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Dear fellow lexicographers,</div>
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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. </div>
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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 <strong>ts </strong>or <strong>!kx'</strong>, and it would be easy enough to specify the ordering of these single symbol <em>placeholders </em>using the 'move up' or 'move down' buttons. The 'second pass' could then proceed to look at the vowels as usual.</div>
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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 <em>single</em> 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?</div>
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Hope I have managed to explain this clearly enough.</div>
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Best wishes,</div>
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Menan</div>
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