idea of dictionary order (was:spelling order)

[Antonio Carlos da Rocha Costa]

Hi,

  I'd like to suggest the following idea: words of oral languages are easy
to
order because they are written as sequences of letters. The order of the
letters
determine the order of the words. Even more, it makes possible to achieve
what is
called a "total order", in which every word has a well determined position,
with
one well determined predecessor word, and one well determined successor
word. Hence,
oral language dictionaries can be printed with basically one word per line.

 Well, maybe this dictionary layout (one word per line) is not the adequate
layout
for SingWriting dictionaries, because written signs are bidimensional sets
of
symbols (not linear sets, as written words).

 Maybe the best ordering of written signs is not a total order, but what is
called
a "partial order", in which many elements may be placed together at the same
location
in the ordering, and each element may have many immediate predecessors, and
many
immediate successors. That is, a partial order orders "clusters" of elements
(not
individual elements), and gives no importance to the relative ordering for
the
elements within each cluster.

 Then, maybe the right layout for a SignWriting dictionary is that of "a
cluster per page",
being of no importance where inside the page the signs are placed, granted
that the pages
are small enough to be visually searched in a fast way (otherwise the
clusters should be
broken into smaller ones).

 This could be applied both to printed pages, to web pages or sign banks.

 Or else, maybe this is not a good idea, and one should keep trying to mimic
the layout
of oral language dictionaries.

 All the best,

 Ant ­? io Carlos