Greek names conjugation in bulk mailings

[vchryssos]

Hi all!

I am trying to set up a new CiviCRM installation to work with a Greek NGO. In greek we have a special case with names. We use to right a name in nominative, while when addressing the person we use vocative. For example:
Name (nominative): Yorgos,
but in a letter/email we write: Dear Yorgo (no ending -s-)

This poses a problem with the automated emailing greetings. Instead of the correct form above, it produces: Dear Yorgos, which is not correct.

One possible solution would be to create a custom field for the vocative of the Name value and use this as a token for the greeting. It would be nice if this field could be auto-completed by the Name value. Then the user would just have to edit the ending (e.g. to erase the ending -s-).

I have two questions:

• does anyone have a proposal for a more elegant way to solve this problem?
• if not, how do I set a custom field to populate from another field's (e.g. Name) value?

thnx!

[joanne]

Two fields already exist to help with this: Email Greeting and Postal Greeting. (There is also Addressee for what goes on the envelope for snail mail)

If you go the edit screen for a contact you will find them on the Communications Preferences tab. 

[JonGold]

You can set a custom field to populate from another field's value if you're comfortable doing custom coding.  I would use hook_civicrm_pre, most likely - or perhaps hook_civicrm_post with an API call to CustomValue.  It's about 10 lines of code, I'd say. http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Hook+Reference

If you're not a coder and don't know any coders, I don't think there's a solution ready-made for you, but the "CiviRules" project currently underway seems like it would meet your needs.  However, the project needs funding to be completed: https://civicrm.org/blogs/erikhommel/civirules-sprint-january-and-march-2015