Latin and other polyonymous name systems
The Latin name system with its praenomen, nomen gentilicium and cognomen or cognomina presented a supplementary methodological complication for the semi-automated processing of material from Duke. We have developed solutions for this, which treat the praenomen and nomen gentilicium as ‘pseudo names’ or ‘name prefixes’, unless nothing else follows: Marcus Aurelius Sarapammon is thus listed among those having the name Sarapammon. For the time being it is not yet possible to search for all people called Aurelius NN, although we hope to develop this feature in the near future.
Similar problems arise with Coptic Apa and Abba, for which similar solutions were found. For Arabic we have identified the problem with polyonymy, but since it currently falls outside our scope we have not yet taken action to deal with it.