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Looking things up in pictogrammatic languages?


Donk

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The old fat-joke runs "more chins than the Shanghai telephone directory."

 

How does a telephone directory work in a language based on pictograms rather than an ordered alphabet? How do the Chinese, Japanese, etc. look things up in a dictionary or an encyclopaedia? Does the lack of "alphabetical order" hold them back? It doesn't seem to...

 

Maybe it's a plus. If things are harder to look up they have to remember them. Better-trained memory = more rapid access and correlation of facts.

 

And another plus: if it's hard to find stuff in books, the best way to get it is to ask somebody else. Older people, who have been storing facts for decades. Could this be why the Orientals seem to look up to oldsters more than Western society? Why their family structure seems to be more cohesive than ours?

 

Any answers? Any thoughts?

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Hmm, he said, rubbing his chins. And getting Shanghai telephone directory ink all over his fingers.

 

I know in Japan, they have a second language that IS alphabetic -- that is, each ideograph refers to a spoken sound. Telephone directories there are written in the alphabetic language, which I assume is ordered into an "alphabetic order".

 

:shrug: Maybe they do something similar in China.

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  • 3 months later...
The old fat-joke runs "more chins than the Shanghai telephone directory."

 

How does a telephone directory work in a language based on pictograms rather than an ordered alphabet? How do the Chinese, Japanese, etc. look things up in a dictionary or an encyclopaedia? Does the lack of "alphabetical order" hold them back? It doesn't seem to...

 

Any answers? Any thoughts?

 

Chinese characters are classified according to a system that was devised some 200 years or so ago, in which every character, however simple or complex, is defined as a combination of a particular graphic element (which in many cases is a character in its own right) plus the number of additional strokes of a pen, pencil or brush required to write the complete character. The defining graphic elements (which in English are usually called RADICALS) are grouped according to the number of strokes required to write them (and in a set order within each stroke-number group).

 

Thus, for example, the character consists of the eight-stroke radical (often called the "gate" radical because that is what it means), plus an enclosed shape 日, written with four strokes, which in its own right is a character meaning "sun" (also "day" in Japanese), but which is somewhat reduced in size to fit into the enclosure. The resulting character (which in Japanese at least has the meanings "space", "room", "interval (of space or time)"), would be found with ease in that section of a character dictionary in which are listed characters classified as "gate radical plus four strokes".

 

That is how character dictionaries work both in Chinese and Japanese. I don't know whether Chinese telephone directories work the same way — unlike Japanese directories, which use the set quasi-alphabetical phonetic order of Japanese kana syllabary.

 

In Japanese word dictionaries (as distinct from character dictionaries), and in telephone directories, words and names respectively are listed firstly in syllabary order and secondly (in the case of homophones) in the order in which their respective first characters would appear in a character dictionary.

 

Thus, in a telephone directory, people with the family name KAMADA would in the first instance all be listed quasi-alphabetically, but then Kamadas who write their name 蒲田[/size would be listed before Kamadas who write their name [size=3]鎌田, in accordance with the relative position of the first characters in the character classification system (the character has a radical with fewer strokes than the character ).

 

FWIW

 

satsumajin

 

 

  

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