digraphs and sorting

[Bill Poser]

I suspect that Alessandro is right that diacritics for tone, nasalization,
and length are best used only for secondary sorts, at least if the
materials are aimed at people who are not fluent speakers. For fluent
speakers I'm not so sure. Phonologically organized Japanese dictionaries,
for example, treat the kana diacritics as primary and no one seems to have
any difficulty with this. Unfortunately, few of us on this list are much in
the business of preparing materials for fluent speakers.

As for polygraphs, I am unable to report any opinion on the basis of
Carrier experience (where polygraphs are treated as first order collocation
units) probably because few people spend much time seriously looking things
up.

On Sat, Jul 28, 2012 at 6:52 PM, Alessandro Jaker <amjaker at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/athapbasckan-l/attachments/20120728/b6ccc3d3/attachment.htm>