[B-Greek] Frustrated Greek Learner!!!

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Sep 8 07:37:05 EDT 2004


At 7:32 AM -0400 9/7/06, George F. Somsel wrote:
>On Tue, 7 Sep 2004 11:46:18 +0700 "Erick Venden" <erickvenden at oci.org>
>writes:
>> I have been trying for the past several weeks to sort a list of
>> Greek
>> words and their translations that I have put together in Microsoft
>> Excel
>> alphabetically according to the Greek.  I have tried everything I
>> can
>> think of with now luck.  I have wasted many hours on this and am
>> now
>> frustrated.  I know that this should not be so difficult, as
>> Microsoft
>> Excel sorts according to the English language why not the Greek.  I
>> suspect also that there is a way to sort Greek in one column and
>> then
>> English in another.  Has anyone else experienced this same
>> frustration.
>> Can anyone help me so that I can sort this list in Greek.
>>
>> Thanks for your help,
>>
>> Erick Venden
>> Yogyakarta, Indonesia
>______________
>
>I noted Wieland's response prior to looking into this and wondered if
>there wasn't a simpler way.  I thought that perhaps setting the language
>to Greek in Word would enable proper sorting (though this was probably
>one of the things you tried).  I tried a simple list of four words in
>non-alpha order.  QEOS, XRISTOS, BIBLIA, and hAMARTIA.  At first glance I
>thought It had worked until I noticed that hAMARTIA was not in proper
>alpha order.  I'm afraid I haven't anything easier to suggest than what
>Wieland told you.

I used to make up Greek vocabulary lists for my classes when I was teaching
and ran into the same problems, of course. The problem is that
alphabetization functions on the basis of the language used in one's
current OS; for English-language based systems that's probably ASCII and it
means that initial Greek characters--including the diacriticals and
breathing marks--are going to be alphabetized not in terms of the sequence
of the Greek alphabet but in terms of the ASCII equivalents of those
characters. One workaround might be to enter the data in beta code,
alphabetize by beta code--but you'd have to rearrange words with
diacriticals even so--and then use a program that converts the beta code
into Greek characters. Since I had short vocabulary lists, I usually did
the alphabetizing corrections by hand back when I was teaching.
-- 

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/



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