Deceptively simple spelling question?

Question

I have a list of names that I need to alphabetize (by last name). Here's a partial sample:

Joe Smith
Rad Šlégl
Lloyd Källberg
Larry Kalibur

The problem is that the letters used in these names come from different alphabets, so it's not clear which letter comes before which.

Does anybody know if there's a precedence list of all characters in all alphabets?

The problem I'm having is that each person comes from a different country. Therefore one person's name might be Czech and another English. Does the Czech "Š" come before or after the English "S"?

In other words, the problem I'm having isn't a collation issue within each language, it's a collation issue of names from several different alphabets.

Answer 1

In the sample you have given, they would be Kalibur, Kallberg, Slegl and Smith - I would disregard the umlaut in Kallberg, putting Kalibur first as the fourth letter "i" comes before the "l" in Kallberg.

Apparently there is an alphabetical order: The Finnish alphabet in alphabetical order is:

a-z, å, ä, ö

Different languages use different rules to put diacritic characters in alphabetical order. French treats letters with diacritical marks the same as the underlying letter for purposes of ordering and dictionaries.

The Scandinavian languages, by contrast, treat the characters with diacritics ä, ö and å as new and separate letters of the alphabet, and sort them after z. Usually ä is sorted as equal to æ (ash) and ö is sorted as equal to ø (o-slash). Also, aa, when used as an alternative spelling to å, is sorted as such. Other letters modified by diacritics are treated as variants of the underlying letter, with the exception that ü is frequently sorted as y.

Languages that treat accented letters as variants of the underlying letter usually alphabetize words with such symbols immediately after similar unmarked words. For instance, in German where two words differ only by an umlaut, the word without it is sorted first in German dictionaries (eg schon and then schön, or fallen and then fällen). However, when names are concerned (eg in phone books or in author catalogues in libraries), umlauts are often treated as combinations of the vowel with a suffixed e; Austrian phone books now treat umlauts as separate letters (immediately following the underlying letter). In Spanish, although ñ is considered a new letter different from n and placed between n and o, acute accents and diaereses are ignored in alphabetization.

For a comprehensive list of the collating orders in various languages, see Alphabets derived from the Latin.

Check the wikipedia link for alphabetisation.

Answer 2

Larry Kalibur----i is before l
Lloyd Kallberg
Rad Slegl----l is before m
Joe Smith
Regardless, this should be right.

Answer 3

Yeah, I liked it.

Answer 4

sorry nope