NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #1/NN_1993_1.iso/spool/comp/std/internat/1115

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-08 | 2.8 KB

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From: [e-mail] (David J Birnbaum)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
Subject: Ukraine: Language tagging
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Date: 8 Jan 93 13:16:17 GMT
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>Proto-Latin, proto-Cyrillic etc sorting makes a lot of sense for
>business applications, providing uniformed way to deal with
>multilingual lists (and such sorting has an attractive quality --
>it "automatically" reduces to a national sorting after deletion
>of foreighn letters). Somehow, it is a simplified scheme of
>sorting large libraries use.

Multilingual sorting, even for languages that share a script, seems to
me to be first a conceptual, and only second an implementational,
problem. That is, if the soft sign sorts after <ja> in Ukrainian but
several letters before it in other Slavic languages written in Cyrillic,
what is _the correct_ pan-Cyrillic sorting order? Neither solution will
automatically reduce to correct sorting for all languages if the
Cyrillic inventory contains a single soft sign and a single <ja>. We
could create two soft signs, one for Ukrainian and one for everyone else
(similarly to the solution proposed for certain Latin letters with
diacritics), but then the "proto-Cyrillic" multilingual sort loses much
of its attractiveness.

I see the primary problem as determining how we want multilingual lists
to sort, rather than how we want to implement the sorting. I don't see
any one solution as uniquely and obviously better than all others. The
problem is, for reasons I hope are obvious, even worse when a list mixes
scripts. As a frequent and frustrating real life example, how should I
sort a mixed Russian/English bibliography that cites both English and
Russian publications by a single author whose name begins with "V"? It
makes sense to separate the scripts, but it also makes sense to keep all
works by a single author in the same place.

(It should be noted that a 1990 Ukrainian orthographic manual proposes
reordering the Ukrainian alphabet to conform to Russian and other
languages, so that the soft sign will no longer follow <ja>. How
comprehensively this is applied in practice remains to be determined.
Meanwhile, the problem is nonetheless real and general, viz. the similar
examples from Latin-alphabet orthographies.)

>Ukrain, say, use characters of both Cyrillic and Latin scripts, etc.

??? What Latin-script letters does Ukrainian use?

--David
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Professor David J. Birnbaum         [e-mail] [Internet]
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