Database design / Latin question

[Alex Franke]

Table names should be singular (at least in our case). Latin words have gender-specific singular forms. You can't give a table more than one name, so what should I call it?

Alumni (plural)
Alumna (feminine singular)
Alumnus (masculine singular)
Alum (informal)

Thoughts?

[JR]

Not clear. Are you building a table of the names of alumni?

In English the masuline form takes precedence when the gender is aspecific.

JR

[Alex Franke]

Not clear. Are you building a table of the names of alumni?

JR

Yeah, you could describe it that way. (It's actually a hierarchical table structure, so names are in a different "person" table. But you can think of it as a table of Alumni.)

Id   FirstName   LastName     GraduationDate
--   ---------   ---------    ------------
1    Fred        Flintstone   1/1/1900
2    Barney      Rubble       2/14/1926
(etc)

[JR]

Go with alumnus. Do not go with alum, or I will get angry. Under no circumstances make any reference to "alums" or I will hunt you down feed you your keyboard.

JR

[Alex Franke]

Go with alumnus. Do not go with alum, or I will get angry. Under no circumstances make any reference to "alums" or I will hunt you down feed you your keyboard.

ROFL -- either I'm hunted down by you or by a bunch of angry, mislabeled, female alumni. It's an academic question, really. No one ever really sees the database.

Thanks for your input!

[DaveS]

I believe that alumnus would be the accepted word.

There are a few words like this: e.g. it is acceptable to refer to a female as an actor (rather than an actress).

For what it is worth, according to American Heritage Dictionary, the formal, modern definition of alumnus is "a graduate (JC) or former student of a school, college, or university."

If you are truly trying to stick with the formal Latin definitions, well then, volo vos optimus of fortuna.

[LCHIEN]

you could do like the texas aggies, they don't have an alumni association, and avoid all those gender and plural problems, they just call themselves the "Association of Former Students". I guess that covers all sins for Aggies... don't have to deal with foreign words they don't understand, don't have to graduate actually (many don't or can't), don't have to be the right sex or the right plurality, etc.

so just call your table "former_students"

[just started]

Or be honest and label them what you are looking for - $UCKER$!

[poolhound]

how about "oldstudent"