From: bap@shrdlu.com   
      
   On 2026-01-17, Evelyn C. Leeper  wrote:   
   > 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'.   
      
   There is a reason why when you set up a computer you specify the principal   
   language of the users. I don't know whether spreadsheets take that into   
   account. If they don't then they are broken by design. It's an artefact of   
   the prevailing assumption that whatever America does must of necessity be   
   right.   
      
   Someone should tell the US car industry about that.  Oooh look!  W.  Edwards   
   Deming told them that 75 years ago.  They ignored him and exiled him to   
   Japan, where the manufacturers listened.   
      
   > 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".   
      
   That's not what they did. They changed the standard not abolished it.   
      
      
   --   
   Bernard Peek   
   bap@shrdlu.com   
   Wigan   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)