🚀 go-pugleaf

>>Let's look at it this way:  How would a Finn want to see Chinese
>>names sorted?
>
> If (as is likely) he doesn't know Chinese he either
>>couldn't care less, or would want them transliterated into Latin
>>characters (and then sorted by Finnish rules).
>
>Ever saw Chinese transliterated into Latin? :-) You generally
>can't do it and keep it intelligible because phonetic structures
>of languages are fairly different.

It is feasible to sort Chinese names in the Putonghua-Pinyin order.
(Of course, there may be problems if this is done programmatically,
since many characters have two or more pronunciations.)

This is even more so in the case of Japanese, where a name like Kouichi
Watanabe could just as easily be Hirokazu Watabe, and the characters
for "hinagata" can also be pronounced "suukei."

In Japanese databases, ordering information is stored in a separate
field from the character encoding, making the kanji ordering somewhat
irrelevant for sorting.

If one wants to make sense out of an ordered multilingual list, it might
be a good idea to provide the following information for each item:

(1) Source language of data item.  The sorting algorithm may or may not
    use this information to arrange different languages into separate
    lists.
(2) Ordering information in source language, where necessary.
(3) Official or arbitrary Romanized equivalent, where necessary.
    (Since people romanize their names differently, the use of this field
     may result in conflicting entries for the same name, such as Otsu,
     Ootsu, Ohtsu, Otu, Ootu, and Ohtu.  There is probably no easy
     solution to this problem.)

-----
John B. Melby
Fujitsu Limited, Yokohama
melby%yk.fujitsu.co.jp@fai.com