Sorting it all Out Michael Kaplan's random stuff of dubious value Be sure to read the disclaimer here first!
Back at the Unicode Conference, after the "Design Principles for A Regional, Multilingual Keyboard" birds-of-a-feather, I had a chance to talk with Klaas Ruppel, who has been helping with the Finnish government standards.
(Among other things, he gave us some data about how the Cyrillic script versions of Sami work to help with our collation efforts. I'll talk more about this another day....)
One of the interesting things he mentioned was something that Raymond Chen mentioned in passing about Swedish collation:
(In marginally related news, the Swedish Academy recently released its latest official Swedish word list, and it changed its longstanding policy and now lists the words beginning with "W" separately from words beginning with "V". Up until now, "W" and "V" had been considered merely typographical variants of one another and had been treated as identical for alphabetization purposes.)
For the record, neither the government contacts in Sweden nor the MS subsidiary PMs in Sweden have asked Microsoft to follow this particular recommendation from the Swedish Academy, in part due to the general reluctance that the Swedes have to cause their sort to be different from the one in Finland (and the Finns have not agreed to make this change at this time).
it will put an interesting cat among the pigeons for Access 12, Jet 4.0, SQL Server 7.0, SQL Server 2000, and SQL Server 2005, given the fact that they have folded the two locales into a single sort (called Swedish/Finnish in Access and Finnish_Swedish in SQL Server).
As I mentioned in International Features of SQL Server 2000:
It should be emphasized that the developers of SQL Server are not "political" people and there really is no desire to offend any one country/region by asking them to "use another country/region's sort order." In fact, someone living in Serbia and Montenegro may not have to worry about using the Croatian sort order; because both the Croatian and Serbian languages use the same collation, the name is arbitrary. In working with customers in other countries/regions, just use the numbers. because the names are really arbitrary descriptions. What is most important is that you can choose a collation that will allow your data to be handled appropriately.
Of course what will be most important down the road (if the Swedish language goes along with the recommendations and Finnish language does not) is how they plan to deal with the disunification of the two sorts!
There is no way to know what will happen eventually, though luckily change will not come too terribly quickly, if it does come....
This post brought to you by "w" and "v" (U+0077 and U+0076, a.k.a. LATIN SMALL LETTER W and LATIN SMALL LETTER V)
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