Re: Norwegian sorting

From: Lars Marius Garshol (larsga@garshol.priv.no)
Date: Mon Jan 21 2002 - 09:16:58 EST


* Tex Texin
|
| I gave a course in internationalization last week, and one of the
| slides I used indicated that in Norwegian u-umlaut sorts with Y
| between X and Z. Some Norwegians attending disputed this.

I doubt that there is an official standard for this, but I would
expect to find Ü sorted with Y, given that Norwegian Y is pronounced
just like Swedish/German/Dutch Ü. Many reference works sort V and W
together, for example, according to the same principle.

I see that my Norwegian atlas sorts "ü" as "y", "ä" as "æ", and "ö" as
"ø", while other diacritics do not affect the sorting. I notice that
the Norwegian Sami[1] do the same thing with "ü", but that they do "ä"
and "ö" differently, possibly because these are native to Sami and
pronounced differently in Sami than in Norwegian.

However, I wouldn't be too surprised to find instances of different
sort orders.

| I see this is referenced elsewhere as well and is claimed to be true
| for the other Scandanavian languages also.

I notice that my notes for the sorting of a Swedish encyclopedia
project sorted the following equivalently: W/V, Ü/Y, Ö/Ø, so that
seems to be correct.
 
| I scanned a couple dictionaries and couldn't find a use of u-umlaut.

Nor can I, but I then I wouldn't expect to find it there, either.
 
| a) Is it true or not that u-umlaut would sort with y, in
| Scandanavian languages?

In most cases I would expect it to.
 
| b) Can someone offers some example words that demonstrate words with
| u-umlaut sorting appropriately?

I can't think of a Scandinavian word with "ü" in it, actually. You'd
have to look at an encyclopedia or atlas to find appropriate examples.
 
| c) I am guessing that u-umlaut only appears in borrowed foreign
| words.

Correct.

--Lars M.

[1] <URL: http://www.hum.uit.no/a/trond/s197t.html >



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