digraphs and sorting

[Marianne Mithun]

I have to agree completely. In my experience, especially people who are 
already literate in a language without distinctive tone or written vowel 
length (such as English) often have a very hard time writing tone, even 
though they perform it flawlessly.

Marianne Mithun

--On Saturday, July 28, 2012 7:18 PM -0700 Bill Poser 
<billposer2 at GMAIL.COM> wrote:

> 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
>
>