2934: Chinese Dictionaries Jan 2, 2025

The notion of alphabetical order does not have any particular bearing on language or even writing usually, but it does have a significant impact organizationally. Whether that’s shelving books, or, for our purposes, putting together a dictionary, having a set order is vital.

This poses a problem for languages like Chinese where there is no formal way to categorize the many thousands of characters. Two solutions have emerged, though neither are particularly neat. The first way is that Chinese characters are made up of radicals, to which there is a traditional stroke order. This poses a problem for quick organization as there are 214 which would complicate simple navigation.

The other way is to use pinyin, a system to use the Latin alphabet for roughly approximate Chinese pronunciation. Pinyin has in fact become so prevalent on account of its use for computer keyboards that then essentially autocorrects that many young Chinese report struggling to remember the proper characters needed regularly. This method has also become more popular to organize Chinese dictionaries since it was adopted officially in 1958. 

There will be more tomorrow about Chinese typing before pinyin assisted in it.