Listing Proper Names
By Fritz Gellerman
I appreciated Gerhard Dangel-Reese's discourse on the variations in the spelling and alphabetization of names. I have just finished final editing of the new edition of my Reed Organ Atlas, which purports to list all reed organ makers in the world. Such a problem dealing with the English language (which is a mess all by itself), as well as German, French, Swedish, Finnish, Hungarian, Japanese, etc.
Is 'de Wit' listed as "de Wit" or as "Wit, de"? Different readers have different expectations. In the end I concluded that I couldn't do everyone's research down to the last detail and that a certain amount of ingenuity and persistence is required of the reader. So the listings are not consistent from the viewpoint of any one language. I make heavy use of cross-references and let it go at that. Even more difficult are the city names and streets as the countries changed names: Kutna Hora vs Kuttenberg for example.
Read the Atlas. The plot is weak but there are a lot of great characters!
Fritz Gellerman
[ I'm sure it's better than my dictionary, which has no plot, but
[ "what a great vocabulary!" Where can we purchase the new edition of
[ "Reed Organ Atlas", Fritz? -- Robbie
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(Message sent Mon 13 Jan 1997, 18:04:40 GMT, from time zone GMT-0500.) |
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