digraphs and sorting

[Alessandro Jaker]

Hey everyone,


> As an English speaker I find it confusing to have to remember any kind
> of alphabetical order that isn’t monographic. I think that, for people
> who are primarily literate in English (even if it’s not their first
> language), following the English pattern of only sorting by monographs
> is what is expected. Doing so would obey the Principle of Least
> Surprise, meaning that the largest number of users would be least
> surprised by the decision to only sort by single letters.
>
> I have an idea which is only tangentially related to this, which is this:
I'm wondering if diacritical markings on vowels, i.e. nasality, length, and
tone, should be relegated to a "secondary sort order" rather than the
"primary sort order," which is what is done right now, e.g. in the Dogrib
dictionary (Saxon & Siemens 1996).  I say this because most of the time
when I or the students at Goyatiko go to look up a word in the dictionary,
what we're looking for is to check the vowel length, nasality, and/or
tone.  Sometimes I find myself having to look in 3 or 4 places to find a
certain word, because, depending on what its nasality or tone is, it could
be located in very different places in the dictionary.

Following James's "principle of least surprise," perhaps what I'm saying
would apply only to nasality and tone, and not vowel length, since vowel
length in Dogrib, and the other Northeast Athabaskan languages, is written
by doubling the vowel, i.e. long /a/ is written as <aa>.  Hence, English
speakers would expect, for example, nàahzè 'you (pl) hunt' to occur before
nàzè 'he/she hunts (if both forms were listed in the dictionary).  On the
other hand, we wouldn't expect a tone mark on top of the vowel to change
where something is located.  It doesn't in French for example.  So under
this approach, we would only take tone and nasality into consideration when
alaphabetizing, if two words were identical in every other way--that's the
sense in which it's "secondary".

I'm interested in this because I'm currently working on a verb dictionary
(i.e. list of verb forms) for Weledeh dialect and sort order will become
and issue at some point.

Alex
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