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Re: Order of logograms

From:Alex Fink <a4pq1injbok_0@...>
Date:Wednesday, April 25, 2007, 17:45
On Mon, 23 Apr 2007 14:22:57 -0000, caeruleancentaur
<caeruleancentaur@...> wrote:
>Is there some standard way by which the Chinese arrange the logograms? > >What I want to do is develop a writing system for Senjecas similar to >Japanese: the use of a logogram for the root of the word, along with >letters for prefixes, suffixes, particles, etc.
Another way about it which hasn't come out yet is to sort the glyphs systematically by some collection of abstract properties of their shape, more than just 'tall, long, round, ...'; this would be especially apt if the Senjecan glyphs don't tend to contain radicals. This is the basis of Gary Shannon's LOTEP (Google cache at http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:og41Kp3BF_8J:fiziwig.com/glyph/piktok.html ). For each glyph one counts the Loops (enclosed areas), intersections of Oddly many lines, Terminations of lines, intersections of Evenly many lines, and connected Pieces, and concatenates these into a 5-number index for the glyph. The Chinese four corner method is similar in spirit: here one classifies the shape in each corner of the character, whether it's a horizontal line, a vertical, a diagonal, a dot, a corner, a cross, whatever, and catenates these into a 4-digit index. http://www.sungwh.freeserve.co.uk/sapienti/fourcinp.htm And there are a variety of input methods (Cangjie, Wubi, ...) that use decompositions into more basic shapes, on the order of a hundred or two, with some associated to each Roman letter; but I've never actually seen these used for sorting or indexing purposes. Alex