Re:I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode
by stevejones on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @06:24PM
(#9222047)
In some languages those accented characters would be different letters, sometimes appearing far away from each other in collation order. In other cases they are basically the same letter. Whereas in Hungarian 'dzs' is a letter.
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Different languages can define different collation rules even when they use the same graphemes. For example, in Swedish z < ö, but in German ö < z. Same graphemes, different collation.
And we may even have more than one set of collation rules within the same language.
E.g. Norwegian had two common ways of collating æ,ø,å and their alternative forms ae, oe and aa. Phone books used to collate "ae" with æ, "oe" with ø and "aa" with å, while in other contexts "ae", "oe" and "aa" would often be collated based on their constituent parts. It's a lot less common these days for the pairs to be collated with æøå, but still not unheard of.
Of course it truly becomes entertaining to try to sort out when mixing in "foreign" characters. E.g I would be inclined to collate ö together with ø if collating predominantly Norwegian strings, since ö used to be fairly commonly used in Norway too, but these days you might also find it collated with "o".