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

Author: Johan de Koning

Date: 21:11:26 03/23/04

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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.

It's a can of worms.
A rather tiny can though. :-)

Regarding your "problem" it even isn't a can at all, since it is
common practice *in Dutch* to capitalize the family name *iff* the
first name is omitted. Hence no offences will be caused by:
- According to Maarten van der Meulen this is fine.
- According to Van der Meulen this is fine.
- Van der Meulen suggests this is fine.
- It seems De Koning is a lunatic.

But when going outside The Netherlands things are getting unclear.
And that's where the can opens. It seems (to me at least) that no
one knows whether to list Maarten under M or under V. And the ones
in favor of M will still have a hard time deciding on brand names
like "Van der Moolen brokers" or "The King chess engines".

But back to the subject: when in Rome do as the Italians. :-)
And if all else fails: do as the Dutch. :-)

... Johan



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