[Lexicog] Sorting

[Kim Blewett]

What is being discussed as "sorting handles" or "alphabetic keys" sounds
similar to the Shoebox/Toolbox/MDF field, "citation form." When outputting
dictionaries for printing through Word, this system can sort either on the
lexeme field or the citation field.

Thus, in Rapoisi most citation forms have a "bo" prefix, e.g., "bo taruu'e"
'sit'. The keyword appears in the dictionary as "bo taruu'e (from:
taruu'e)", sorted under "T". You can customize the label that appears
("from:"), but I think you'd need some other tag in the record and a Word
macro if you wanted more than one possible label. I don't know if this is
flexible enough for your purposes.

Also, in another recent email someone mentioned a bar(|) which appears in
lexemes, and the need to ignore this character when sorting or printing.
Shoebox/Toolbox allows one to specifiy "ignored characters" for a sort
order. As others in this discussion group have said, sorting and filtering
in this program are very flexible, designed for languages with digraphs &
non-European fonts.

Can someone please clarify for me: Is it true that the old Philippines
dictionary project is the "papa" of MDF--Multi-Dictionary Formatter--which
is built into Shoebox/Toolbox for formatting and printing dictionaries?

Kim Blewett

> on March 21, John Koontz wrote:
>
> There are probably various ways to handle sorting, but Bob Hsu used to
> discuss it in terms of sorting handles, which are transformations of the
> sorted elements into character strings for which the collating
> sequence does
> match the desired sorting order.  For example, if you want upper and lower
> case to be treated the same, convert upper case to lower case in
> the handle.
> If you want a-acute to be treated like a, convert a-acute to a in the
> handle....
>
> from David Frank:
>
> It looks like what you called a sorting handle is what I was calling an
> alphabetic key when applied to a dictionary record. (See my second message
> of March 19.) You went on to say, "Ideally the sorting program
> will generate
> these handles on the fly as it needs them, based on your sorting
> rules, but,
> if you don't have access to a clever sorting program you can always create
> the handles manually yourself and make sure the sorting program
> uses them to
> sort with rather than the nominal key.  You have to delete them from some
> kinds of output, of course."
>
> My practice and my proposal was to keep an alphabetic key as part of each
> entry, but it would be a nonprinting field and used only for sorting. An
> advantage of keeping it as part of the entry is that you could,
> for example,
> manually convert "an bagay" to BAGAY AN if you want it to sort after
> "bagay", but keep the default order in other cases, depending on
> which word
> in the phrase you want to use as the basis for sorting.





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