prevalent in Europe and other parts of the world.The practice of putting given names in upper- and lowercase and surnames in all uppercase is not limited to the French. It is quite
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-French-people-write-their-surnames-in-capital-letters
prevalent in Europe and other parts of the world.The practice of putting given names in upper- and lowercase and surnames in all uppercase is not limited to the French. It is quite
--------------- is it common in Germany, Austria ???
The underlying issue is that in parts of Europe, the order
last name/first name can be found to varying degrees. For French
names, the names themselves aren't always unambiguously first names
or last names, and with both orderings possible, capitalization is
used to disambiguate.
In Germany, where last name/first name order survives in bureaucratic contexts and dialectal use, capitalization is not used. Ambiguity
does not appear to be a problem in practice.
Silvano wrote:
Christian Weisgerber hat am 30.03.2024 um 21:22 geschrieben:
The underlying issue is that in parts of Europe, the order
last name/first name can be found to varying degrees. For French
names, the names themselves aren't always unambiguously first names
or last names, and with both orderings possible, capitalization is
used to disambiguate.
In Germany, where last name/first name order survives in bureaucratic
contexts and dialectal use, capitalization is not used. Ambiguity
does not appear to be a problem in practice.
It isn't, with _German_ names. As a translator, I often have to write
Italian names in German translations of Italian documents and I always
capitalize the surnames.
1) You wrote correctly that the order last name/first name can be found
to varying degrees, especially in official documents.
2) You also wrote correctly that "for French (and Italian) names, the
names themselves aren't always unambiguously first names or last names".
3) Finally, German readers do not always know which is an Italian first
name and which is a surname. Actually, in some cases even a native
Italian like me has to ask that person. If I ever have to do with
Alessandro Marcello (both are common first names), which is the surname?
Alessandro as https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Alessandro or
Marcello as https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenzo_Marcello?
P.S. I read regularly (when I have access to a desktop) only AUE. Please
answer there and tell me, if this discussion is diverted to AEU or
sci.lang only.
A funny thing about this is that, I'll bet, ambiguity between given names
and surnames is much more common with English names than with French, Italian, or German, but we don't feel any need to capitalize surnames.
When a surname is given first, it's almost always followed by a comma.
jerryfriedman <jerry.friedman99@gmail.com> wrote:
A funny thing about this is that, I'll bet, ambiguity between given names >>and surnames is much more common with English names than with French, >>Italian, or German, but we don't feel any need to capitalize surnames.
When a surname is given first, it's almost always followed by a comma.
Aiui italians don't do that at all.
On a note of indeterminate relatedness, italians only capitalise the first >letter of acronyms.
On a note of indeterminate relatedness, italians only capitalise the first letter of acronyms.
On 2024-04-04, Antonio Marques <no_email@invalid.invalid> wrote:
On a note of indeterminate relatedness, italians only capitalise the first >> letter of acronyms.
Looking over the first two examples that come to mind, both article
text and references, ...
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNESCO
... I'd say both usages exist in parallel.
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