Chinese way to classify names...??

[芳芳]

Ok, I didn't know where to post this. I didn't find a topic about this question on the forum, but maybe I didn't search preperly. It may seems stupid too. Bah...

Here is the point: in countries using an alphabetical language, alphabetical order is used to register people, to find their name in a phone book and so on...

But in Chinese, How does it works?

How are names sorted into lists, how to classify characters?

If maybe nowadays the pinyin transcription of characters can be used, it is artificial for chinese...How did they do before the arrival of latin letters?

This is very mysterious to me. I hope I expressed clearly my question which is: how does chinese administration deal with the classification of names, in order to easily fing them?

Thanks, 芳芳

[skylee]

IIRC, we used number of strokes when we had telephone directories.

[TCcookie]

I think this is a good question. I've wondered about this somewhat as well. It seems like now it would be easy enough with Pinyin or any other phonetic or syllabic alphabet to order things alphabetically, and then perhaps by radical somehow. I wonder how on earth people back in the day (read ancient times) would index the entire set of known characters when they would undergo reform and standardization. What a mess! But, surely, people had to look them up.

[芳芳]

IIRC, we used number of strokes when we had telephone directories.

Ah ok.

I had thought about something like that, but I believed there was something else, something more precise, or more efficient in addition to that... because when looking for family name then the two characters of the name...

But maybe is it really convenient, it is just that I'm not used to this method (only for looking up a word in the dictionary)...

Ah, yes, here is then my second question: Between two words with the same number of strokes, how do we do to know which one comes first in a list?

[盤古]

The standard way or organizing and looking up characters would be first find the radical (about 100 of them I think) which are also organized by the number of strokes. After you've found the radical, you then find the total number of strokes for that character and look it up.

This way it's a lot more efficient than simply looking up a character by its number of strokes because like others have mentioned, many characters have the same strokes. But characters with the same radical AND the same number of strokes are much more rare.

[laohu489]

I know for a fact that nowadays, the Shanghai telephone book is arranged in alphabetical order according to pinyin just like most dictionaries. I happened upon an old phone book from Guangzhou the other day, circa 1970. This was not in alphabetical order, but arranged according to the Kangxi radical system and then by stroke count.

Hope this answers your question.

[smalldog]

The most straightforward answer is that Chinese administration tends to deal with numbers, not names! However, I have come across two ways of sorting characters:

1) Number of strokes and type of stroke. Where two characters have the same number of strokes, they are sorted by the type (horizontal, vertical, leftward, rightward, hook, dot) of the first stroke, then the second stroke, etc. I'm not sure how characters with all the same kinds of stroke are sorted though (eg. 士 and 土).

2) Pinyin ordered as per the Latin alphabet. Lists sorted in Excel or other software will be in this form. Where two characters have the same pinyin, they are sorted by number of strokes as above.

[gougou]

You can find examples for the two ways of sorting in any standard (I take it this is standard) dictionary: the character lookup table is sorted by stroke order of the radical, then stroke order of the compound, whereas the main section is organized by pinyin, then stroke order.

[in_lab]

At the record store, within a music section, they sort by music company first, then by artist. At the book store, they sort by publisher first, then by author. (I don't know about all stores, but the ones I usually go to.) This makes it a pain when you are looking for a book/record, and you don't know who the publisher is.

[芳芳]

Thanks you all for your answers.

I'm used for a long time to search a character in a dictionary but I thought there was an other way to classify characters.

I gess, as Smalldog said, that it is finally more simple for chinese administration to deal with numbers.