Foreign Minister Taro Kono to ask media to switch order of Japanese names

Re:Foreign Minister Taro Kono to ask media to switch order o... by jcrawfordor on Tuesday May 21, 2019 @01:25PM (#19972326)

In genealogical research it's typical to not only standardize capitalization of family names (typically to ALL CAPS) but to also standardize spelling to the most common or first used spelling. Otherwise searching becomes a very frustrating venture, and these things change surprisingly quickly through generations.

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Re:Foreign Minister Taro Kono to ask media to switch order o... by mcguire on Tuesday May 21, 2019 @01:35PM (#19972468)

Good luck with mcguire. ;-)

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Re:Foreign Minister Taro Kono to ask media to switch order o... by wyldfire on Tuesday May 21, 2019 @05:07PM (#19975056)

A long time back soundex [1] was used for matching things like names. I imagine there might be yet better algorithms these days but that one probably still solves this problem relatively well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex

EDIT: I guess there are better ones: metaphone [2] is a modern improvement on soundex.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphone

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Re:Foreign Minister Taro Kono to ask media to switch order o... by YawningAngel on Tuesday May 21, 2019 @04:34PM (#19974648)

Would this not render fairly unambiguously to MAGUIDHIR (?spelling, corrected in an edit as I got it wildly wrong)? It only seems confusing if you're not Irish, and I'm already completely at sea with names that aren't Western European so this seems like a fine tradeoff to make.

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Re:Foreign Minister Taro Kono to ask media to switch order o... by mcguire on Tuesday May 21, 2019 @05:26PM (#19975243)

Unambiguously? Yep. (And wow, I'm impressed.)

But you're going to dreadfully confuse people looking for Mark McGwire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_McGwire), for example. (And possibly "MacGuiver". I'm kind of unconvinced that it's related.)

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