GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 640203
Non alphabetical language names, phonetic transcription field implementation.
Last modified: 2021-05-19 11:37:54 UTC
I've noticed that evolution does not support the fields for the pronunciation of names (aka furigana, aka yomi, aka phonetic transcription). This kind of content should be supported by the standard vcard format, as the official site reports: http://www.imc.org/pdi/vcard-pronunciation.html This kind of field is highly used in east-Asian countries as Japan and China. I wonder if this kind of field could be implemented on evolution.
Might be the "SOUND" property of vCard, might not be... What applications do support this already?
From the wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard#vCard_extensions) about vCard seems that the extension for the "alternative spelling of names" is identified by the extension X-PHONETIC-FIRST-NAME, X-PHONETIC-LAST-NAME.
I made some further searches about the topic, and found that the format X-PHONETIC-FIRST-NAME X-PHONETIC-LAST-NAME is widely used for the furigana fields: -Google uses them when exporting the fields in vCard format. -Seems that Apple is using this syntax for the mobile devices such as iPhone (I'm actually short of iPhones, but there are many Japanese tutorials on the Internet to convert contacts in vcf and import them on the iPhone, so I suppose the format is standard, or at least compatible, for Apple) -PowerAddress (a commercial Japanese contact manager) uses the fields for import-export contacts between various formats. -------------- I'd like to add that any Japanese cellphone has a field for the phonetic transcription, and many of them are able to attach a vCard file. So implementing this kind of function has the value of increasing the compatibility between devices, considering also the fact that linux-based operating systems for mobile devices are growing very fast and that (as far as I know) maemo and meego contacts are based on evolution.
I use Evolution 3.2.2. I would like to have the possibility to have those fields (X-PHONETIC-FIRST-NAME, X-PHONETIC-LAST-NAME) to my contacts when needed. It should be added to the edit contact window, or maybe the edit name window. They should be shown below the name in the panel at the bottom when clicking on a user in the contact list window. More importantly, those field should take precedence over the name when sorting, that way it might provide natural sorting in japanese. At the moment the sorting seem to use utf-8 glyph ordering while natural ordering is done according to the pronunciation, which is usually written in hiragana or katakana. Also note that in Japanese, there is no automatic way of generating those phonetic names. A single character has several reading. Some guess can be done, especially for surnames because there is few of them. Japanese business cards seems to always include those phonetic transcriptions. Those fields should also be used in the new Gnome Contacts whose sort doesn’t make sense to me. It looks like it use utf-8 order of the first glyph.
*** Bug 613993 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
GNOME is going to shut down bugzilla.gnome.org in favor of gitlab.gnome.org. As part of that, we are mass-closing older open tickets in bugzilla.gnome.org which have not seen updates for a longer time (resources are unfortunately quite limited so not every ticket can get handled). If you can still reproduce the situation described in this ticket in a recent and supported software version, then please follow https://wiki.gnome.org/Community/GettingInTouch/BugReportingGuidelines and create a new enhancement request ticket at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evolution/-/issues/ Thank you for your understanding and your help.