From: dik@cwi.nl (Dik T. Winter)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: Dumb Americans (was INTERNATIONALIZATION: JAPAN, FAR EAST)
Keywords: Han Kanji Katakana Hirugana ISO10646 Unicode Codepages
Date: 2 Jan 93 01:27:24 GMT
Organization: CWI, Amsterdam

I move the discussion a bit: would we like sorting according to the texts
language or the users language?

In article <1i2lojINN4se@rodan.UU.NET> avg@rodan.UU.NET (Vadim Antonov) writes:
 > BTW, how do they deal with things like ["o-z] in regualar expressions?
I do not know, but I do know that in many cases a Finn would like to handle
it differently from a German, regardless of the language of the text involved!
For sorting it is much less important what is the language of the underlying
text, it is more important to know what the native language is of the
intended public.  Moreover, if the intended public is multilingual it makes
sense to make multiple entries for single items, sorted according to
different criteria.  I have an atlas published by a number of West European
publishers.  It has an index where place names are sorted by local customs
and by non-local customs.  I.e. the Spanish Llano occurs two times, once
between the letter L and once under a separate heading.  So look-up is easy
both for the native Spanish speaker and for the non-speaker.  Putting it in
only one place makes it difficult either for the Spanish speaker (who would
look under Ll) or for the person who does not know Spanish (and does not
know that Spanish Ll is a separate letter).
 > 
 > Another solution is to create a generic rule for EQUIVALENT letters
 > which have identical position in the sorting order and to add a
 > "letter" oe.
Will not work, because this letter has to sort between the combinations
od and of, which again mixes multiple letters and single letters.
 > 
 > So, even if sorting is not regular there always is a way around --
 > with Unicode you can't do even that.
Eh?  I would think the same way around!
 > 
 > (I repeat it: to do trivial operations like case-insensitive comparisons,
 > sorting, regular expression matching Unicode requires explicit
 > specification of the language -- it can be obtained from user or
 > recorded somewhere outside the text itself. The "paradox" is that
 > if we have this information we DO NOT NEED extended Unicode codes
 > because we already know the alpahbet and it is small!)
As I said above, you do in general *not* need the language of the text
involved, but the language of the user, which can not be recorded in the
text.  I, as a non-German, non-Swedish, non-Finnish native would be
extremely surprised if my searches sometimes would give German a-umlaut
and sometimes the non-German ones, especially in a multi-lingual text.
How would you deal with mixed languages?  (And I do not mean mixed
different scripts, which Latin, Cyrillic and Greek are in fact, which
is the reason they get different code-points.)
 > 
 > Users are interested if they're able to do the work without grep
 > asking them which language they mean everytime they run it.
Right.  That is why, when I do sorts on texts I want the Dutch sorting
order, regardless the original language of the text, which means
ignoring diacritics.  And I would like to be able to set an environment
variable in my profile that my preferred language is Dutch.
 > 
 > Beat it!
Beat that!
-- 
dik t. winter, cwi, kruislaan 413, 1098 sj  amsterdam, nederland
home: bovenover 215, 1025 jn  amsterdam, nederland; e-mail: dik@cwi.nl