263045 - Alphabetical sorting in non-English Latin alphabets

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 163140

(Core :: Internationalization, defect)

Description

[aleksr_si]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; sl-SI; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040618 Firefox/0.9
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041001 Firefox/0.10.1

The alphabetical sorting engine sorts, I should think, letters according to
their ASCII (or another) value. However, in Slovene (sl-SI) at least, certain
letters follow others in a different manner from the one given in any character
encoding.
Scrutinise, for example, the language selection menu in Firefox (Edit ->
Preferences -> Languages).

In the Slovene localisation, these come at the very end of the list:
Čečensko (Chechen)
Češko (Czech)
Škotsko galsko (Scottish Gaelic)
Špansko (Spanish)

However, in the standard alphabet, Č comes after C, Š comes after S and Ž comes
after Z. Further, all other umlauts and symbols do not affect the order, so if a
language should begin with Ø, this would be classified IN BETWEEN other
languages starting with 'o', depending on what follows. Thus:
oab
øab
obc
ocd
øde
oef
...

Whilst I do not anticipate any such exotic characters to be used in the language
list in Slovene, Č, Š and Ž are in the regular alphabet and everyone would
expect to find them at the appropriate place.

I believe German is facing the same problem with ä, ö and ü, which should come
after (or in between?) a, o and u respectively, and not at the very end. Of
course in, say, Swedish, the current sorting is appropriate to the alphabet, so
there ought perhaps to be a specific system to sort appropriately to the
language in question.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 163140 ***