Name: Donald (Level 3)
Middle Name:  Normal (Level 4)
Last Name: Allingham (Level 1)

Having an "anglo" style name, my name would be constructed as:

"Level3 Level4 Level1", and sorted by "Level4, Level3 Level1"

Adding new styles should be fairly easy.

Does this make sense?

Don