[Lexicog] Sorting

[William J Poser]

No "standard" sort order, even with Unicode, is likely ever to
be sufficient for lexicography and related work. Not only do we
need to be able to do alphabetization for minority languages
whose sort order is unique, but it is desirable
to be able to sort in other ways for other purposes. Once equipped
with a program that allowed me to specify completely arbitrary sort
orders with essentially unlimited numbers of multigraphs of essentially
unlimited length (the last time I checked, which was a long time ago,
Shoebox limited multigraphs to four characters), I discovered uses
for sorting that I hadn't previously thought of. For instance, I have
generated topical indices automatically from the semantic field
information. Sorting records by semantic field requires the use
of "multigraphs" as long as "gathering-plants-scrapingcambium".

Bill

--
Bill Poser, Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wjposer/ billposer at alum.mit.edu



Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
     http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lexicographylist/

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
     lexicographylist-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
     http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/