Culture Based Classifications
- This page is a part of series in Classifying Names by Culture
There are many possible 'culture' based classes that one might want to use. At the finest grained level (and in the most ambitious case), one might want to predict actual countries of origin ( standardized country names are provided by the United Nations). At all more course-grained levels, countries must be aggregated into meaningful units.
Two commonly used (and meaningful) aggregations are:
- UN GeoRegions
- Ethnologue Classification - A language development based aggregation
Custom Classifications
For the purpose of economic analysis it is not necessary to know which country an individuals name has its roots in; broad areas of origin are sufficient. Areas that are of particular interest might include:
- Western European (including the colonies)
- Scandinavian
- Slavic
- Hispanic/Latin
- Chinese (including Chinese 'dependencies')
- Arab (Muslim)
- Israel (Jewish)
- African
- India/Pakistan
- Asia-Pacific (Phillipines, Vietnam...)
- Korean
- Japanese
Other Classifications
One other potentially useful classification of names is based on differences in writing systems. The following is a loose list of the major writing systems of the world:
- Latin (alphabetic)
- Cyrillic (alphabetic)
- Hangul (featural alphabetic)
- Other alphabets
- Arabic (abjad)
- Other abjads
- Devanagari (abugida)
- Other abugidas
- Syllabaries
- Chinese characters (logographic)
