5 ms·
My last name is mixed case, so capitalizing it makes it wrong.
by jlv2 7y ago
My last name is mixed case, so capitalizing it makes it wrong.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoWrong, or contrary to your preferred style? I see names like Macdonald and MacDonald, where one family prefers the mid-capitalisation to another or family names like De Havilland. But it seems like a reasonable disambiguation to capitalise a family name. Could you be more specific about what makes it "wrong". FWIW my family name is commonly misspelt, life is too short to get too hung up about it. In my case it's just a name that existed prior to English standardisation.
- jcrawfordor 7y agoIn genealogical research it's typical to not only standardize capitalization of family names (typically to ALL CAPS) but to also standardize spelling to the most common or first used spelling. Otherwise searching becomes a very frustrating venture, and these things change surprisingly quickly through generations.
- mcguire 7y agoGood luck with mcguire. ;-)
- YawningAngel 7y agoWould this not render fairly unambiguously to MAGUIDHIR (?spelling, corrected in an edit as I got it wildly wrong)? It only seems confusing if you're not Irish, and I'm already completely at sea with names that aren't Western European so this seems like a fine tradeoff to make.
- mcguire 7y agoUnambiguously? Yep. (And wow, I'm impressed.) But you're going to dreadfully confuse people looking for Mark McGwire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_McGwire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_McGwire), for example. (And possibly "MacGuiver". I'm kind of unconvinced that it's related.)
- wyldfire 7y agoA long time back soundex [1] was used for matching things like names. I imagine there might be yet better algorithms these days but that one probably still solves this problem relatively well. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex EDIT: I guess there are better ones: metaphone [2] is a modern improvement on soundex. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphone
- natestemen 7y agowrong could be contrary to your preferred style. that's just how it goes. just because you don't care if others misspell you name doesn't mean that applies to all others.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoI care, it's just it's an emotional response and over time I've realised that there's no real logical reason to correct it in most every situation. Of course people are not logical, and I don't expect others to share my values -- in part that's the point of asking question to get another perspective that I can use to alter my own.
- philwelch 7y agoPerhaps adjusting the capitalization, e.g. McMILLAN rather than MCMILLAN?
- crdrost 7y agoThis might be suitable. I don't know about jlv2, but the Dutch frequently have a tussenvoegsel[1], an insertion between their names which is properly lowercased but is a part of the family name. So the physicist who researched molecular stickiness is named Johannes Diderik van der Waals. His surname is "van der Waals" and a scientific reference should be cited as "van der Waals, JD", sorted alongside other surnames starting with W (either sorted at WAALS∅∅JD where ∅ is a symbol that evaluates less than any letter, or occasionally you will see them sorted at W∞VAN∅DER∅WAALS∅∅JD so that all of the tussenvoegsels end up at the end of their section, where ∞ is a symbol that evaluates greater than any letter). It is considered formally incorrect to capitalize tussenvoegsels, except when they begin a sentence or when you precede them with an article like Mr. or Dr. You would probably want to write his name in this last-name-capitalized-first-no-commas convention as “van der KAMP Johannes Diderik;” writing ”VAN DER KAMP” looks wrong to me—but I am not sure what the French do. Is there a Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Surnames yet? There’s famously one for names in general. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tussenvoegsel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tussenvoegsel
- Xixi 7y agoYour post made me want to check the rules of the "particule" in French [1], with regard to French names, as in: Charles de Gaulle, Jean de La Fontaine or Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu. Turns out, capitalization depends on the grammatical construct. It's always capitalized at the beginning of a sentence, or to avoid ambiguity as in "Les mémoires de De Sèze". It's never capitalized when writing the full name (Jean de La Fontaine). In other constructs, it's complicated, and quite subjective... Foreign names with particules follow the rules of the country of origin. [1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particule_(onomastique)#Majuscule_ou_minuscule_ https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particule_(onomastique)#Majusc...?
- lalalandland 7y ago
- kapep 7y agoIt makes all names wrong but I guess mixed case names are probably harder to read. "Small Caps" could be used to avoid that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_caps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_caps
- mcguire 7y agoSo is mine, but it would make life easier all around.
- FabHK 7y agoOne could restrict it to the first mentioning in any (con)text. Would that be acceptable?