I suggest you try it out - http://oss.software.ibm.com/cgi-bin/icu/lx/en_US/utf-8/?_=he&EXPLORE_CollationElements=Thank you, Markus. Unfortunately the results are barely usable because they are in Arial Unicode MS or something (and cannot be changed) which simply fails to give a meaningful display of pointed Hebrew. There is a clear need for a mechanism for the user to specify a useful display font with good support for the text in question.
ICU implements the UCA, including discontiguous contractions.
markus
But one thing is immediately clear. I sorted a set of shins with various combinations of shin and sin dot and dagesh, each followed by alef and separately by bet. The default collator sorted all the shin alefs before all the shin bets. This is probably correct for modern Hebrew. It is not the preferred ordering for biblical Hebrew.
Here are the results of the sort, which are slightly more legible when pasted into this message, and show the ordering shin, <shin, dagesh, shin dot>, <shin, dagesh, sin dot>, <shin, shin dot>, <shin, sin dot>. I would consider this incorrect even for modern Hebrew as sin and shin dots logically come before dagesh, so I would prefer <shin, shin dot>, <shin, dagesh, shin dot>, <shin, sin dot>, <shin, dagesh, sin dot>, or perhaps better still with sin dot before shin dot.
03 ×× 09 ×Ö×× 05 ×Ö×× 07 ××× 01 ××× 04 ×× 10 ×Ö×× 06 ×Ö×× 08 ××× 02 ×××
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
