Alternate name fields

This is a proposal on behalf of The Moodle Association of Japan (http://moodlejapan.org). We are willing to work closely with Moodle HQ on this improvement and help by providing some funding for its development.

The standard Moodle has only two fields for names "firstname" and "lastname". In countries that use a different writing system, this means that two sets of names need to be displayed, their name in the local writing system and their name in Romanization. Moodle needs a way to input both types of names, and for both the individual and the administrator (and perhaps at the course level) to determine which names appear in the various Moodle contexts.

An ideal configuration

I propose three additional fields: surnamephon givenphon alternatename

For standard English and European usage, these would be ignored, but for Japanese, Chinese, Korean and perhaps other writing systems such as Thai, the various Indian languages and Arabic. Possible entries would look like this:

The site administrator would select how the $FULLNAME variable would appear. For Japanese, for example, the administrator might select lastname + firstname + alternate so that the students' names would appear in Kanji, but with the Romanization of it following the Kanji. This would allow everyone to know how the name should be pronounced. (Even Japanese need this since there are alternate pronunciations for Kanji. "神部" for example, could be read as "Kamibe" or "Kambe" depending on the preference of the user's family.)

Any combination of the above could also be selected as the default for user names that appear in various tables.

If the selected fields for tables is one of the Asian phonetic fields, then rather than the standard alphabet display for filtering the list by first name and last name, a similar selection display would appear for the selected alphabetic system.

For Chinese, a selection would also need to be made for the phonetic system to use. Taiwan uses the "BoPoMoFo" (Zhuyin) system, while mainland China uses the Pinyin system.

Student ID Display

For many Asian languages, another problem not encountered so much in the West is people with identical names. This, plus the fact that some of the languages (namely Japanese and Chinese) have no convenient method for ordering names in Chinese characters, means that most schools rely on the student ID for ordering and identifying students rather than (or in addition to) their names. Thus, there should also be an option in the site set-up selecting the StudentID field to be displayed to the left of names on various listings such as the grade book, assignment evaluation, etc.

Complexity & coding time:
This problem is quite complex since it involves modifying core code in perhaps 50-100 files that do database I/O, table displays, preference selections, etc. and would need to be done in close coordination with Moodle Headquarters.

Who would benefit from this improvement?:
Probably every institution in Asia that has staff who do not read the local language need to be able to display names in both the local language and Roman letters. Various, rather unsatisfactory ad hoc solutions are currently used but a permanent, more elegant solution is urgently needed.