Re: accented Latin characters sort order, non-language dependant

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Tue Jul 11 2006 - 12:42:18 CDT

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    From: "Jonathan Coxhead" <jonathan@doves.demon.co.uk>
    > Adam Twardoch wrote:
    >> Philippe Verdy wrote:
    >>> That's not true for all languages. In German, "München" (the city of
    >>> Munich in Germany) sorts like "MUENCHEN", not like "MUNCHEN"...
    >>>
    >> Yes, but in English, Czech, Polish, Italian or Spanish, it sorts like
    >> "MUNCHEN".
    >
    > In English, it would not appear at all. It would be "Munich".

    In general texts where the city is cited, yes, but in postal addresses, it would remain München or MUENCHEN, keeping the orthography specified by the customer or expected by the repicient and the postal service (addresses are preferably not translated, and the same is true for most road maps, so that they exhibit the same orthography as seen on road direction indicators, to avoid confusions by drivers, given that road indicators cannot show all possible translations, but at most a national language using the official language of the location where the indicator is placed, and optionally a regional language if the indicated direction is within the same region, or one foreign orthography for a nearby country)

    Someone said here that one needed to know German conventions to use "UE", but this is not true. In place names, the orthography is kept as indicated by the owner of the target address, and there's no compelling reason for any business to translate those toponyms. There's an exception related to needed transcriptions when the business limits the character set or would have lots of difficulties to handle the names (for example when there's no one in the company that can decipher the Arabic script, it's common to see the Latin script used instead, but even in that case the Latin transcription is specified by the customer itself, and Arabic-speaking countries most often display place names both in Arabic and in a Latin transcription, including on road indicators and most street indicators in cities).

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