Perhaps you have some answers. Answers that are not acceptable: I don’t know, or google it.
- Question: Is there such a thing as Chinese morse code? How does it work?
- Question: Is all braille the same, or does Chinese use a different system?
- Question: Similar to the question above, how about sign language?
- Question: It is easy to tell someone in English how to spell something, you just tell them the letters. How does it work in Chinese? If you didn’t have the chance to show them, do you just describe how the squiggly lines look?
These things need to be answered. Thank you.
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February 25th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
How do you spell things in Chinese? First method is to give examples of words that contain the character. Like my wife will tell people how to spell her name: “我姓夏，夏天的夏。” (My name is Hsia; Hsia as in Xiatian (summer). (Please ignore the different romanization systems!)) The second way is to describe what compenents are in the character, so you could talk about the character with gold on the left and tough on the right to describe 銀. The third method is to combine the two, so you could talk about the 秀 in 秀麗 except with 王 in front to describe 琇.
March 1st, 2008 at 10:51 am
I think they might have a different braille (but not for sure.) I know there’s different sign language at least.
March 4th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
1) Chinese morse code is pretty much identical to Chinese telegraph code, if I remember right. I think it’s a series of 4-digit sequences, with each sequence representing a character, ordered according to radical and listed in a standardized codebook. The sequence is made up of 2 digits for the page number, one digit for the column, one for the row, so for example a character morsed/telegraphed as 1163 would be the character on page 11, column 6, row 3.
2) I’m not sure about Chinese braille. Presumably it would have to be different, since braille is latin characters, so perhaps Taiwanese braille uses Zhuyin?
3) Every country practically has its own variant of sign langauge. Auslan (Australian Sign Language) is different to ASL (American Sign Language) is different to NZSL (New Zealand Sign Language). I think Auslan and NZSL are more closely related to BSL (British Sign Language) than ASL.
4) Depends. James is right with the most common methods - “[character], as in [word containing character]” or breaking it down by elements. There are alternative methods, like the one based on the (IIRC) Kangxi dictionary, where three basic characters are used to “spell” the character in question, the first representing the initial, the second the final, and the third the tone. Kind of like the way they used to teach words on stuff like Sesame Street - “d” “ongs” “dongs”. Although I think this method’s basically dead for modern Mandarin, since it’s based on a much older form of Chinese, so it’d be like trying to tell someone how to spell a word in English, but using Shakespearean English as the basis for the spelling.
March 5th, 2008 at 2:11 am
I was friends with a blind masseuse in China - she knew braille in English and Chinese. She said the Chinese was far harder.
Some details here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braile#Braille_for_other_scripts
March 13th, 2008 at 5:35 am
I feel so educated - you got smart people reading your blog.
Tetsuo, you’re alive! Yay!