(no subject)
I was flipping through Knuth's chapter on search algorithms last night while I reinstalled the OS (finally mucked around with the kernel enough that it broke), and I ran into the following fact that was really interesting.
The idea of sorting alphabetically according to the entire word, e.g. intelligence comes before intelligent, has not been intuitively obvious for very long. There are a few ancient works, such as Galen's Hippocratic Glosses that have alphabetization by word, but most alphabetize by the first letter or first two letters.
Okay, fine, I would have been mildly but not terribly surprised by this.
In 1286, Giovanni di Genoa is explaining alphabetical order to his audience, e.g.
amo precedes bibo
abeo precedes adeo
amatus precedes amor
imprudens precedes impudens
iusticia precedes iustus
polisintheton precedes polissenus
He goes on to say that it took strenuous effort to devise this rules, and implored his reader, "do not scorn this great labor of mine and this order as something worthless."
Okay, so much for the medievals.
In 1604, Cawdrey was explaining this principle in his English dictionary, and Knuth says he appears to have been teaching himself how it worked, as the beginning of the dictionary contains numerous misplaced words, but the accuracy of alphabetization gets better further on.
Wow, did not realize they were still struggling to alphabetize whole words in the seventeenth century.
Knuth, volume 3, page 421, second edition.
The idea of sorting alphabetically according to the entire word, e.g. intelligence comes before intelligent, has not been intuitively obvious for very long. There are a few ancient works, such as Galen's Hippocratic Glosses that have alphabetization by word, but most alphabetize by the first letter or first two letters.
Okay, fine, I would have been mildly but not terribly surprised by this.
In 1286, Giovanni di Genoa is explaining alphabetical order to his audience, e.g.
amo precedes bibo
abeo precedes adeo
amatus precedes amor
imprudens precedes impudens
iusticia precedes iustus
polisintheton precedes polissenus
He goes on to say that it took strenuous effort to devise this rules, and implored his reader, "do not scorn this great labor of mine and this order as something worthless."
Okay, so much for the medievals.
In 1604, Cawdrey was explaining this principle in his English dictionary, and Knuth says he appears to have been teaching himself how it worked, as the beginning of the dictionary contains numerous misplaced words, but the accuracy of alphabetization gets better further on.
Wow, did not realize they were still struggling to alphabetize whole words in the seventeenth century.
Knuth, volume 3, page 421, second edition.