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Comment by nanis | Hacker News Reader

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> He immediately gets angry at Facebook messing up his name. The company changes his name to ‘Hans De Zwart’, with a capitalized D. A small annoyance, but for De Zwart it signifies something bigger: “It is the arrogance of a giant American corporation which considers the correct spelling of the names of millions of Dutch people an edge case.”

I am really confused. I am assuming the correct spelling is "de Zwart" ... since a human is writing this article, it shouldn't have been too hard for him to use the correct spelling or check the work of any computer involved in publishing the piece.

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It was actually translated into English by De Zwart himself. I believe that proper capitalisation of Dutch names with 'de' is to keep the 'd' lowercase if stating the full name (Hans de Zwart), but to capitalise the 'd' if stating just the last name (De Zwart), which the article seems to do consistently (except when quoting Facebook's mangling of the name).

In this context, Dutch refers to the country The Netherlands, not the language.

Based on my non-linguist opinion, I would say you're correct. Dutch people tend to not capitalise their Ds in surnames. When only mentioning the surname, it is treated as a mini-sentence, hence the capitalisaiton.

In northern Belgium (AKA Flanders), Dutch speakers tend to capitalise their Ds in surnames, so you would see "De Zwart" regardless of where it appears in the sentence. In case you're wondering: yes, there are quite a few surnames that exist both in The Netherlands with "de" and in Belgium with "De". The same goes for "van" (of) and "vander/van der" (of the), for instance.

Then again, if they're nobility, they might not capitalise the "de" because it might be the French "of" as opposed to the Dutch "de", meaning "the". Confusing stuff.

In Spain we don't have so many surnames prefixed with particles, but we do have some (e.g. "Del Río") and the capitalization also works as you describe for Dutch.

It makes sense: when you say Juan del Río it's obvious that it's a surname, but if you just said "del Río" without context, the "del" could be confused with the common word.

Exactly. In the Dutch example, "de Zwart" in the middle of a sentence would be a misspelling of "de Zwarte", meaning "the Black".

Works like that in French -- with subtle caveats depending on the length of the name and weather it starts with a vowel: "D'Alembert", "De Sèze", "De Gaulle"... but "La Rochefoucauld".

I am assuming the correct spelling is "de Zwart"

Are you really willing to assume someone spelled their own name wrong before you question your own knowledge about Dutch names? That seems a bit unreasonable. It's much more likely that your assumption is incorrect than someone wrote their name incorrectly.

This is the premise that should drive software as far as user input goes. The rule should simply be "Trust that the user entered their data correctly and don't try to 'fix' it programmatically." Validate it, sanitize it, but don't change it.

Are you chiding someone for knowing and communicating their confusion and assumptions? When someone is already communicating enough self-awareness to obviate that, either contribute clarifying information or say nothing.

I think the problem is that the OP did not stop at "I am confused, can someone explain this discrepancy to me?" They went on to make seemingly unconfused assumptions that the translator must have misspelled his own name in an article about misspelling names.

The reason for my assumption is the explicit statement:

> The company changes his name to ‘Hans De Zwart’, with a capitalized D. A small annoyance, but for De Zwart it signifies something bigger ...

which seems to imply pretty unambiguously that using "D" is incorrect. Assuming that all the information I have is what is contained in the article, this is confusing.

Seemingly completely reasonable... but I think your assumption can be classified under falsehood number 7 (People's names do not change) in https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... which was linked above.

The way it's used in the article is correct. His full name is "Hans de Zwart", but if you want to refer to him by just his last name, you always capitalize the tussenvoegsel: "De Zwart".

I did notice the juxtaposition in the paragraph there, but everything is correctly written here.

If you write just the last name, it'd be "De Zwart". If you write the full name it's "Hans de Zwart".

The first character of the name is capitalized. Just a Dutch grammar quirk.

"Hans de Zwart" would be correct in Dutch yes. In English it'd be similar to "Hans the Black"

We also have variants that we insert between first and lastname: 'van' (from), 'van de' (from the), and many others.

I was under the same impression, until I reached the end of the article and noticed first the return to "de", and second that the author is de Zwart himself

> This article was written by Reinier Kist and originally appeared in Dutch in NRC on August 3rd, 2020. It was translated into English by Hans de Zwart.

If you're referring to him by his last name, it'd be De Zwart. If you're referring to him by his full name, it'd be Hans de Zwart.

And I made a presumptuous comment in another thread about the irony of the author getting it wrong.

Whether that’s you or not, I apologise.

I shall leave my shame there, as a reminder to myself.

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