Sorting - case

Victoria Neufeldt vneufeldt at M-W.COM
Tue Mar 14 14:20:30 UTC 2000


I think the expected order today is lowercase first.  That certainly is and
has been the practice among North American dict publishers.  I checked
recent editions of Random House, Webster's New World, American Heritage, and
Merriam-Webster, and all place the common words before the proper nouns.
The Concise OED (1990), however, shows the proper names first (August and
Polish).  I checked a couple of old -- really old -- dix too and found
differences: Walker and Webster Combined Dictionary of 1867, published in
Britain, had 'August' first, but the Concise Imperial Dict of the English
Language by Annandale (no date shown, but it would be late 19th century),
also published in Britain, shows the adj 'august' first.

I think intuitively proper names are "marked" and hence should follow what
might be called "regular" lexical items, even though in individual cases a
"regular" item might be of less common occurrence than its proper-name twin,
as in 'august' vs. 'August'.  The custom of showing caps first when
displaying the alphabet is a custom of long standing, as in primary
education, but the alphabet displayed is a completely different thing from
its use in words, and so shouldn't be considered in any decision about word
ordering in a list.  The issue of alpha order of course involves more than
cap vs. lc: there are also affixes, abbreviations, and symbols using the
same letters as some short words, and then some are spelled with periods and
some without . . . .

I didn't check any dix in other languages (I did page through my Kluge
etymological dict quickly, and found that it does enter proper nouns --
'August' was there -- but couldn't think of any homographs involving a
proper noun and didn't happen on any).

So that, for what it's worth, is all I can offer on this problem at this
point.

Victoria

Merriam-Webster, Inc. P.O. Box 281
Springfield, MA 01102
Tel: 413-734-3134  ext 124
Fax: 413-827-7262


> -----Original Message-----
> From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU]On Behalf
> Of A. Vine
> Sent: Monday, March 13, 2000 3:03 PM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: Sorting - case
>
>
> All,
>
> There is a debate on the Unicode list about what is normal
> (expected) sort order
> in English - lowercase then uppercase, or uppercase then lowercase?  For
> example, is it August, then august?  Or polish, then Polish?
>
> Cites differ from Oxford press, Websters, and Merriam Webster.
> Please leave the
> word chronology and parts of speech out - consider only the word
> as written.
>
> Thanks for any info,
> Andrea
> --
> Andrea Vine, avine at eng.sun.com, iPlanet i18n architect
> Guilty feet have got no rhythm.
> -- George Michael
>



More information about the Ads-l mailing list