[LarryTheLeffa]

I'd like to start a discussion about the alphabetical sorting when taking an article into account.
The current situation is, that sorting media files is ignoring a (german) article like "Der", "Die" and "Das" (plus "The"). These are definite articles (Bestimmte Artikel). But what about indefinite articles (Unbestimmte Artikel) like "Ein", Eine", "Einer" and so on (= "A" in Englisch, i.e. "A beautiful day")?

I have asked a librarian about this and he said that sorting Books is respecting indefinite articles. This would lead to the fact that a book named "Ein schöner Tag" (A beautiful day) can be found in a library at the letter "S" instead of "E" (= "schöner Tag, Ein"). And that would imho mean that Kodi is doing it's sorting wrong and the addon.xml of resource.language.de_de (at least the german version) should be extended to take that into account. Or is/was there another reason why this hasn't be done 'til now?

References:
https://github.com/xbmc/repo-resources/b...ml#L17-L22
https://bildungswissenschaften.unibas.ch...en_2.2.pdf
https://www.scribbr.de/apa-standard/lite...sortieren/

[scott967]

Probably because it is so fraught with exceptions.

scott s.
.

[hansl]

Isn't that a very German discussion aka knowing the "right way" even if nobody will ever walk upon it? Mind you, I'm German myself  Do you (or anyone) use this way of sorting? It is one of the first things I turn off, because it is completely couter-intuitive to me. If I look for a movie called "Das wandelnde Schloss" (Howl's moving castle) I would never think to look unter the letter "w", not with my DVDs (yes, I still own physical media ) nor with my books.
That aside, yes, I think you are right, in a catalogue of a library the indefinite acrticle is treated the way you described. But I think that the catalogue of a library is something very different from a movie collection. Books are primarily sorted by author first and then by title. You don't do that for movies... And I am unsure if a library would really *physically* sort book that way. The RDA (German: RDA) covers the cataloging of books not the physical ordering or visual presentation. And Kodi is all about the latter
So I think the time and energy needed for a proper implementation of a sorting that has (to me) no practical use is better spent somewhere else.

[LarryTheLeffa]

You are right and sorting "doesn't matter" in principle. But then the "sorttokens" in resource.language.de_de/addon.xml is completely useless (because incomplete) and should be removed or turned off by default.
A (sometimes) practical problem is that I have tons of media files in alphabetical subfolders (A-Z) and when we (my wife and/or I) want to watch "Das wandelnde Schloss" we are going to Folder "Movies/W/Das wandelnde Schloss", which is saved as "wandelnde Schloss, Das" in the SQL library. But when we want to watch "Ein Fisch Namens Wanda"... where to take a look? /E/ ? /F/ ? Ask the library everytime before watching?

My wife is somewhat autistic. You can guess what she's saying everytime she found a "wrong sorted" media file 
Yeah, first-world-problems. But either do it right or don't do it at all.

[Chillbo]

Probably because it is so fraught with exceptions.

scott s.
.

Not sure where there would be exceptions regarding articles in German. There are none really. It's straightforward and if a setting says that articles are to be ignored while sorting, articles should be ignored - all of them.

Isn't that a very German discussion aka knowing the "right way" even if nobody will ever walk upon it? Mind you, I'm German myself  Do you (or anyone) use this way of sorting? It is one of the first things I turn off, because it is completely couter-intuitive to me. [...] But I think that the catalogue of a library is something very different from a movie collection. Books are primarily sorted by author first and then by title. You don't do that for movies... And I am unsure if a library would really *physically* sort book that way. The RDA (German: RDA) covers the cataloging of books not the physical ordering or visual presentation. And Kodi is all about the latter
So I think the time and energy needed for a proper implementation of a sorting that has (to me) no practical use is better spent somewhere else.

Yes, I do and it makes sense. It's preference whether you use it or not, but using your preference as an argument to do it wrong when this type of sorting is used, frankly doesn't make any sense.
And from an archival/librarian's standpoint I cannot agree at all! Sure, books are often sorted by author (first!), but that doesn't mean they aren't being sorted by their title's actual first word after an article at the beginning of the title consequently... And that doesn't just apply to a library inventory, but it sure does also apply to physical sorting of books in a shelf - these two are corresponding to each other in a very close manner as anything else wouldn't make much sense. In what way would an inventory help you, if the sort order of the actual physical books that you'd like to find using said inventory is entirely different?
And another argument: Keep in mind that most libraries and archives don't just store books nowadays, so the sorting system will apply to all media found there, including movies.

If it's not too difficult to implement, it would be great to honor all articles in excluding them from sorting or none at all. But the current situation regarding German articles is really not making much sense 😊

[jjd-uk]

If you don't want the articles ignored then turn off the setting. If with setting on the ignored articles aren't comprehensive enough FOR YOU then add whatever articles you want via the sorttoken advanced setting see https://kodi.wiki/view/Advancedsettings.xml#sorttokens

[Chillbo]

I believe, the whole point of this discussion was to talk about whether the ignored articles are comprehensive in general when it comes to the German language... Infinite articles are articles, so it should be pretty logical and straightforward to ignore them as well when enabling a setting that says: "ignore ARTICLES when sorting". I don't see this so much a discussion about preference, but about a logical consequence of a setting we have.

Until something has changed about this, I can use advancedsettings which is nice.