Hi Simon,
--On July 11, 2013 at 3:58:10 PM +0200 Simon Perreault
<simon(_dot_)perreault(_at_)viagenie(_dot_)ca> wrote:
We submitted two drafts to help people here to correctly call chinese
people names:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-deng-call-chinese-names-00
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-zcao-chinese-pronounce-00
Very cool! Thanks for writing this!
I have a question: I think I've seen Chinese names written in both
orders. That is, sometimes "Hui Deng" will be written "Deng Hui". Am I
right? Does this happen often? What is the most common order? Is there a
way to guess what order a name is written in? Sometimes it's not easy
for non-Sinophones to know which part is the given name and which part
is the family name.
Well that actually brings up a good technical point!
In iCalendar (RFC5545) we have properties to represent the organizer and
attendee of meetings. A parameter (attribute) of those properties is "CN" -
defined to be the "common name" of the corresponding calendar user.
Obviously that is a single string and typically the concatenation of first
name/last name. But that of course is a very "Western" approach.
I have had several people request that iCalendar instead define new
parameters for "FIRST-NAME" and "LAST-NAME". That then gives clients the
option of re-ordering those for display purposes based on user locales and
preferences.
So, from a technical standpoint, it seems better to always represent user
names using components (last, first, middle)? vCard does have an "N"
property where individual components of a name can be broken out.
--
Cyrus Daboo