Re: icelandic eth thorn

[weberwu@cha01.tfh-berlin.de (Debora Weber-Wulff)]

Peter Hermann (ucaa2385@iris2.csv.ica.uni-stuttgart.de) wrote:

: icelandic question:
: For a simple sorting feature running under both Ada83 and Ada95
: I am mapping the latin-1 character code for
: a" (a with umlaut) (diaeresis) german-ae
: as well as a` a with grave accent, a' a with acute accent,
: a^ a with circumflex, a~ a with tilde, ao a with ring, ae ae diphtong
: to the code of character a.
: Correspondingly I map german_sharp_s to s, or n_tilde to n.
: For my application this is the best fit for my sorting purposes.

: However, I do not know how whether the characters 
: icelandic_eth and icelandic_thorn are usually sorted into
: the lower set of ascii-characters in a typical icelandic 
: telephone book or whether they are characters entirely in their 
: own right.

Now that's a "thorn"y problem ;-) as not all dictionaries sort the
same way. Some sort a' and a the same, many sort first the a and then
all the a' letters. The "funny stuff" like thorn  and o-umlaut
get sorted after z. There's an Icelandic-English dictionary that
apparently just did a "SELECT ALL WORDS FROM A* to Z*" and left out
ALL of the thorn words. 
Note that eth is only lowercase (can never be a first letter) whereas
thorn can be both upper or lowercase and as a first letter.

Bless og saelir!
 
--
Debora Weber-Wulff (Professorin fuer Softwaretechnik und Programmiersprachen)
Technische Fachhochschule Berlin, FB Informatik, Luxemburger Str. 10, 
13353 Berlin, Germany        email: weberwu@tfh-berlin.de   
<http://www.tfh-berlin.de/usr1/name/weberwu/public_html/>