Person Name: Gender-specific formatting

[Robert Stepanek]

Hi,

I am co-authoring an IETF standards draft to represent contacts and addressbook data (draft-ietf-jmap-jscontact <https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-jmap-jscontact-09.html>). It aims to provide a backward-compatible alternative to the widely used VCARD contacts data format (RFC 6350 <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6350>). I see that Unicode PRI 434 has an open issue with regards to gender-specific formatting, and I would appreciate if we could share our findings in that area.

One unresolved issue in our RFC draft is how to indicate the grammatical gender to use when addressing a name. This may be required to choose a honorific such as "Mr." or "Mrs." (in case the name object does not explicitly state them). Also, in some languages a grammatical gender is required for salutations (e.g. "Liebe Anna" vs. "Lieber Robert" in German).

The VCARD standard defined a GENDER <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6350#section-6.2.7> property to indicate the biological sex of a contact (and also a free-text value for gender). Some applications used this biological sex attribute to store and determine the grammatical gender of a contact. This is problematic because the biological sex and grammatical gender may not be equal. Also, the enumeration of allowed biological sex values seems poorly chosen, both in grammatical and biological contexts (e.g. "none", "other").

I wonder if a "grammaticalGender" field on a name might make sense?

It looks to me as if "male", "female", "neuter" would cover a large number of languages, but I also understand that some allow for more genders (e.g. according to this Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender#Mostly_semantic_criteria> entry the Zande language has four genders: male human, female human, animal and inanimate). Probably a free text-value in combination with a few predefined values for common genders could do the trick.  That being said, I am not educated in linguistics.

Could you please share your thoughts on gender-specific formatting in PRI434? At best, we could come to a solution that fits both standard works.

Thanks!
Robert

P.S. in CC are my co-author as well as the IETF working group chair for the JSContact standard.


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