Leo Broukhis, Fri, 21 Dec 2012 01:31:18 -0800: > In Russian, the difference between Е and Ё is primary at the beginning > of a word as they are considered distinct letters of the alphabet, yet > secondary in the middle of a word, as the dieresis over Ё is not > mandatory. > > As an example, ель < ёлка, but тёлка < тель, see > http://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/Орфографический_словарь_русского_языка
You say that the difference is primary in the beginning of a word but elsewhere secondary. And yes, that orthographic dictionary that you link to above, looks as you describe. However, in reality, the difference is secondary - if that is the right word - even as the first letter in a word. Wikipedia has the following example: едок > ёж > ездит.[1] And, for instance the word ёлка could also be written елка. Hence I would argue that the dictionary you linked to above considers the difference to *always* be secondary. It is just that the dictionary applies the sorting algorithm to a collection where the words that begins with the letter Ё has been separated from words that begins on the letter Е. > A cursory scan of the UCA doesn't reveal if that's implementable, and > experiments in a fairly fresh Linux Mint yield either > ель < ёлка < тель < тёлка or ель < тель < тёлка < ёлка depending on > the LANG setting (en_US works better than ru_RU). (Both examples consider the difference primary, but the the last example is incorrect as the ёлка follows after the тёлка - which is incorrect from every angle (except from the angle of the number of the letter inside Unicode.) > Could someone tell if the UCA in its current form is able to support that? Is there not a need for 3 kinds of sorting? Namely: a) Е/Ё as always distinct letters, b) Е/Ё as always non-distinct letters, c) Е/Ё as non-distinct letters except when used as the first letter. (Note that the last variant would only be yield correct result on collections of words where a first-letter Ё is guaranteed be rendered with a Ё. Thus, if ёлка is written елка, then the result becomes incorrect.) Linguistic PS: From the angle of the "color" of the sound, then Russian Ё is the "light" version of Russian О. (Its predecessor was also a digraph - "IO".) But from the angle of stress then, when the Ё looses its stress, it alternates with Russian Е (since Е can both be with and without stress, whereas Ё can only be with stress). The reason why Е/Ё is often considered a secondary difference, is (I think) related to the stress: But for in lexicons and dictionaries, then Russian texts typically do not mark where the stress of a word is. The stress is simply known by the reader/user. [1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ё#Russian> -- leif halvard silli
