Old Norse Alphabet

Old Norse Alphabet & sorting in Python

Motivation

Old Norse constains letters that may be hard to type with most keyboards. Prime examples being þ, ð and ǫ. There are also some letters "missing", like c and q. This package offers the alphabet & tricky individual letters as constants.

Also provides sorting function to get the old norse alphabet order just right.

Install

pip install old-norse-alphabet

Usage

The library offers Old Norse alphabet in lower/uppercases, and a function for sorting by old norse alphabetical order.

Sort

The crate exposes custom compare function for getting old norse alphabetical order just right. Compare function accepts two words to compare, so you can use cmp_to_key with sorted.

from functools import cmp_to_key
from old_norse_alphabet.sort import old_norse_sort

words = (
    "öðli",
    "ógnan",
    "æðrask",
    "aðili",
    "þakkan",
    "áfir",
    "á-auki",
    "él-ligr",
    "maðka",
    "ef-lauss",
    "œgir",
    "áðr",
    "maðr",
    "madr",
    "mæðr",
)

result = sorted(words, key=cmp_to_key(old_norse_sort))

print(result)
# "aðili", "á-auki", "áðr", "áfir", "ef-lauss", "él-ligr", "madr", "maðka", "maðr", "mæðr", "ógnan", "þakkan", "æðrask", "œgir", "öðli",

Alphabet

Alphabets are just immutable tuples of letters in ON alphabetical order with getter functions.

from old_norse_alphabet import alphabet

# Both alphabets contain 34 characters.
upper = alphabet.get_upper() 
lower = alphabet.get_lower()

# There is special list for characters that are valid as first letter.
valid_as_first = alphabet.get_valid_as_first()

Exposed special characters:

from old_norse_alphabet import alphabet

print(alphabet.eth) # ð
print(alphabet.thorn) # þ
print(alphabet.o_caudata) # ǫ
print(alphabet.slashed_o) # ø
print(alphabet.ae) # æ
print(alphabet.oe) # œ
print(alphabet.ash) # Alternative export of AE

About Old Norse

Old Norse was a North Germanic language that was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and their overseas settlements from about the 7th to the 15th centuries.