One thing that’s been in the back of my mind whenever the non-Western
names issue comes up is Mongolia. The primary name in (outer)
Mongolian society is the given name, with the patronymic added to
resolve ambiguity. In other words, the typographic roles of the given
name and the “family” name are reversed. Correct formatting either
requires weird special handling, or insertion of the name elements
into the “wrong” fields – risky, since there is no suffix to signal
that a name is a patronymic/matronymic rather than the person’s own
given name. (We have several Mongolian students in our program – two
are my supervisees – and they do publish, so this is kind of a
front-burner issue locally.)
Not sure how it should be handled, but I guess this should be in the
mix along with Asian name formatting convention problems.
Frank