How we arrange the order of Chinese contents?
Renda addressed an interesting question in the class: how we arrange or categorize the order of Chinese contents since the alphabet order isn't suitable to Chinese characters?
I call it "interesting" because sometimes we don't even think over it though we use it everyday. (I guess we miss many things in our daily lives as well.:P) There are some ways to categorize.
# By the order of the number of strokes (in a character)
“一” (means “one”) goes before “二” (means “two”)
# By the order of notional phonetic alphabet / phonetic symbols (we call it “注音符號”)
“不” (pronounce as “bu ㄅㄨˋ” ) goes before “跑” (pronounce as “paoㄆㄠˇ” )
*Only used in
# By the order of Hanyu Pinyin (漢語拼音)
*Broadly used in the worldwide
There are some links about changing notional phonetic alphabet to Hanyu Pinyin:
http://www.cnpedia.com/pages/knowledge/baserule.htm
http://cls.admin.yzu.edu.tw/pronounce.htm
posted by ０８：１２ @ 8:14 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
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I should have remembered Pinyin dictionary was organized by brush stroke and alphabetically for westerners. I have found alphabetical order less useful as catagory names are not always intuitive. The printed phone book is a classic example. I also think alphabetical order is not effective now we can search by a group of key words. Different countries emphasize differently. I talked to a woman from Mexico about the color red. In America, red is almost a category, it could include all shades/types of red. In Mexico, there is no generic red, one would always use the best type of red. The latin based languages also take a lot of words to describe something and it is very beautiful. American english is very too the point and abrupt, rather like it's german language ancestor.
I think there is more to discuss on the design variations between cultures and it would make a very interesting subject for a website.
Maybe we should make one?
Randa
I should have remembered Pinyin dictionary was organized by brush stroke and alphabetically for westerners. I have found alphabetical order less useful as catagory names are not always intuitive. The printed phone book is a classic example. I also think alphabetical order is not effective now we can search by a group of key words. Different countries emphasize differently. I talked to a woman from Mexico about the color red. In America, red is almost a category, it could include all shades/types of red. In Mexico, there is no generic red, one would always use the best type of red. The latin based languages also take a lot of words to describe something and it is very beautiful. American english is very too the point and abrupt, rather like it's german language ancestor.
I think there is more to discuss on the design variations between cultures and it would make a very interesting subject for a website.
Maybe we should make one?
Randa
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