Alphabetical order

An alphabetic sort is a sort that are arranged according to the strings by order of the letters in the alphabet. The conventional sort is referred to as initial alphabetical order, because the order of the letters is determined in writing direction. In the alphabetical sorting features such as special characters, Diacritical characters, spaces, uppercase and lowercase letters and digits must be taken into account because they generate different rules and standards.

History

Marcus Verrius Flaccus (c. 10 BC) placed first a Latin dictionary alphabetically. The Suda from the 2nd half of the 10th century is the first alphabetically arranged Byzantine encyclopedia. The Liber de rerum of Bartholomaeus Anglicus proprietatibus from the 13th century is also listed in alphabetical order and is often regarded as a forerunner of the encyclopedia.

Grading system according to language

German language

Einsortierungsregeln for other letters

The German alphabet complements the modern Latin alphabet to the umlauts Ä, Ö and Ü, and the lowercase ß. These additional letters can be sorted in four ways:

For all other ( foreign ) diacritics applies in the German-speaking countries, that they are omitted defined; so all accents, tilde, macron: é and e, and c ç, ñ and n, Č and C, ō and o are equal.

Germany

The German standard DIN 5007-1 describes under the title " Order of character strings (ABC rules) " the Order.

DIN 5007 variant 1 ( used for words, such as encyclopedias, section 6.1.1.4.1 )

  • ä and a are equal
  • ö and o are equal
  • U and u are the same
  • ß and ss are the same

DIN 5007 Version 2 (special sorting for lists of names, such as telephone directories, section 6.1.1.4.2 )

  • ä and ae are the same
  • ö and oe are the same
  • U and ue are the same
  • ß and ss are the same

This takes into account that for proper names in different spellings are possible while terms are entered in a lexicon or dictionary only exactly one case. Contrast, can not be opened, or if anyone Moeller Moeller is now called. Especially for German speaking individuals, institutions and place names.

Proper names are often in Germany (eg in telephone directories ) in the following manner in alphabetical order:

  • First, the entries are sorted by last name, with academic degrees such as " Professor ," " Dr. " and additions to names "of", "before", "to" be omitted "to". It should be noted that names additives may also consist of several words, such as in " from the lip ."
  • With identical surname is then sorted alphabetically by name of any existing additives, where people name without name affixes are always listed first.
  • Votes also to the names match (or are not present), sorted alphabetically as the last from the first name.

This type of sorting is regulated in the bibliographical organization rules DIN 31638.

Austria

Austrian sorting ( for directories)

  • ä follows a ( comes only after az )
  • ö follows o
  • ü follows u
  • ß follows ss
  • St. follows on Santa

In the printed Austrian telephone book there are different sorts: In the local directory, umlauts and ß as letters of their own at the end of the alphabet sorted. In the Info Pages and Yellow Pages 5007 Version 1 is sorted according to DIN. In the name of the directory Austrian sorting is used.

Danish language

  • æ comes after z
  • ø æ comes after
  • å ø comes after

Finnish language

  • å comes after z
  • ä comes after å
  • ö ä comes after
  • U and y are the same

Swedish language

  • å comes after z
  • ä comes after å
  • ö ä comes after
  • U and y are the same

In other languages

In other languages ​​the alphabetical order is also subject to additional language-dependent rules that are caused by additional letters or special special rules. So there is the Spanish letters Ch, but elsewhere is alphabetically as a C, which provides the computer algorithms for sorting prior problems. After n ñ follows. Even more critical is the alphabetical order in languages ​​such as Japanese or Chinese, which use a variety of characters and their order in the font ( ie their encoding) does not correspond to the order of there usual sort. In Chinese, for example, sorting by the Pinyin equivalent ( in computer systems ) or by a system that depends on the base symbol and the number of strokes in a clockwise direction ( in dictionaries ), as usual.

Example

The two spellings of Goethe available in variant 2 immediately adjacent, distinguished from each other only by first name. Used Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in his lifetime both variants; the family was previously called Goethe. Today uniform notation was introduced more than a quarter century after his death by German scholars.

Computer systems

Computer systems encode the stored strings by means of a system-wide or application-specific standard codes (ASCII and its variants or additions, rare EBCDIC, today more and more Unicode) and arrange the characters (including numbers, spaces, punctuation marks and special characters) in the simplest case by the associated numerical value of this codes so that for example all Latin capitals are placed before the small "a". However, many programs apply a culturally expected by the users traditional sort. There are ways to influence the sort order by custom coding or parameterization. A possible algorithm that finds this application is the Unicode Collation Algorithm. The sort is defined by specifying a so-called collation (of English. Collation, collation ') for operating system configurations and applications such as database systems.

Declining sorting

The declining sorting is an alphabetical sort, in which the words are read from back to front. When creating Declining dictionaries will be sorted in this manner, they can also be used in rhyming dictionaries.

Bartholomeus Anglicus Rhyming dictionary
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