Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: (semi-ot) "van der" Names

Author: Leen Ammeraal

Date: 22:28:08 03/22/04

Go up one level in this thread


On March 22, 2004 at 22:11:08, Dave Gomboc wrote:

>In my thesis I want to refer to van der Meulen's work (that was published in
>Advances in Computer Chess 5).  I have the following sentence fragment:
>
>"van der Meulen (1989) provides algorithms for..." (blah, blah).
>
>In English, it's pretty much compulsory to start the sentence with a capital
>letter, but I don't want to rearrange the sentence so that the name is not at
>the front.  However, using "Van der Meulen" just makes me think that it's
>spelled incorrectly.
>
>Does anyone know the proper practice for this?
>
>Dave

Van der Meulen is a Dutch name. Being Dutch myself, I think I have
learned the following rule (a long time ago):

You can (and, actually you should)
write 'Van' instead of 'van' if the name is not preceded by the
first names, or beginletters of them. In other words:

I saw Jan van der Meulen, (or I saw Jan Peter van der Meulen) but
I saw Van der Meulen.

As for alphabetical ordering, the position should be M,
and (in thes examples) you should write

Meulen, J. van der
or
Meulen, J. P. van der

Leen





This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.