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.” 
But isn’t that because “," precedes “i" ?
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.
Same with López de Molina, G. and López, M. E.

Or does ConTeXt, or TeX, have its own sorting order?

Best regards,
Robert Blackstone