Talk:Alphabetical order

Other punctuation
There is no paragraph on that subject at present.

I think the convention is to ignore apostrophes, for example. 'Twas the Night Before Christmas This would alphabetize under T, by treating 'Twas as Twas.

Correct? Varlaam (talk) 16:29, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Yes, I think so (unless the collation is being done by some automated computer system that hasn't been programmed to take account of this). Victor Yus (talk) 06:50, 22 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Good. I've been alphabetizing List of World War II films, amongst other changes there.
 * Two months, and counting. Big page.
 * Thanks, Varlaam (talk) 11:42, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

ascending and descending order
These can be confused, sometimes deliberately...Myles325a (talk) 11:28, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

Missing: Middle English. Missing: Maltese
I find nothing - historic or modern - whither to collate Yogh.

The order of Maltese needs mentioning. They have G, Gh, double barred H, etc.

Nuremberg/Bavaria -  Ángel.García2001  131.188.3.21 (talk) 21:10, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

Reasoning behind sortig of Umlauts in German is wrong
The sentence "For phone directories and similar lists of names, the umlauts are to be collated like the letter combinations "ae", "oe", "ue" because a number of German surnames appear both with umlaut and in the non-umlauted form with "e" (Müller/Mueller)." is factually wrong. The reasoning behind this way of ordering the letters is that each of those letter is only a typographical shortening of a common two-letter combination. Ä, ö, ü and ß do not exist in the alphabet. I.e. "ü" is the short version of "ue", "ß" is the short version of "ss". It follows logically that they should be sorted exactly were their constituent letters fit in at. Surnames have absolutely nothing to do with it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 153.96.11.5 (talk) 11:23, 29 August 2014 (UTC)
 * I agree with your statement about the origin of umlaut symbols; however, your comment here might be misleading in that it implies umlauts such as "ä" can simply be replaced with their two-letter variant such as "ae". That is certainly not the case - nowadays, the two-letter variants are second-rate fallbacks used if and only when dictated by some external factor, including inconvenience at typing on a non-German keyboard layout, or a desired graphical effect of the letters. As this text refers to names, it should be noted that this is particularly true for names; while the surnames "Müller" and "Mueller" are pronounced the same, they are generally not any more interchangeable than the surnames "Schmidt" and "Schmitt".
 * As for the "ß", no, that is not the short version of "ss", but of "sz", even though nowadays the commonly used ASCII fallback is indeed "ss". 85.180.116.202 (talk) 21:06, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

Alphabetical order examples: Spanish
I might be being too picky about this (as a Spanish teacher), but I have a small issue with the section that uses the example of Saints' names in Spanish. In particular, it shows how names starting with "San" and "Santa" would be alphabetized. However, one of the names on the list is "San Tomás," and as most Spanish speakers would say, the correct name is not "San Tomás" but rather "Santo Tomás." Spanish has a rule whereby the title "santo" shortens to "san" before male names, except in cases where the name starts with "To-" or "Do-" (so we get Santo Tomás, Santo Toribio, Santo Domingo, etc.). Source: http://blogs.molinodeideas.com/cometario/santo-o-san-una-explicacion-fonetica/

So having said all this, I was wondering if it would be okay to fix the list, either by changing "San Tomás" to "Santo Tomás" (and putting it in the right place on the list) or by changing the name Tomás to one that doesn't start with To- or Do-. I mainly ask in case the list was taken straight from some source and thus has to be cited as-is... Thanks! --Andresg770 (talk) 21:32, 19 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Please feel free to change the list to end with a different entry that still illustrates the same alphabetical principle. You don't need to keep it as Tomás. Would "San Timoteo" work better? --Metropolitan90 (talk) 05:49, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

Romanian
Romanian Wiktionary collates differently: â toward the end

https://ro.wiktionary.org/wiki/Categorie:Flexiuni_ale_verbelor_%C3%AEn_rom%C3%A2n%C4%83

Nuremberg / Bavaria - Ángel.García2001 ~ ~ ~ ~  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.156.58.102 (talk) 22:32, 24 November 2016 (UTC)

Rhyming dictionaries
"A rhyming dictionary is based on sorting words in alphabetical order starting from the last to the first letter of the word."

In some languages, this is viable, but not in English: "bomb", "comb" and "tomb" are not rhymes, but "comb" and "home" are. Is is not more appropriate to say that a rhyming dictionary could be constructed by sorting from the last phoneme of the word? In any case, it's not appropriate to suggest that all rhyming dictionaries are constructed in the way described. &mdash; 91.238.123.116 (talk) 14:46, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

Casing of characters
How is the case (A/a) of a character taken into account? Could this be added to the article please? Jamesmcmahon0 (talk) 09:56, 7 August 2018 (UTC)

The short answer: For books in English, case is ignored for sorting whenever possible. The longer, better answer is one I'm not qualified to give. TooManyFingers (talk) 08:16, 12 November 2020 (UTC)

Dutch place-names
Can anyone offer any guidance (or references to relevant reliable sources) on the alphabetization of Dutch place-names beginning with "'s", such as 's-Hertogenbosch or 's-Gravenzande? Wikipedia is inconsistent on this. The List of populated places in the Netherlands (and its Dutch counterpart) group them all together under "s"; but the defaultsorts, and therefore the various categories in which the places appear, list them under the first main capital letter ("H" or "G"). GrindtXX (talk) 12:06, 10 December 2018 (UTC)

Czech and Slovak
In the article, there is an example of correct ordering, which says it's "baa, baá, báa, bab, báb, bac, bác, bač, báč". How come baá < báa, but bač > bác? That surely has to be a mistake! Michal Grňo (talk) 18:15, 15 April 2019 (UTC)
 * No. This happens because 'č' is treated as a completely different letter to 'c', rather than as a 'c' with an accent.  This is stated in the article, but clearly not clearly enough.  The explanation reads fine if one knows the jargon of collation. --RichardW57m (talk) 16:13, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

Subsection "Mac prefixes" could be extended to "abbreviations".
Abbreviations like "St.", "Mt." sort like they were written in full as "Saint", "Mount" in my atlas. Perhaps the current subsection "Mac prefixes" could be extended to include this too. I am not the right person to do this, so I am putting this here. 212.178.135.35 (talk) 11:50, 29 July 2019 (UTC) Martin.

German, long words and short words
In the German example, Ärgerlich is sorted before Arg. In English, the shorter word is placed first in such cases; does German have a rule that the longer word is placed first? Or is something else going on in that example? TooManyFingers (talk) 08:12, 12 November 2020 (UTC)

History section missing any history
So, the history sections seems to forget to mention where the ordering seen in phoenician, greek, etc. came from. It just starts saying "so we started organizing libraries this way, you know, according to the order we have". I had to go all the way to History of the alphabet to see that information anywhere, which is rather unreasonable. I'll take a swing at this later if no one else does  Remsense  留  01:30, 2 December 2023 (UTC)