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I tried to search for Mihály Sztárai (d. 1575), author of the Hungarian metrical version of Psalm 92 beginning "Mely igen jó az úr Istent dicsérni" (I have no idea what English translations may be out there, but I'm fairly sure there are some). But when I put "Sztárai" in the Person Name Search field, and select People as a result type, and click Pre-1979, I get no results, but what's worse, I'm told that I'm searching for "sztrai", which is NOT what I entered. In other words, the search engine is ignoring the "á"; not interpreting it as an unaccented "a", which I could understand and which might actually be a good thing since lots of times English typists and even hymnal editors leave out accents; but no, it acts as if there were nothing between the t and the r. I tried all of the variants I could think of and still don't find any Person Authority for him, but the way the search engine treats non-ASCII characters really has me worried. I'm assuming his authority should be called Sztarai_M.
Leland/Haruo
Comments
searching
> But when I put "Sztárai" in the Person Name Search field, and select People as a result type, and click Pre-1979, I get no results, but what's worse, I'm told that I'm searching for "sztrai", which is NOT what I entered.
Enter sztarai as the search term. if Sztárai were in the database, the normalize form (used for searching) would be sztarai, and your search would have found it.
Harry
Okay, however
People who are used to Google searching are not used to having to think about whether a particular search term is "normalize[d]" or if not, how to normalize it. In Google, I can search for "Sztárai" and it will find all instances with or without the accent, or I can refine my search to exclude "Sztarai" and it will find only those instances that *have* the accent. For those who cut and paste search terms from the web into search boxes, this is second nature, and I think it would enhance the usefulness of the Hymnary's search capabilities if the outside world's norms also applied here.
In any case, I'll try to supply a person page for Mihály, er, Mihaly.