From: evelynchimelisleeper@gmail.com   
      
   On 1/17/26 16:00, Bernard Peek wrote:   
   > On 2026-01-17, Dorothy J Heydt  wrote:   
   >> In article <10kdp51$1kju4$1@dont-email.me>,   
   >> Evelyn C. Leeper  wrote:   
   >>> In 2010, the Academia Real Española declared that 'ch' and 'll' were no   
   >>> longer letters in their own right, but digraphs (like 'ph' in English).   
   >>> As such words with 'ch' would be alphabetized after 'cg' and before   
   >>> 'ci', and those with 'll' would have that between 'lk' and 'lm'.   
   >>>   
   >>> I personally think this was because computers could not handle them as   
   >>> single letters, and sort algorithms in particular would just break.   
   >   
   > No, there are international standards for collating sequences.  At the 1990   
   > Worldcon in the Netherlands I found a small huddle of Confused Americans   
   > trying to find their membership numbers in an alphabetical list.  The list   
   > followed the Dutch collating sequence standards where the prefix "van" in a   
   > surname is ignored.  So "van Gelder" appears between F...  and H...  names.   
      
   Yes, there are international standards. But when someone put a bunch of   
   names in a spreadsheet and asked to have it sorted, it would blithely   
   ignore those standards, and sort 'ch' as 'c' followed by 'h'.   
      
   This is still a problem in languages such as Welsh, Hungarian, Czech,   
   and Slovak.   
      
   But not in Spanish anymore. Because the Academia Real recognized it was   
   a problem that they could not fix by stamping their feet and saying,   
   "But there's a standard!" "Real" in this case may be short for "realidad".   
      
   --   
   Evelyn C. Leeper, http://leepers.us/evelyn   
   Golden ages always shine more brightly from a distance. --Jack Shafer   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)