Of course, language of the cited publication. Nothing else makes sense at all. This field is also to be used for hyphenation of the title field. BUT, the author of the TeX document must control and decide if the bibliography will use an eventual language= field or rather use the language rule in vigor for the TeX document; alternately, he/she could impose a particular language for the rendering of a particular dataset. Thomas has argued this point. The explicit parsing of "vons" or particles gives control for the sorting of author names. It is not so complicated: if treated as a particle or von, it does not enter into the sorting; if treated as intimately part of the surname (often, but not always, the case for post-revolution names in French, for example) then it does enter into the sorting. German is the only case that I know where the "von" gets placed after the first names. Here, one must not abbreviate the von, of course, as in: "Laue, M. V." - and I have seen this published!! Nor do I want to see: "von Laue, M." However, to be correct, some publications might appear as "Laue, M." Now, say that I want to cite Laue's work published in English (as well as one or more of his references published in German). Clearly this real case will cause grief. I could set language=german for all of his work, but then how are the titles to be hyphenated (and what about quotation marks if the style uses them)? This is why Hans asks if we should optionally parse 5 part author names. Here is a real case: @Article{Friedrich1912, Title = {Interferenzerscheinungen bei Röntgenstrahlen}, Author = {Friedrich, W. and Knipping, P. and Laue, M. von}, Journal = {Sitzber. Math-phys. Kl. bayer. Akad. Wiss. Manche}, Year = {1912}, Pages = {303}, Volume = {22}, Language = {german} } @Article{Friedrich1913, Title = {Interferenzerscheinungen bei Röntgenstrahlen}, Author = {Friedrich, W. and Knipping, P. and Laue, M.}, Journal = {Annalen der Physik}, Year = {1913}, Number = {10}, Pages = {971–988}, Volume = {346}, Doi = {10.1002/andp.19133461004}, ISSN = {1521-3889}, Language = {german}, Publisher = {WILEY-VCH Verlag}, } @Article{Friedrich1913a, Title = {Phénomènes d'interférence des rayons de Röntgen}, Author = {Friedrich, W. and Knipping, P. and Laue, M.}, Journal = {Radium (Paris)}, Year = {1913}, Number = {2}, Pages = {47–57}, Volume = {10}, Language = {french} } @article{PhysRev.37.53, title = {The Diffraction of an Electron-Wave at a Single Layer of Atoms}, author = {Laue, M. v.}, journal = {Phys. Rev.}, volume = {37}, issue = {1}, pages = {53--59}, numpages = {0}, year = {1931}, month = {Jan}, publisher = {American Physical Society}, doi = {10.1103/PhysRev.37.53}, url = {http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRev.37.53} } This last case is directly what I download from: http://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev.37.53 Yikes! So some cleaning (and thought) IS necessary! Alan On Mon, 2 Feb 2015 20:40:16 +0100 "Keith J. Schultz" wrote:

Hi Alan,

All of this is fine and good, but what is the language field suppose to relate to: Language of the text, language of the cited publication language of the citizenship of the author language of the heritage of the name of the author!

Sure we can put a lot of heuristics into it, but we still should have a means to manually set sorting and setting of the fields of the authors!

As you said often one has many mixed authors names and languages of texts!

regards Keith.

...

Am 02.02.2015 um 15:23 schrieb Alan BRASLAU :

The handling of the "vons" issue is cultural and language-dependent. The problem with mucking around with vonsep and other parameters is that one may very well have a mixture of references in a single document (this is often the case for me). I see no solution other than trying to identify some common use and to make the behavior depend on the language= field (or the document language, by default).

Alan

-- Alan Braslau CEA DSM-IRAMIS-SPEC CNRS URA 2464 Orme des Merisiers 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette cedex FRANCE tel: +33 1 69 08 73 15 fax: +33 1 69 08 87 86 mailto:alan.braslau@cea.fr