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The problem (along with addresses) seems relatively simple until you think of all the variables that come along with it. Not even taking into account alphabets there are many gotchas in storing names correctly.
Take for instance names in the Latin American Countries and
Spain:
Luis Alvaro Hernandez Garcia
How would that be stored? In most US-centric databases this is
stored as either:
first_name — Luis
middle_name — Alvaro
last_name — Hernandez Garcia
OR (as the case of OpenACS)
first_name — Luis Alvaro
last_name — Hernandez Garcia
While certainly this model is useful, it has its limitations.
What if you decide to sort your data by Last Name? What is the
correct part of last_name to sort on? Is it Hernandez or Garcia?
These are easy Western Language problems that get much more
complicated when dealing with Eastern European or other cultures
where names aren't written in a first, middle, last order.
Here are some examples of cultural differences and you can see
the problems that are created:
Indonesia — Many (not all) Indonesians have only one
name.
Korea — Some put family name first, others put
family names last.
Hispanic — As well as the above example the rules
can get very complex. Spanish men, for example, sometimes use
their father's name and mother's name and separate them
with a y (and).
Luis Alvaro Hernandez y Garcia
Other times they may hyphenate the last names:
Luis Alvaro Hernandez-Garcia
Now onto Hispanic women (and this also changes somewhat by
country). In general a single women is similar to men. She takes
her father's last name and adds her mothers maiden name. The
difference comes about when the women marries. In this case the
women still has the fathers last name but appends the
husband's last name preceded by de (of):
Luisa Benavides Hernandez de Fernandez
As a side note, in Cuba the Wife keeps her name and so does the
husband.
To complicate matters more, the Wife may be refered to as Luisa
de Fernandez or simply Luisa Fernandez, as well as Sra
Fernandez.