How would you organize a library or index in a language without an ordered alphabet, such as chinese?
In: Culture
I studied Japanese in Japan for a few months, so I don’t really understand the details. But the way things like dictionaries were organized was by stroke order and radicals of the Kanji. Like I said, I don’t really understand it but the idea is that you order entries based on the way the symbols are written. In book stores, for example, authors are just ordered by their romanized names because that’s obviously a lot easier.
I also studied Akkadian for a few semesters, which is written in cuneirofrm. Most Akkadian dictionaries are simply transcribed and ordered alphabetically, with some extra entries for letters like š (after s). The reference works that are actually in cuneiform use a somewhat chaotic and arbitrary method that lists all symbols that start with one horizontal wedge, then those with two horizontal wedges, etc, then the same for slanted wedges, then angle wedges, then vertical wedges. I never used any cuneiform dictionary myself, so I’m not sure how convenient it is. Cuneiform is a fairly complicated writing system in general though. Also, keep in mind that this is how **modern** reference works are ordered and even that’s not universal. There are ancient lists a dictionaries written in cuneiform but I actually don’t know how those are ordered. Although I’m guessing there was a similar system because assigning a fixed, random order to all of the hundreds of symbols would just be impractical.
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