sizeof(char)

[Joseph S. D. Yao]

In article <9053 at sun.uucp> guy at sun.uucp (Guy Harris) writes:
>Furthermore, I don't know how you sort words in Oriental languages, although
>I remember people saying there *is* no unique way of sorting them.

Perhaps not a unique way of sorting them.  (Then again, I can sort
English words in several ways ... look in the Reference section of
your local library ...)  But I remember going through some of my
Dad's dictionaries years ago.  They had pretty much the same sort
sequence: first by number of strokes in the character, then by one
or two other characteristics that I never fully mastered.  I still
don't speak Chinese ...

Another way of sorting them (not as usable to the average person)
would be to express the words in the phonetic alphabet, and then
sort them by those glyphs.  Although this is intuitive to us users
of the Roman (Greek, Cyrillic, ...) alphabet, this doesn't seem
to be as intuitive to users of a character alphabet.

Japanese and Chinese readers of this newsgroup may be able to
enlighten us further, and perhaps correct this one's tentative
attempts?
-- 

	Joe Yao		hadron!jsdy at seismo.{CSS.GOV,ARPA,UUCP}
			jsdy at hadron.COM (not yet domainised)