First of all, thanks for having replied!
Wondercow wrote:The Finder not ordering English articles properly has always bothered me. Blame Apple for not following convention regarding alphabetical sorting
I will not blame the Finder nor Apple, the Finder is right (for me). Doing otherwise would be a bag of hurts!
File names very often are abstract, they usually are not prose, names can starts with an indexing code that can easily resemble grammatical articles, especially taking all languages of the world (and you can't assume that a user will only use the primary language set in System Preferences, if only because they can receive files from other users).
Omitting articles would imply the software to make horribly subjective assumptions that render the whole idea simply unrealistic.
Wondercow wrote: The word "the" doesn't mean anything in French; however, the word "thé" does mean "tea". In French, a missing accent is like a mssing lettr in Enlish
As there are only three English articles , i.e.
the,
a, and
an, it is, in fact, very rare that another language would use these words--especially without accents. I'm a linguist and, off the top of my head as I'm about to turn in (it's the wee hours of the morning here) I can't think of any that would generally cause problems through placement at the beginning of a sentence. I'm sure they're out there, but I'm also sure that they're inconsequential.
Well… I know French… I'm French! and I know "Tea" is "Thé", but you are still wrong because "TEA" is "THE" as accents in French are discarded when writing in all capitals, which BTW is common for titles.
But academic points of grammar aside, file names are often non-accented anyway for legacy reason (as much as I hate this state of affairs).
You say "Only 3 articles in English and no problem?" Think again! Only considering French, it happens that
all of them are French nouns:
- "THE" means "TEA" (as I said, only when written in capitals, granted)
- "A" means "To" (i.e., this classics French movie: "A l'aventure" - omit the "A" and the title looses its meaning entirely (BTW, I wouldn't know how to translate this tile in English,
it is not "The Adventure" for sure!)
- "An" means "Year" - a hypothetical tile such as "Year 50 BC" would be in French "An 50 avant JC"
But omitting articles leads to problem in English as well, because it can
alter the meaning. For example, take the movie
"The hour". If you know the story, I am sure you will realize that the word
The carries as much meaning as the word
Hour, it just cannot be omitted,
that single article carries by itself the essence of the entire novel!
In summary, my point of view is simply that
a title is the work of the author, it is "sacred", and should not be mangled by us mere recipients
This fundamental consideration, combined with practical issues with titles using acronyms, the complexity of articles in foreign languages
(*), titles with mixed languages, expressions, play on words, etc, etc… makes it that the only way to have a
sound and consistent sorting in such a database is to
respect titles by the letter.
(*) Trying to cater to foreign articles is another bag of hurts! The list is much longer than 3, and grammar can be very peculiar, for instance with that French movie I mentioned above, "A l'aventure"", the article is l' because of a certain grammar rule that says the article gets tied to the noun with its vowel replaced by an apostrophe when the noun starts with a vowel (unless due exceptions to that rule, of course, that would be too easy!).
So if you want to deal with articles in foreign languages, issues will be endless!
Wondercow wrote:I'm not meaning to put down your request, just that these reasons aren't likely to be a problem very often (except for the Finder--but that's in Apple's hands).
I understand what you say, but on the other hand my request is trivial, a simple and obvious Preference. If some users want to sort while omitting articles (despite the countless issues - I guess they don't care), it is really nice for DVDpedia to try and accommodate them, but to make it not only the default, but
compulsory(**), I just don't get it!
(**) I know it is not absolutely compulsory, as the "Sort Title" field can be used, but frankly, this is like acrobatics! I am constantly going to forget to fill that that field. And using a terminal command (or making an automator script) to fill it automatically (but after the fact!) is also like acrobatics to me. Just that I have to remember and run the process manually, and very often, is a real pain.
I mean… kudos for implementing that field (sincerely!), as it can serve to accommodate perfectionists for they specific needs, I really admire the intent of implementing this feature, but asking users to resort to this instead of a trivial Preference is not reasonable
I bought DVDpedia years ago, and actually bought it 3 times over the years with new versions, always with the intent to finally sort my collections, but was put out every time because it is a daunting task. You dismiss this sorting issue as exceptional, but now that I am trying DVDpedia again, I was
immediately hit by this problem that is making my work much worse than it should be!
I hope I made my case… If writing this long post is not proof that this issue matters to a user like me, I don't know what to do. Please be responsive and implement it.
