Are multilingual sorts integrated?

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2006/01/30 08:46 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2006/01/30/519230.aspx

Someone using the handle 'And' asked the following in the Suggestion Box:

Sometimes (e.g. in journals) Cyrillic/Greek letters are used in proper names. The sorting order then becomes somewhat complicated. Are systems giving results like the following in use? Are there any (relatively) widespread standards?

This type of 'integrated multilingual sort' is not something that is directly supported by Windows and would require a massive reassignment of all weights to work properly.

It is also not generally expected by users who I have spoken with, though. And has not really come up as a frequent request.

Of course if one is trying to support such a sort, the easiest way to do it would be to keep for each entry a separate transliterated name, perhaps using the new Microsoft Transliteration Tool! :-) , and then with all of the strings on the level playing field of the same script you could simply sort by those entries to integrate the sort.

But it is a specialty usage, not one that would expected in everyday sorting....

 

This post brought to you by "Ж" (U+0416, a.k.a. CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER ZHE)

# Serge Wautier on 30 Jan 2006 10:30 AM:

Another example of such a situation is a list of (native) localized languages (such as a 'Language' submenu. Or the list of 'languages in menus and dialogs' in the regional options CPL).

# Michael S. Kaplan on 30 Jan 2006 10:36 AM:

In an ideal world, Serge -- though in the world of Windows that currently ships, it is not quite as interesting as that!

(cf: http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2005/12/09/502054.aspx)

# orcmid on 30 Jan 2006 11:53 AM:

Oh oh, it looks like some of the MSDN blog RSS feeds were all crippled sometime between yesterday and this morning. What I am getting in Outlook Newsgator now are RSS feeds that refeed a long list of previous entries, but with no content whatsoever, just a link to the default blog page. They all seem to have the timestamp of when I did the download (around 7am today).

In your case, the other thing I notice is that the name on the feed changed from "Sorting It All Out" to "mitchcap."

The oldest article that was refed (that is, obliterated depending on how a feed reader matches it to the previous post) has title "Invariant is a really good choice ... ."

The other blogs where I have noticed this so far are "Gianpaolo's blog" and "Dan Fernandez's blog."

I'll see who I can get an e-mail to about this too.

# orcmid on 30 Jan 2006 12:07 PM:

Hey Mitch, your RSS feed is on fire and your witty "contact Mitch ..." page doesn't seem to have a link and I can't find a previous e-mail exchange to scarf your address from. ... Dang.

# orcmid on 30 Jan 2006 12:07 PM:

Sorry Michael. I don't know why I said Mitch. Feeling frazzled about not making contact and hurrying too much. Sorry again.

# Michael S. Kaplan on 30 Jan 2006 12:13 PM:

I will forward the info on to the site owners (and no offense taken!)
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