[lojban] Re: multi-part names

[Pierre Abbat <phma@phma.optus.nu>]

On Tuesday 16 September 2008 13:15:17 Seth Gordon wrote:
> In Russian, if you see "Sergeyevich" in someone's name, you know that
> person's father is named "Sergey".  I'm looking for a Lojban grammatical
> construction that conveys the same kind of message.  IIUC, as far as the
> grammar is concerned, "la mixa,IL. serGEIvic. gyrbaTCOF." is a token
> with no internal structure.

There isn't any. I have thought of using "bes" for this, as "ben" is used in 
Hebrew, thus "la mixa,IL bes.sergeis. gyrbaTCOF.", but there is no 
distinction between that and someone named Bess.

There are many name formats in the world, and you just have to know them to 
understand names given in them. Some of them are:
Hungarian: Family name comes first. Edward Teller is Teller Ede.
Indonesian: Family names are rare. Sukarno is just Sukarno. His daughter, 
Megawati Sukarnoputri, has a patronymic ("putri" is from Sanskrit).
English: Many people have middle names, but not all. Married women often, but 
not always, have a maiden name before their married last name. If the maiden 
name happens to be a common middle name, you can't tell from the name which 
it is.
Spanish: Maiden name comes after the married name, separated by "de". Men have 
two last names, separated by "y". The maiden or maternal name is often 
omitted or reduced to an initial (José Cruz D.).
Icelandic: Most people have a given name and a patronymic, but no family name.
I've thought that there ought to be a culture where men pass one family name 
to their sons and women another family name to their children, but I've never 
heard of one.

As to titles, you could translate them by names, but I think "Secretary" is 
best handled as an appositive.

Pierre


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