Re: [NTG-context] bibliography again: “von” and “van”

Hi Alan, Hans, As you say the treatmeant of the „particles“ are complicated. They depend on „citizenship“, period, country of title, true nobility or ennoblement, the region of a country one comes, and form of the particle (abbreviation, captilization). Practically all of this information is missing in the a normal bibliography. Sure we can try to guess some from publication date, language, etc. But, these are very in accurate, and will not give decent results. Now, I am all for making as easy as possible for the user and have a system do as much inference as possible. We could simply add all kinds of switches and coding to help this process, but in the end we end up with an over complicated format that grows into a monster! I as an old school type and database person would think it far better, to take a more pratical approach. Set up the inference rules for the names after 1920. Most of the ambiguity is gone for most of the western world to my knowledge! (I can not say much about the rest, we have not even talked about them). We can add fields or a mechanisms where the author of a bibliography can set display form, sort form etc. that are used. Yes, this does put the burden on the author, but is the cleanest and most flexible way to do it. Or implement a mechanism where the Author of the bibliography can write a SETUP/filter for the format of the author field and add a field to the format called authorfieldtype. this way. I believe this would be the ConTeXt way. regards Keith.

Am 28.01.2015 um 04:10 schrieb Alan BRASLAU :

I have been arguing with Hans over the proper treatment of "particles", in general. The rules vary greatly - here we are looking at a comparison between Dutch and German practice. In French, the use often depends on history differing before and after the revolution. In Spanish, we have other practice.

One solution is to make the rendering depend on the "language=" bibtex field. But this does not work universally. With Hans, we have extended the bibtex standard so that names can be explicitly separated, as in: author = {particle, lastname, suffix, firstname} This allows the author to use a free form for each component without resorting to any bibtex trickery (like capitalization or not). How these components are handled or rendered is not entirely worked out. Indeed, the German practice differs from others. Thus my suggestion of the use of the language field (or setting).

Alan