XBOX 360 2561
Won't we be creating "alphabets" to preserve languages that has to include pronunciation cues? Let me reask this question. Won't we have to have a computer alphabet that has to include pronunciation cues...
Clbuttical (Pre-koine) greek can have a plethora of diacritical marks as well. Some convey...
Letter+diacritical mark stored separately isn't ambiguous
The trouble is that in large library catalogs all of the different cultures exist side-by-side.
Not all online catalogs do things the same way. Most libraries need to be able to use catalog records created by the Library of Congress and other large libraries, so almost all of them accept the character set LC uses. While most libraries sort ignoring diacritical marks, it would be possible to use LC records just sort the headings differently.
Back in the card catalog days, we used to sort vowels with umlauts as vowel+E. It confused a lot of people, and not just English-speakers. A library could chose to implement that sorting online. They might have some trouble because headings are not tagged by language, but a library that had lots of German and very little of other languages using umlauts might choose to sort them that way. I see that even DIN adopts sorting by base letter
Even in the card days we didn't sort Spanish CH, LL, and N+tilde as separate letters.
It's not just US libraries. Libraries using the Roman alphabet all over the world represent the letters and diacritical marks in much the same way.
-- Patrick
Alt Folklore Computers from Newsgroups