Talk:List of people by name: St

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[edit] Alphabetizing Issue: Compound Names, especially "St. ...."

The section of this talk page's article's first named section reflects a data-structure decision that may be mistaken. My intention was consistency with other aspects of alphabetizing this list that i think are common sense. Namely, given that many compound surnames are subject to various renderings, such as

  • Darin
  • DaRin
  • daRin
  • Da Rin
  • da Rin

IMO almost certainly should fall next to each other anyway. The Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR 2, currently) provide libraries (at least large ones) with means to resolve problems like these , but

  • they are very complex (Introduction to Cataloguing is the size of a long novel, and i dread to imagine The Compleat Cataloguer [wink]), and
  • in practice, they probably are adequate only because libraries have professionals available to be consulted when a mere mortal gets stumped.

I'm now considering the idea that everyone with spaces, punctuation marks, or "funny" casing in their surname should appear twice (at least) in the list. In this case, St. Legard would appear once somewhere between "Stimson" and "Stoller", and once among people whose names all start with "St. ". (To be more precise, among any version of "St" without a lower case letter being the very next character.) I probably will put back copies of the names i moved away from the start of the St listings, and change the discussion i put on the article.

For those interested in why: Because "compound surnames" (Da Rin and Garcia Marquez are non-borderline cases) are tricky; in my gut, i want Dan before both Da Rin and DaRin, and Garcial after Garcia Marquez, but i doubt the rules that achieve that are user-friendly enough. Tentively, i think that every compound name should appear twice in this list: once as if its spaces, hyphens, and apostrophes were squeezed out and they were spelled with all caps, and once as if we believed all the people having in common a D and an A (of any case) at the start of their name, and not followed without punctutaion by a lower-case letter, are so closely related that it's unthinkable to mix them up with others like Darin.

Comments requested. --Jerzy(t) 02:44, 2004 Mar 26 (UTC) (or so; sig forgotten)

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