[email protected] wrote:
> But do "friend" and "frigate" appear in Maltese dictionaries? Is it
> reasonable to expect that a single collating spec can correctly order words
> that follow two different collating conventions all at once?
My understanding of the post was that "friend" *is* a Maltese word
(in the same sense that "r�sum�" is an English word), but that it does
not contain the Maltese letter "ie". Therefore, there needs to be
a way to know when "ie" is to collate as a single letter and when
it is not to do so.
> Suppose it were the case that Maltese alphabetic order put the letter l
> before f.
I have a recollection of seeing a list of Chinese words written in pinyin
but alphabetized according to bopomofo rules. Is this commonplace?
> As a result, if we
> had a mixture of English (or French - more likely for Benin) and Adja
> words, we couldn't sort them using a single set of rules and have them come
> out correct for both languages at once.
To be sure. The trouble arises when the digraph sometimes sorts one way
and sometimes another. IIRC, in Danish "aa" sorts as "�" when it is an
archaic rendering of it, as in "Aarhus", but as "aa" when it is a borrowing,
as in "aardvark". That's the same case as Maltese, no? What is commonly
done for Danish sorting?
> In general, the best solution is: if a language has borrowings from another
> language, they take on the conventions of the receptor language.
A good principle, but it doesn't always work in the Real World.
Summary: Of course I agree with you that adding characters is not the answer,
and that tailored collation sequences mostly are --- but some languages
may have collation rules that look internally inconsistent when represented
in Unicode, and may require tricks with ZWNBSP, which I think is the Right
Thing in this case.
--Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis um dies! || John Cowan <[email protected]> Schliesst euer Aug vor heiliger Schau, || http://www.reutershealth.com Denn er genoss vom Honig-Tau, || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan Und trank die Milch vom Paradies. -- Coleridge (tr. Politzer)
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