Re: Sorting of Asian telefone books
On Wed, Nov 15, 2006 at 11:04:58PM -0800, Thomas Bushnell BSG wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-11-16 at 07:37 +0100, Daniel Baumann wrote:
> > how are Asian telefone books sorted? Or are they transcripted from the
> > symbolic into alphanumeric writing and then sorted "normally"? I'm eager
> > to know...
>
> Japanese Kanji have a standardized stroke order: someone who really
> knows Kanji can look at even an unfamiliar one and know which order the
> strokes are made to draw the character. As a result, Kanji can be
> sorted by number of strokes, and then by particular strokes with a
> typical radix method.
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.
--
<Lo-lan-do> Home is where you have to wash the dishes.
-- #debian-devel, Freenode, 2004-09-22
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