9. A method as in claim 7 , further comprising sorting compressions in each of the compression tables based on combinations of code points of the compressions in said each compression table.
7. A method of building a symbol table for storing sort weights for a plurality of linguistic symbols used in a plurality of languages supported by a computer system, comprising: constructing the symbol table to contain a list of code points each uniquely identifying one of the symbols, and a sort weight for the symbol identified by said each code point; providing a plurality of compression tables for the plurality of languages, each compression table pertaining to one of the supported languages and having a compression type and containing compressions of symbols of that compression type, the compression type identifying a number of symbols in a compression, and each compression being a grouping of two or more symbols treated as a single sort element for purposes of linguistic sorting; for each code point in the symbol table, sorting the plurality of compression tables for the plurality of languages to order the compressions in the plurality of compression tables and to identify a highest compression type for all of the compressions in the plurality of compression tables, the order of the compressions being performed by ordering compressions based on a first of the two or more symbols and then ordering the compressions based on compression types, beginning with the symbol identified by said each code point; and storing a tag in the symbol table for each code point to indicate said highest compression type for said each code point, wherein the tag for each code point is stored as a portion of the sort weight of the symbol identified by said each code point, and wherein the sort weight of the symbol identified by said each code point comprises a case weight value, and wherein the tag for said each code point is stored as part of the case weight value for said each code point.