This is commonly seen in the Index of many books about computer programming, where there are index entries for the various punctuation marks used in the language. Punctuation marks are typically given a separate section in the index, at the very beginning, before the letter “A” section. Grabbing one book off my shelf, PHP Advanced For The World Wide Web by Larry Ullman, we see the index begins like this:
(I have no idea what that anomalous “nbj” entry is about, and looking at page 298, there’s utterly nothing recognizably related to that there. Go figure.)
The article exception spawns more headaches than it solves. Nowadays it’s common to have eBooks, songs, videos with foreign titles on your devices. Does the article exception apply to those as well? Are you sure about the usage of “Une”, “Der”, etc.?
I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a law in Canada that says if you exclude articles in English in sorting you have to exclude articles in French as well.
If the article is part of the name as it is commonly known in the US (like, say “Das Boot”), then I would say file it under “d.” The issue in English is that it’s often not clear whether the article is part of the proper name, or not, and sometimes there is even inconsistency there (like how “The Smashing Pumkins” were originally known as “Smashing Pumpkins.” Gish, Siamese Dream, and Zeitgeist have the cover as “Smashing Pumpkins.” The other albums [or at least most of them] have it as “The Smashing Pumpkins.” So how to classify that? Easiest is to put them all under “S.”)
This has come up I. Another thread, but it is a recent idea that it makes a difference whether “The” is “officially” part of the proper name. It’s a pointless idea that produces nothing useful for the language or usage. “The” should just be treated as an article and uses when grammatically needed.
Zombie question but Joe Haldeman wrote a science fiction story titled “A !tangled Web”. It was about a human interacting with an alien race called the !tangs.