🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Dec31.171450.1513@klaava.Helsinki.FI> wirzeniu@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Lars Wirzenius) writes:
>A-with-ring-on-top -- don't know its official name, if any.  The
>Finnish alphabet has no A-w-r-o-t, so I guess they have A-umlaut after
>Z, although they/we seem to usually include the A-w-r-o-t too, thereby

No, the Finnish alphabet is the same as the Swedish one. Letters
A to Z, A with ring, A with two dots, O with two dots. The
sorting is also done in this order, except V and W are usually
sorted (should be sorted) as one letter. If we use the currently
common 7-bit coding, characters ], [ and \ are replaced with A',
A" and O" (and }, { and | with a', a" and o", meaning that
sorting will not work with direct code sorting. Neither will it
in any different currently used coding (ISO 8859-1, DEC
Multinational, HP Roman-8, EBCDIC (the Scandinavian version we
are using), IBM PC or the Macintosh).

Also the telephone catalog seems to sort "Mc", "Mac", "van" and
"le" as they are written, but "von", "Von" and "der" according to
the main word.

Now if we also take into the account that French e' will usually
become E when capitalized and other well known charater behaviors
like the German double-s, it is my opinion that there is no way
to make a simple character code that will preform sorting and
character conversion automatically. 

So the ISO 10646 approach seems right to me. Make a character
code that codes just the appearance of the characters and leave
the rest for other people to worry about. My understanding is
that the making of ISO 10646 has been politically difficult
enough as it is, tryig to add more stuff into the standard would
just have blown the whole thing apart.

About the differences between Swedish and German (and Finnish)
A", I don't know why we should consider them as separate letters,
they are pronounced about the same way in all languages.  And
most of the other letters usually differ in other languages as
well. The Swedish letter O is pronounced like the Finnish U, in
English Y is as often concidered a vowel as not, while in Finnish
it is always a vowel etc.
--
Timo Kiravuo, kiravuo@hut.fi
Helsinki University of Technology, Computer Center, Finland