Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2020 January 27

= January 27 =

Is there a term for excluding "The" when alphabetically indexing things?
For example, say I had an A-Z List of Books that ignored "The" at the start of their titles for how to alphabetize them, so The End would be under E and The Stand would be under S, but I had another list of movies where the T section was huge because The Shining and The Matrix and so on were all under T.

It's pretty common to exclude "The" like this, but there is a word or term for doing so, that you could describe the first list as being?-- occono (talk) 12:25, 27 January 2020 (UTC)
 * There is not, as far as I am aware or can find with a search online, any specific word or phrase beyond the ones you have already used, to describe this concept. -- Jayron 32 13:19, 27 January 2020 (UTC)


 * Here is a short but precisely written paper about the matter. It doesn't use any particular term. From this, I infer that if one wants to write about this, one doesn't have to trouble to think of (or dream up) technical terms for it. -- Hoary (talk) 13:41, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

In morphological analysis (not the same as collation, of course), the term for ignoring stuff at the beginning to get to the essential part of the word is "prefix stemming"... AnonMoos (talk) 23:40, 27 January 2020 (UTC)
 * See Stemming. -- Hoary (talk)

"The", "a" and "an" are generally placed among stop words. (There are exceptions: if there weren't, "The The" would evaporate.) So if you were really intent on an impressive/soporific way of expressing the idea, perhaps something like "implementing a stop word function". -- Hoary (talk) 00:55, 28 January 2020 (UTC)


 * Perhaps I am wrong. I thought it was called "elision".  When I checked that article, it states: The omission of a word from a phrase or sentence is not elision but ellipsis, or elliptical construction.  But, I am not sure that "matches" what you are referring to.  Thanks.    Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 17:34, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

lugbara
Which language do lugbara people in Uganda speak? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 41.210.146.200 (talk) 21:09, 27 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Presumably most of them speak the Lugbara language; a number may be bilingual or multilingual in one or more of the other Languages of Uganda (including English). {The poster formerly known as 87.81.239.195} 90.205.58.107 (talk) 22:34, 27 January 2020 (UTC)