[Coco] family names

[Mathieu Bouchard]

Le 2013-12-22 à 14:38:00, Glen VanDenBiggelaar a écrit :

> You can just leave it with no spaces. I asked my Grandfather once about 
> it and he did not even know if officially there was spaces or not.

Names have gone through lots of different changes over the centuries. 
However, things have tended to become more stable during the 19th century, 
as more people learned to write and spelling has become more standardised, 
though names going across language boundaries still got often mangled, 
such as La Marche becoming LaMarsh in English (while in French, it became 
Lamarche). Also on the topic of spaces in particular, north-american 
English practice tends to delete spaces and keep any former capitals, 
whereas one of the last changes in French was to delete most spaces and, 
if so, uncapitalise too (La Fontaine becoming respectively LaFontaine and 
Lafontaine ; see also the previous example). Quite often, the name of the 
same extended family has several different spellings because one branch of 
the family lives in the USA and the other branch in Québec, for example.

But Dutch (and a few French names) retained the original spaces. It 
depends what language's practice you want to follow.

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