digraphs and sorting

[Mike Morgan]

I would imagine that it would depend on the existing level of literacy
in a majority language, and what orthographic conventions are used by
that majority language community. If most members of a community are
already used to the idea that "th" is a separate sound but is
alphabetized after "tg" and before "ti", then presumably following
this practice in creating an orthography would make things easier.

Though, of course, making things easier is NOT ALWAYS the primary
goal, and sometimes OPPOSING any existing majority language practices
is preferred as it increases the degree of distinctiveness of the
minority language.

as I said though, although I think I have seen studies on this
somewhere, I have no idea where or when they might have been...


PS technology can also enter into the mix: Welsh has a long history of
treating "ch", "dd" and "ll" as separate digraphic characters, and
alphabetizing them accordingly (so "ch" follows "cz", etc). With the
advent of word processing, but before special software which
alphabetized according to welsh rules, things started to change, and
many people followed English practices ("ch" after "cg"). Now that
such software is ubiquitous, it is (mostly) back to tradition...

mwm

On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 8:40 PM, Gary Holton <gmholton at alaska.edu> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I know this list doesn't get a lot of traffic, so apologies in advance
> for spamming you with this query. For years I've accepted without
> question the orthodoxy which sorts dictionary entries by digraph
> rather than by single characters. This makes obvious sense, since
> digraphs such as th or even trigraphs such as tł' are single phonemes
> and hence shouldn't be relegated to secondary status within a
> dictionary. On the other hand, we also know that many languages do
> just fine treating digraphs as separate characters for the purposes of
> dictionary sorting (e.g., English has no "th" section; Malay has no
> "ng" section). So, my question is, does anyone know of any usability
> studies -- or even just subjective account --  comparing the relative
> advantages of each approach within a language maintenance situation?
>
> Gary Holton



-- 
mwm || *U* C > || mike || мика  || माईक || マイク || மாய்க் (aka Dr Michael W
Morgan)
sign language linguist / linguistic typologist
academic adviser to "Nepal Sign Language Training and Research Centre"
project
NDFN, Kathmandu, Nepal