On Wed, 29 Aug 2001 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> I know that German treats o + umlaut (�) as if it were oe,
Only in phone books. The more modern German sorting order used in
dictionaries and most other applications treats � like o, distinguished
only in the second sorting level (just like accents are sorted in English
as well). I'd rather see the �=oe sorting order disappear. It is
confusing, user unfriendly, and makes looking up words in sorted list more
complicated. It has it's place in phone books and name lists only, because
there used to be a lot of German surnames that sounded identical but have
�/oe, �/ue, �/ae as spelling alternatives (Moeller versus M�ller, etc.).
But that sorting order is user unfriendly if applied to anthing other than
lists of German surnames, and even there its usefulness is dubious at
best. DIN 5007 defines both sorting orders for German, the International
Sorting Order (ISO) follows the �=� alternative fortunately (but allows
tailoring).
If you need a test case that differs radically then use a Swedish or other
Scandinavian locale, which sorts � after z, because they treat � etc.
conceptually a bit more as an independent addition to the alphabet, not as
an umlaut (= a related but phonetically modified version of the same
letter).
Markus
--
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
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