Dealing with compounded article prefixes when sorting

Question

Say you are sorting a list of movie or book titles. You'll often want to pull certain articles from the front:

What if you have a title like L'École des Facteurs? How would this be written?

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 10 '12 at 15:43

5

I would say:

École des Facteurs, L'

answered Jan 10 '12 at 15:43

Toto

Thanks. Does anyone have a source, maybe just a prominent site that does it this way? – miracle2k Jan 12 '12 at 11:53
@miracle2k: In an index the article is always placed at the end after a comma. Here the article is L' not La. See some information at http://theleme.enc.sorbonne.fr/cours/edition_epoque_moderne/etablissement_des_index – Toto Jan 12 '12 at 12:16

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 27 '14 at 12:03

0

The article is part of the title, it doesn't make sense to put it behind. Would you use Cain John, Mc?

I would use L'école des facteurs as no one can think about école des facteurs alone.

answered Feb 27 '14 at 12:03

goto

The article is often pulled out of titles in such lists to make searching easier, otherwise half of the list would be in the T or L sections. – Kareen Feb 27 '14 at 16:16
If your talking about software, it's not because you see it that it is a good solution. A lot of database search are done by autocompleting the results, ignoring the article. Like you begin to type "sei", it propose "le seigneur des anneaux" and "trois seigneurs" – goto Feb 28 '14 at 08:22
I'm not talking about software, it's obviously irrelevant. What is relevant though is not making your user manually sift through 15 pages of "The [...]" when they could go straight to the relevant part of the title. Besides, it doesn't really answer the question. The OP is already separating the full articles and asks how to proceed for contracted ones. – Kareen Feb 28 '14 at 08:33

2 Answers2