How would you organize a library or index in a language without an ordered alphabet, such as chinese?

Question

How would you organize a library or index in a language without an ordered alphabet, such as chinese?

In: Culture

Answer 1

One way that some librarians or bookstores organise books “alphabetically” is by using the Chinese *pinyin* system.

Basically, pinyin is how you would “spell” a Chinese word using the alphabet based on the word’s pronunciation.

For example, the characters for Beijing are 北京, and the pinyin is indeed “bei jing”.

Using this modern method of organisation, 北京 (Beijing) would be in the “B” section based on its pinyin, as the pinyin is also organised A to Z.

**Edit:** A little further detail. Each Chinese character represents one “word” of pinyin, e.g. the above example 北京 is 北 (bei) and 京 (jing) together. Most pinyin “words” are made of two, three or four letters which represent the way you would pronounce them in spoken Mandarin.

When I’m booking a train ticket here in China, the city names are listed from A to Z according to the pinyin of the characters. So if I wanted to go to Shanghai (上海，shang + hai), it would be under “S”. My own city Xiamen (厦门，xia + men) would be under “X”.

This is not the only way of organising Chinese characters – one other way may be ordering the characters by the amount of brush strokes it takes to write them, e.g. the character 上 (shang; up) requires three strokes and would be somewhere near the top of the list.

Likewise you can organise the characters by the “components” within them, called radicals. For example, the character 板 (ban; wood or plank) contains a radical called 木 (mu; wood or tree) on the left side. All characters containing that radical on the left side of the character may be categorised together.

There are other methods too. The above two that I just mentioned are a little older and more complicated, but still fairly commonly used. The pinyin method is new but is gaining ground as the most popular method of organisation on computers, mobile apps and book stores because of its simplicity and the young generation’s stronger familiarity with the pinyin system.