Re: Order of logograms

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