They are not ignored, just considered only secondary, if the first
order characters didn't provide an ordering.
Ok. One would have no clue of that, either, from the --debug output.
sort obviously knows the exact rules defined by the locale, or it
couldn't do its job. How about a way to dump the rules in some
human-readable way? (In sort or another utility or a separate program
or whatever.) Similar to how James Youngman found a way to write out
regex definitions in Texinfo ... just a wish ... -karl