Hacker News Reader

Comment by LegionMammal978 | Hacker News Reader

Case-folded names in academic journals happen to be a pet peeve of mine. When the author is listed only as "VINCENT VAN GOGH", is the name rightly spelled with "van" or "Van"? Often, there's no real way to know, short of searching for the author's other works!

Some online metadata lists the name with normal capitalization, but sometimes the spelling was entered by someone whose guess is just as good as yours.

View on HN

Names are awful identifiers, considering how they are misshapen by stylistic rules (case folding, reordering, abbreviation, transliteration, etc.) and how many collisions there are. I really hope some generalised system (ORCID?) finds as wide of adoption as DOI did.

why would you spell as van? the English language and coding format is Van

You’d do it lowercase in van Goch’s name because it’s the correct way to write it for him. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tussenvoegsel

Of course, for someone so well-known, it's easy just to look it up; I was just using that name as an example. But in general, particles in names like "van", "von", "de", etc. might be properly capitalized one way or the other, and it can be impossible to tell which without a close understanding of the author's nationality (which in turn can very difficult to determine).

Yeah, surely the author can't be Dutch or Flemish? Where the van prefix originates?

No it’s not

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_van_Gogh

Because Vincent van Gogh was Dutch. In the Netherlands (and Flanders, I presume) "van" would be lowercased when placed between given name and surname (because it's not a name, "van" just means "of"), but capitalized when it stands alone with the surname:

    Vincent van Gogh
    Van Gogh

And to pre-emptively answer the next question: we don't drop the "van" because some surnames come in varieties with and without it, so you might end up confusing a hypothetical "Jan van Gent" with "Jan Gent".

But of course, you can't tell from an article if someone is Dutch or just has Dutch ancestry but long-since switched to English spelling rules. Which in some cases means the family chose to always lowercase the "van".

Source: look at my username ;)

We don't do that in Flanders. My husband's name is "Roel Van Gils". People (and computer systems) from the Netherlands do automatically change this to "Roel van Gils" but they are wrong.

Also, in Flanders, when you do write the "Van" or the "De" in your lastname with a lowercase letter, we assume you are nobility

Thank you for educating me! :) It also immediately highlights the original problem even better.

Funny how the French do the same thing as us (Dutch people) again though, I wonder if there is a quirky consequence of some historical event "encoded" there?

It's the same in French ('de' is lowercase) though many people get that rule wrong.

It took me a while to realize that "Van Morrison" wasn't the musician's surname.

Falsehoods programmers believe about names number 30:

"There exists an algorithm which transforms names and can be reversed losslessly."

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

Counterpoint: utf8 <-> utf32

Reply on news.ycombinator.com