Re: Sorting of Asian telefone books
> 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,
Right.
> 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.
I could be wrong; but I thought people were talking about dictionaries.
Those usually don't contain names...
> Katakana are satisfactory for all loan words;
No, they are not. Almost all syllables in Japanese consist of a consonant
followed by a vowel; it is impossible to write down syllables that end
with a consonant (except, perhaps, if it ends with the consonant n, but
that's a special case). For example, it's impossible to write down your
name or mine with Japanese kana -- at least if it's to be pronounced
correctly.
I'm aware that the Japanese usually write down a fair approximation for
foreign names in katakana, but sometimes that's not enough.
--
<Lo-lan-do> Home is where you wash the dishes
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