On Thu, 2006-11-16 at 10:38 +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote: > > Additionally, the Japanese really use four alphabets: Hiragana (for > Japanese words or syllables that don't have a kanji character), Katakana > (for loan words or to place emphasis), Kanji, and our latin alphabet for > loan words that can't be written by use of katakana. Although you > probably won't find the last one in a Japanese dictionary (though I > can't be sure, never having seen one), you will be able to find words > written in at least hiragana, possibly also katakana in one. These two > alphabets contain "only" 104 characters, and have a particular sorting > order. Both kana are syllabaries, not alphabets, but since they are short, you are correct that they are easily sorted with normal radix methods. That's why I didn't mention them. The question was about names, which are pretty much always written with Kanji in Japanese. Katakana are satisfactory for all loan words; the use of Roman letters is for different reasons. Thomas
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