Q regarding Chinese database use

[sef1029]

How does one go about searching for names in a Chinese/Mandarin database? How are names grouped in a setting where alphabetization isn't relevant? Is there an ordering system that is relevant?

I'm wondering, for instance, how Shen Wei might have gone about searching for Kunlun in the modern era. Also, how easily could one hide a name like Da Qing if one wanted to keep it present in the records but difficult to find? In English, for instance, just changing "Catherine Braun" to "Katherine Brown" would subvert most searchers. What might a clever person do to achieve a similar result with logograms?

Or would something entirely different from a name search be more useful? What?

Thanks for any clues!

Comments

[oracularmayhem]

Hi! I have only a cursory knowledge of Chinese archival systems (and Mandarin Chinese!), but my understanding is that the organizational choices are thus (and can be combined to a certain extent):
1. Stroke order (the "old-fashioned way" pt 1)
2. Radical (the "old-fashioned way" pt 2)
3. Category (used mostly for things like medical dictionaries)
4. Zhu Yin system (Taiwan - a transliteration system for Mandarin Chinese that renders Mandarin into semisyllabary. aka Bopomofo or Mandarin Phoenetic Symbols)
5. Alphabetically using romanisation system.

Maybe the trouble with researching Kunlun is that he's referred to as things other than his name in texts. I'm afraid I don't remember very specifically the episodes where this comes up. As to your question "how easily could one hide a name like Da Qing if one wanted to keep it present in the records but difficult to find? " My guess is "very easily" if Da Qing spends 10K years changing up how his name is written. In the Guardian wiki, his name is listed as 大庆 and Dà Qìng that means just.. "the greatest", right? Maybe? I think you have creative license to do whatever with that.

[sef1029]

Cool. Thank you so much. Guess I'll have to go learn about different strokes...ha.

[ariunderscore]

re. strokes, what you mainly need to know is: there's a certain order to how characters are written, which is fairly intuitive after you know some ground rules (and consider that they used to be written with brush and ink and top to bottom).

Once you know these rules, you can easily count strokes even of unfamiliar characters to look them up.

For example 口 has 3 strokes: first the left one, then the one across the top and then down the right side drawn in one go, and last the bottom one.

(my knowledge comes from Japanese, but they imported Chinese writing)

[sef1029]

Oh, I appreciate that. Thank you. Fans are so generous.

[grayswandir]

I'm going off of extremely superficial research here, but as far as I understand, sorting by radicals is the most traditional way. The current system of radicals was introduced with the Zihui dictionary in 1615 and popularized about a hundred years later with the Kangxi Dictionary, but apparently radicals had already been used in dictionaries for centuries before that -- there were just way more of them (550 instead of 214), which made dictionaries really difficult to use. The section on "Dictionary Lookup" in the Wiktionary article on radicals seems to confirm that radicals are still the most common sorting method in dictionaries, though I'm not sure whether other types of archives necessarily use the same system. (It seems like it probably depends a lot on the archive and what its purpose/audience is.)

According to this page from a translation service website:

Because there is no standard way of ordering Chinese characters, Chinese speakers can choose from several methods to organize lists. Even dictionaries don’t agree. Some dictionaries sort by the radical or root character. Others use the number of brushstrokes in the first character, then the second, and so on. Still others sort alphabetically by the pinyin, the standardized system that transcribes the sounds of the Chinese characters into Latin script. Most dictionaries use one method in their main body and then include an index or two that use another method, in the likely case that the reader is more comfortable with one of them.

Personally, when I'm looking up a Chinese character that I can't copy-paste, I mostly use Wiktionary, which can be searched in a few ways, but I think primarily uses radicals for sorting. All the words with the same radical are listed together and ordered according to number of strokes (and I presume then by stroke order, but I don't know enough about stroke order to be sure about that). For example, here's the page listing all the characters with the radical 口.

While I was Googling around just now, though, I saw several pages that mentioned stroke order as a common way of sorting characters. For instance, there's a page here that explains how to set up Microsoft Word, Excel, etc. so that they'll correctly sort Chinese characters by stroke order. (Sorting by radical doesn't seem to be an option at all, although I suppose the majority of words sorted by stroke order would automatically be sorted by radical, since the radical is usually the first part of the character that you write...)

On a side note, this page points out that simplified characters have added another level of difficulty, because a simplified character will have a different number of strokes, and sometimes a completely different radical, from the traditional character (which I guess would make pinyin sorting the most consistent, though of course that could be confusing for Chinese speakers who don't know Mandarin... or who know Mandarin but don't know pinyin... and I guess words with multiple pronunciations would have to be listed multiple times?).

[sef1029]

Wow, that's so helpful! And fascinating. Thank you, thank you. It does seem like there are lots of opportunities to bury someone in the data, which works well for me.

[trobadora]

I was just looking up something else and remembered your post, and it occurred to me ... you know, I think if Da Qing wanted to hide his name, the first thing to do would be to swap out the 大 because that's not an actual surname and would really stand out anywhere. Substituting in a similarly-pronounced surname like 达 or 笪 would probably go a long way?

[sef1029]

Oh, good idea. Thank you for the info!