OK, here's a 2-minute intro. Anybody who knows Japanese will know this is technically wrong in many ways but hopefully somewhat useful.
"Kana" = Hiragana + Katakana. These are the 2 sets of phonetic 'alphabets' that Japanese uses. They're different ways to write the same sets of sounds, like upper-case and lower-case in English. But instead of individual letters, they're consonant+vowel pairs, like か = ka. (There's also plain vowel sounds, a lone "n" which is just special, and some other variants, but it's pretty regular overall.) There's about 50 each, hiragana and katakana.
Obviously 100 groupings is kind of overkill. So what my iPod seems to do is something like:
- only make groupings for each 'consonant' sound, using the 'a' vowel sound: [a ka sa ta na ha ma ya ra wa] (this is, transliterated, what I see on the right side in the Music app)
- within each grouping, the vowels are ordered [a i u e o], so the the first characters in the sorted list would look like [a i u e o ka ki ku ke ko sa si su se so ta ti tu te to ...]
- when sorting, treat hiragana/katakana equally (ka = か = カ), and use the difference between them only as a tiebreaker (hiragana first, I guess?)
There's other variants of the characters that affect sorting, too. The Wikipedia article "Goj%C5%ABon" describes this, probably better than I could.
I imagine there's enough subtleties that there should be a standard library for doing this -- they can't expect developers to implement this all themselves every time -- but some quick googling didn't turn up anything obvious. Hmm...
Anyway, this is pretty low priority for me. There's a dozen other things I'd like to see more than this. I'll get around to writing about them one of these days.
Thanks again for figuring out the crashing problem for me!
OK, here's a 2-minute intro. Anybody who knows Japanese will know this is technically wrong in many ways but hopefully somewhat useful. :-)
"Kana" = Hiragana + Katakana. These are the 2 sets of phonetic 'alphabets' that Japanese uses. They're different ways to write the same sets of sounds, like upper-case and lower-case in English. But instead of individual letters, they're consonant+vowel pairs, like か = ka. (There's also plain vowel sounds, a lone "n" which is just special, and some other variants, but it's pretty regular overall.) There's about 50 each, hiragana and katakana.
Obviously 100 groupings is kind of overkill. So what my iPod seems to do is something like:
- only make groupings for each 'consonant' sound, using the 'a' vowel sound: [a ka sa ta na ha ma ya ra wa] (this is, transliterated, what I see on the right side in the Music app)
- within each grouping, the vowels are ordered [a i u e o], so the the first characters in the sorted list would look like [a i u e o ka ki ku ke ko sa si su se so ta ti tu te to ...]
- when sorting, treat hiragana/katakana equally (ka = か = カ), and use the difference between them only as a tiebreaker (hiragana first, I guess?)
There's other variants of the characters that affect sorting, too. The Wikipedia article "Goj%C5%ABon" describes this, probably better than I could.
I imagine there's enough subtleties that there should be a standard library for doing this -- they can't expect developers to implement this all themselves every time -- but some quick googling didn't turn up anything obvious. Hmm...
Anyway, this is pretty low priority for me. There's a dozen other things I'd like to see more than this. I'll get around to writing about them one of these days. :-)
Thanks again for figuring out the crashing problem for me!
