[ANSTHRLD] The SCA Armorial And Regular Expressions

William Meriic wmeriic at tx.rr.com
Thu Dec 20 12:44:10 PST 2007


Thank you for your insight.  If I understand you correctly the Welsh name:

Morgan William David

Would conflict with:

Morgan ap William ap David
Morgan William ap David
Morgan David William
Morgan David ap William

?

If so, then I could easily explain how one can search for all of these
possibilities (and a few more) in a single query:

Morgan(( ap)? (William|David))+


One could broaden one's search with a slightly different query:

Morgan .*? (William|David)

This would find all of the above names and any other names that contained
Morgan followed by William or David.

I am not worried about conveying the technique right now; I just want to
make sure that an article describing these things would be of use.

But, it sounds like one of the major issues in conflict checking is knowing
that these kinds of permutations (either in structure or spelling (e.g.
Gaelic and Anglicized names)) exist.  This would not be within the scope of
the article (or within my extremely limited education on the subject).

However, with a good understanding of pattern matching, one could maintain a
list of common transformations.  For instance, consider Latin names:

Male first names ending in -us are synonymous with names ending in -o
(Davidus = Davido = David).  So, in the list one would document:

-us, -o:  (us|o)?

One could add some other common Latin issues:

J, I:  [ij]  # J's and I's are sometimes interchanged
-es, -e: es?
-as, -a: as?

So, when researching the name Iohanne, one would look on the Latin list
above and see that the I, and the -e should be transformed thusly for the
search:

[ij]ohannes?

That would match all common spellings:

Iohannes
Iohanne
Johannes
Johanne

Of course, as you mention Gaelic makes this really difficult.  I won't touch
Kellie = Ceallach with a ten foot poll!  However, it seems as though
Genitive endings are somewhat regular.  Ach => Aigh: a(ig|c)h, so we could
add that to the Irish list.

So, I hope no one thinks I am trying to move in and make a mess of things.
I am just curious about this process and talking out loud.  I definitely
don't want to make more work for anyone; I am just quite interested in the
subject matter!  :-)

Will





Will


-----Original Message-----
From: heralds-bounces at lists.ansteorra.org
[mailto:heralds-bounces at lists.ansteorra.org] On Behalf Of doug bell
Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2007 2:11 PM
To: Heralds List, Kingdom of Ansteorra - SCA, Inc.
Subject: Re: [ANSTHRLD] The SCA Armorial And Regular Expressions


The article would be useful if for no other reason than to provide access to
all of the types of searches available.

I can guess many possible conflicts and variant spellings in English from
working with census records for many years.  A wild card search will often
spot sound alike spellings and it is useful for non English characters.

Gaelic is probably the worst for finding conflicts.  There are myriad
spellings for many names and the SCA registers names with both normal and
accented vowel spellings.  The patronymic naming system also allows for far
more conflicts, especially with combinations of common given names.
This also applies to some extent to Norse and Welsh patronymics.

Some locatives, like de Calais and de Lyon, are very popular in the SCA.
This is another trouble spot that generates conflicts.

So write away on such articles.
Safe journeys
Magnus
 
 

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