[Data-modeling] how much work done on modeling of personal names -- even for surname + given name?

[Bryan Cheung]

Chinese names can be made up of 2 or 3 characters.

For 3 character names, the characters represent the family name,  
generation name, given name.  Some families even have different  
generation characters for the males/females.

For 2 character names, I believe they forgo the generation name.

Examples:
Bruce Lee = Li Xiao Long (real name Li Zhen Fan)  Lee is his family  
name.
http://www.freebase.com/view/en/bruce_lee
http://www.freebase.com/view/en/li

Ma Lin (table tennis player) = Ma Lin.  Ma is his family name.
http://www.freebase.com/view/en/ma_lin_1980
http://www.freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000005569373



On Mar 5, 2009, at 12:32 AM, John Bäckstrand wrote:

> I am wondering how chinese names work. According to my chinese friend,
> they do not have family names! I'm not sure this is correct or not,
> just wondering if anyone knows more about this!
>
>> On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 18:18, Raymond Yee <raymond.yee at gmail.com>  
>> wrote:
>> I would like to be able to sort topics of /people/person (e.g.,
>> http://www.freebase.com/view/people/person) by the person's surname  
>> but
>> don't see any generic properties for a person's surname and given  
>> name.
>> Am I missing something here or is there no such field in the commons.
>>
>> I realize that modeling personal names is non-trivial (see
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_name for example) -- but  
>> having a
>> way to indicate surnames+first names would be very helpful for many  
>> topics.
>>
>> I looked around on the data-modeling list archives but couldn't  
>> find any
>> discussion around this issue.
>>
>> What should I do to have sorting on surnames?
>>
>> -Raymond
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>>
>
>
>
> -- 
> John Bäckstrand
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