State what family and the patronymic view hold where a convention has no family name (#1253, #1203) - #1367

Closes #1203. Refs #1253.

This records #1253's decision in the rules, and settles #1203 (Ethiopian names) as the decision says: no default reading changes. It touches only docs; no library code changes.

What it adds

• Statement 1 in the name-order section's Background (rules/O-name-order.md): family is the name a convention files a person under, not necessarily an inherited one. For an Ethiopian name, that is what position gives. The Mongolian and Kyrgyz readings need the order and the marker rule those conventions turn on, which land in Add locales.MN, a Mongolian pack reading a Cyrillic name's father's name as the family (#1237) #1365 and Read a Turkic marker ending three name words with the father's name as the family (#1187) #1366. The wording holds whichever of the three PRs merges first.
• Statement 2 in rules/R9's Because: the patronymic view is filled only by a word or a rule that says patronymic, and it may overlap the family or be a part of it.
• Ethiopia as an Accepted consequence of rules/O4:
  • Abiy Ahmed Ali → family Ali
  • Abiy Ahmed → family Ahmed
  • neither fills the patronymic view
• A new decisions key, decisions/family-without-an-inherited-name, holding:
  • the two statements;
  • the outcome for each sub-issue;
  • the open leaves (Should the patronymic view read Kazakh -ұлы/-қызы written as one word? (Тилектес Серикбайулы АДАМБЕКОВ gives patronymic '') #1188, Should a family name after a بن chain stay out of the patronymic? (خالد بن سعد القحطاني gives patronymic 'بن سعد القحطاني') #1155, Should a Burmese choice read U and Daw as titles, and stop San joining the family? (Daw Aung San Suu Kyi gives given 'Daw', family 'San Suu Kyi') #1231, and Should S/O, D/O and W/O mark the parent's or husband's name, as bin does? (Ravi Kumar S/O Mohan Lal gives middle 'Kumar S/O Mohan') #1165 as a decision of its own);
  • Where should an Ethiopian father's name go when there is no family name? (Abiy Ahmed Ali gives middle Ahmed; Abiy Ahmed gives family Ahmed) #1203's measurements, re-taken where the cache allows, as dated snapshots.
• docs/usage.rst: a short passage beside the patronymic view on what family holds for a name with no inherited family name.
• docs/matching.rst: a "Names with no inherited family name" section. Its recipe is a matcher built from Parser(policy=Policy(middle_as_family=True)) for a list known to follow the convention, with the default parser kept for reading the fields. The examples use invented names.

Measured (2026-11-12, master 2b39f23)

• House of Peoples' Representatives (et_hopr, from the opensanctions-parliaments fetch of 2026-11-12, 23 datasets):
  • 2,191 distinct names: 211 two-word, 1,940 three-word, 35 four-word, 5 longer.
  • The default reads 1,938 of the 1,940 three-word names as own name, father (middle) and grandfather (family).
  • No name fills the patronymic view.
  • Where should an Ethiopian father's name go when there is no family name? (Abiy Ahmed Ali gives middle Ahmed; Abiy Ahmed gives family Ahmed) #1203 counted 2,291 on the 2026-11-08 fetch; the dataset itself has changed since.
• ORCID (config_diff.py score default 'default@middle_as_family=1' --group ET --group ER):
  • Ethiopia: 91.95% by default against 70.43% with middle_as_family (18,794 records).
  • Eritrea: 92.24% against 72.41% (232 records).
• The matching table in the decision comment reproduces cell for cell. Under the fold, a swapped father and grandfather are consistent (Abiy Ahmed Ali / Abiy Ali Ahmed), where the default matcher keeps them apart. Under either matcher, a two-word name whose second word is the other name's grandfather is consistent too. The recipe says both.

Not re-taken: #1203's ORCID box splits and its Wikidata P734 count. The decisions entry quotes them as the issue's 2026-11-08 figures.

Found while writing it

• San inside a Burmese name joins the family forward (rules/P2): Aung San Suu Kyi → given Aung, family San Suu Kyi. The decision says the last word of a Burmese name is the family by position, so this is a case for Should a Burmese choice read U and Daw as titles, and stop San joining the family? (Daw Aung San Suu Kyi gives given 'Daw', family 'San Suu Kyi') #1231's pack. It is recorded in the decisions entry; no issue was filed.
• Nothing to repoint: no existing decisions file's Open: line names any of Where does a father's name go when the name has no family name? (Abiy Ahmed Ali, Ухнаагийн Хүрэлсүх, Бекмырза Чолпонбай уулу) #1253's questions.

Checks

• uv run pytest: 46,001 passed. Python 3.15 in its own environment: 45,969 passed.
• uv run pytest -n0 -m serial: 35 passed.
• mypy and ruff: clean.
• sphinx-build -b doctest docs (835 tests, 0 failures) and -W -b html: clean.
• python -m doctest README.rst: clean.
• Snapshot: no reading moves. The rules corpus gains the two O4 examples, read by default.
• No release-log bullet: a docs-only change like this has none in recent releases.

Reviews

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