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Comment by est | Hacker News Reader

> Modern Hanzi are a very bad phonetic alphabet

alphabets, universally have one common property: they are sortable.

I challenge you to sort Chinese characters.

This is an idea from James Gleick's The Information. The Chinese may never be able to invent morse code alone, because encoding Chinese scripts is extremely hard, even today (think of all those massive code-points in CJK Unicode, with dups and errors)

Chinese text on the Internet may have some emulation of phonemes, but it's never systematically standarized. It just borrows some aspects here or there.

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> I challenge you to sort Chinese characters.

Chinese characters are in fact definitely sortable. There are multiple keys, the most popular ones being by stroke or by sound.

Example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroke-based_sorting

good luck dealing with duplicates and hand-written variants.

That's a problem in most alphabets as well. Several Latin letters (and the number symbols we use as well) have significant differences between printed and handwritten versions, and several handwritten versions around (g and z have some of the most variations).

Chinese dictionaries have been sorted in various ways for at least two millennia, but there are some aspects which make alphabetic order sorting simpler:

1. Less ambiguous order: With classic Kangxi radicals for example, it's not always clear which radical to pick, and there is no clear order when there are multiple characters with the same radical and stroke count. There are other, more modern systems out there, but they all have some ambiguities.

2. Phonetic lookup: If you hear a word and don't know how to write it, you can just try to look it up phonetically. Unless the writing system is extremely perverse (I'm looking at you Ongloti, er, I mean English), you can kinda guess how it's written or at least how it starts. With Chinese characters that is not possible. Sure, Chinese dictionaries often have Pinyin or Zhuyin (Bopomofo) indexes, but Pinyin and Zhuyin are alphabets.

> alphabets, universally have one common property: they are sortable.

Isn't this just an arbitrary order? Why could I not assign numbers to chinese characters and sort them? I know next to nothing about Chinese.

> Isn't this just an arbitrary order

yeah but there are very limited number of alphabetical letters and commonly agreed order as a convention.

There's no such a thing in Chinese. For example, you can't easily sort names by A-Z in Chinese except PinYin (or Unicode codepoints for what matters)

The sort order of the alphabet symbols is arbitrary, but since all of the words are composed of an ordered set of symbols then sorting the words relative to one another is trivial.

Dictionaries written in Chinese exist. They are in a sorted order, just like English dictionaries, so users can quickly look up the word they have in mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_orders

The thing is it's sorted only after PinYin is invented, sorta proves the point.

You can't easily compile an encoding out of it, but for alphabets it's intuitive to invent an index for each letter into dash-dots as morse code. It's extremely difficult to do so for Chinese.

Back to the topic, OP talks about "Character amnesia", if you think Chinese characters as emoji, yeah you talk about actions represented in emoji, but you forgot how it was drawn exactly. You can't sort emoji, and emojis don't generally have a sound.

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