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How do you alphabetically sort German names when a list contains last names starting with "Von ...", "De ...", "Van ..." etc.?
Also, how are words with umlauts (ä, ö, ü) and other diacritical characters handled?
For example, how would you sort the following list?
Anton Mustermann, Felix Dörfener, John von Neumann, Johannes Dorfer, Hans de Maizière, Ludwig van Beethoven
How to handle person's names is a question that's quite common in libraries, for example. The "RAK-WB" ("Regeln für die Alphabetische Katalogisierung - Wissenschaftliche Bibliotheken") have a sophisticated system how to handle a person's name ("Ansetzung"), depending mainly on the nationality of that person. You can find more information on M. Payer's paper on the RAK-WB together with some examples.
Applying those rules should lead to the following list (same sorting as Christoph wrote already):
John von Neumann is a "difficult case" here. He was born as János Neumann Margittai in Budapest (Hungary) and changed his name to "Johann von Neumann" later. After his emigration to the United States, he used the americanized form "John von Neumann". As far as i know, the german RAK-WB rules are applied depending on the last nationality, which is US-american in this case, so his name is treated like an english name with the "von" as part of the last name.
Here is wikipedia's take on the question. Following those rules would sort your list as
Beethoven, Dörfener, Dorfer,de Maizière, Mustermann, von Neumann .
[So sad you're last, John! But you remain my hero in 20th century mathematics :-). More seriously, the Hungarians call him Neumann János: they put family names before first names, and of course John is an Americanization which he adopted when he emigrated to the US]
Personennamen werden in Deutschland häufig (z. B. in Telefonbüchern) in der folgenden Art und Weise alphabetisch sortiert:
- Zuerst werden die Einträge nach Nachnamen sortiert, wobei akademische Grade wie „Prof.“, „Dr.“ und Namenszusätze „von“, „vor“, „am“, „zum“ weggelassen werden. Dabei ist zu beachten, dass Namenszusätze auch aus mehreren Wörtern bestehen können, wie etwa bei „von der Lippe“.
- Bei identischen Nachnamen wird anschließend nach eventuell vorhandenen Namenszusätzen alphabetisch sortiert, wobei Personennamen ohne Namenszusätze immer zuerst aufgeführt werden.
- Stimmen auch die Namenszusätze überein (oder sind keine vorhanden), wird als letztes anhand des Vornamens alphabetisch sortiert
The whole page might interest you.
Diacritical characters can be sorted in two different ways: like in the telephone-book, or like in the Duden.
The Duden sorts them like the normal character, a=ä, o=ö and so on:
but the telephone-book sorts them like ~e: ä=ae, ö=oe
von Damme, van Houten, ob der Tauber, zu Guttenberch is a different question, I don't have answers for.
I would sort by lastname. I would ignore umlauts, handle ä like a, o like ö and u like ü.
With the starting "Von ", "De " etc. I would also ignore them. My ordering would be:
van Beethoven, Ludwig
Dörfener, Felix
Dorfer, Johannes
de Maizière, Hans
Mustermann, Anton
I don't really know if this is correct, but I would do that this way.
