dropping the Arabic particle in sorting

gotoayman

Is there anyway to drop the Arabic particle "ال" from sorting the bibliography?
for example, i want الرازي to be sorted under the third letter in the word which is "ر". currently it is sorted under the letter "ا" .

bwiernik

Do you have the language specified in language field of the item data in Zotero? What style are you using?

gotoayman

yes the language is specified "Arabic".
I am using Chicago note style.

bwiernik

Set the language field to “ar” instead and this should happen automatically.

gotoayman

i changed it to "ar" in the item info, but nothing changed.

bwiernik

Okay, let me check with the developer of the citation processor.

@fbennett Does citeproc-js support Arabic character particle dropping, or only transliterated particle dropping?

fbennett

It only handles romanized forms at present, but parsing is based on a controlled list, so we could register the original forms as well, if there is a list of them to work from.

One question for the implementation would be whether there is a delimiter of some sort between the particle and the name. Parsing currently depends on that, but we could tweak things if Arabic typography runs the two elements together.

gotoayman

No delimiter in Arabic between the particle and the name.

bwiernik

Can you give a list of the particles that are dropping and non-dropping?

DWL-SDCA

For my own curiosity: Am I correct that sometimes the name particle characters are used but should not be dropped? I'm also thinking of institution names when named for a person.

fbennett

@DWL-SDCA The processor should not drop particles from single-field names. In roman-script names, the particle in a two-field name can be capitalized to disable dropping. I don't know about Arabic script - if there is no analog to capitalization, and particle look-alikes sometimes do not drop in two-field names, someone will need to come up with a hinting mechanism.

gotoayman

Its only one particle "ال".
no capitalization and no hinting mechanism.
the only way of dropping this particle, i think, is to tell the software to drop the two letters "ال" from any word starting with them. 99.99% of names starting with "ال" is starting with the particle. I mean that rarely in Arabic you can find a word start with "ال" as an original letters of the word. "ال" almost always a particle if it comes in the first parts of a word.

fbennett

You would want this dropped for sorting in titles as well? Or would that be unnecessary or over-aggressive?

fbennett

(I'll put this in a list for next weekend. Today and tomorrow I want to put some time in on finalizing a release of the Juris-M variant, which I've been putting off for months.)

gotoayman

yes it is needed for authors and titles.
thank you a lot

bwiernik

And what about for names of organizations (single field names)?

gotoayman

i wonder if we can add to the particle list: "ابن", "ابو" and "بنت" in the names of authors only. they are separated particles from the names. they mean "the son of", "the daughter of" and "the father of". Many Arabic citation styles prefer to dropping them, some does not. so if it is possible to let the user choose wither to drop them or not, it would be great. otherwise, I think, it would be better to consider dropping them.

gotoayman

Is there any progress in this subject matter?

gotoayman

?