On Tue, Feb 22, 2005 at 01:52:48AM +0100, Anders Wegge Jakobsen wrote:
In most languages the right place for base letter X with diacritical mark Y is somewhere after plain letter X (and we can chose order of Ys that generates few conflicts).
Given that danish have com up in the discussion, I will hasten to point out that the danish letter "å" is interchangeable with "aa". In /some/ cases. For Instace, the german city Aachen has a collation order in the start of any list, where as the danish city Aalborg (Ålborg) comes at the end of any collation.
In short, nothing is as simple as it seems.
The languages with such letters at the end, or with ever weirder orders are few, and we won't break any more than we currently do if we adapt "base, then base+diacritics" sorting.
Probably not, but the danes are still going to complain about those two examples, no matter what's done.
We should just get it right for 80% of cases with 20% of effort. It's much better than having it broken for 100% of cases, as it is now.