[Tshwanelex-l] Sort configuration: how to handle digraphs and trigraphs?

Menan du Plessis menanduple at fastmail.fm
Wed Apr 25 04:11:22 EDT 2012


Dear fellow lexicographers,

This is a quick postscript to my earlier query.   I have thought
of something that might solve the problem, even if it is rather
inelegant.

I was thinking to do most of the sorting on the 'first pass',
with phonemic affricates, aspirated segments and the variously
expanded clicks all being treated as individual members of the
basic alphabet.  l could use spare letters, punctutation marks
and other symbols to stand as placeholders for those sounds that
are represented by 'polygraph symbols' such as ts or !kx', and it
would be easy enough to specify the ordering of these single
symbol placeholders using the 'move up' or 'move down' buttons.
The 'second pass' could then proceed to look at the vowels as
usual.

The only problem now is to specify the letter strings that need
to be recognized as the values for the placeholders.   As I
understand it, the dialogue box allows the user to specify a list
of various single elements that may be identified with a given
symbol (e.g. upper and lower case forms).   My question is:   Is
there some way of using punctuation within this list to indicate
that a string of symbols should be treated as a single entity for
purposes of the sort?

Hope I have managed to explain this clearly enough.
Best wishes,
Menan
-- 
  Menan du Plessis
  menanduple at fastmail.fm

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/tshwanelex-l/attachments/20120425/f94c78c2/attachment.html 


More information about the Tshwanelex-l mailing list