People's names (was Re: sqlite3 error)

[John J. Lee]

Steve Holden <steve at holdenweb.com> writes:
[...]
> > 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?
> 
> You'd think some standards body would have worked on this, wouldn't
> you. I couldn't think of a Google search string that would lead to
> such information, though. Maybe other, more determined, readers can do
> better.

I suppose very few projects actually deal with more than a handful of
languages or cultures, but it does surprise me how hard it is to find
out about this kind of thing -- especially given that open source
projects often end up with all kinds of weird and wonderful localised
versions.

On a project that involved 9 localisations, just trying to find
information on the web about standard collation of diacritics
(accented characters) in English, German, and Scandinavian languages
was more difficult than I'd expected.  And I'm glad I was incompetent
to deal with the Japanese collation :-)

I found this useful list of things to worry about, though, which does
say a little about personal names, though not in detail (and provides
some useful Googling terms for somebody determined):

http://developers.sun.com/dev/gadc/des_dev/i18ntaxonomy/i18n_taxonomy.pdf


which I found from this page:

http://www.i18nguy.com/guidelines.html


John