On 3 Nov 2014, at 10:01 , Alan BRASLAU <alan.braslau@cea.fr> wrote

On Sun, 2 Nov 2014 12:45:25 +0100
Robert Blackstone <blackstone.robert@gmail.com> wrote:

On 2 Nov 2014, at 12:00 , Pablo Rodriguez <oinos@gmx.es> wrote

I
Alphabetize letter by letter. When alphabetizing surnames, remember
that “nothing precedes something”: Brown, J. R., precedes Browning, A.
R., even though i precedes j in the alphabet.

Singh, Y., precedes Singh Siddhu, N.
López, M. E., precedes López de Molina, G.
Ibn Abdulaziz, T., precedes Ibn Nidal, A. K. M.
Girard, J.-B., precedes Girard-Perregaux, A. S.
Villafuerte, S. A., precedes Villa-Lobos, J.
Benjamin, A. S., precedes ben Yaakov, D.

Hi Alan,

This still puzzles me a bit.

You write: “Brown, J. R., precedes Browning, A.R., even though i precedes j in the alphabet.”

Likewise, when sorting these names (with TeX-Edit Plus), Singh Siddhu, N. comes out before Singh, Y., not the reverse, precisely because, as you say, “nothing precedes something”, or the space between Singh and Siddhu precedes the comma between Singh and Y.