Re: Erratum in Unicode book

From: Richard Cook (rscook@socrates.Berkeley.EDU)
Date: Mon Jul 09 2001 - 00:29:51 EDT


James Kass wrote:
>
> Richard Cook wrote:
>
> > "John H. Jenkins" wrote:
> > >
> > > It is on occasion something of an art figuring out the correct
> > > radical/stroke position for a character in this kind of an index, sad
> > > to say.
> >
> > I'd say, when 2 radicals are possible, put it under both. When 3, well
> > ... you probably get the idea ...
> >
>
> This is a swell item to add to a "wish list", but imagine the
> challenge faced by anyone wanting to set-up such a database:
> existing information is sorted by residual strokes after the
> significant radical. When you want to add each character
> under every one of its components, these residual stroke
> counts would need to be re-counted for each 'permutation'
> of every character!

Well, not all components are Kang Xi radicals.

What you're talking about is not a Kang Xi index, but a complete
component index, and this is not quite the technical feat you imagine.

E.g., I have complete component and rad/str data that is lexicon
specific (Shuowen), and somewhat less complete general data.

The most comprehensive collection of such data is from
http://www.wenlin.com . When compiling wish lists, watch Wenlin's development.

>
> The Han Radical Index is set up for people familiar with CJK,
> the rest of us will just have to guess (and learn something during
> each look-up process, I'd suspect.)
>

Even for experts,there are cases in which the choice of a single
classifier is completely arbitrary, or at least apprently so to the
casual user. In these cases, putting the character under both is a good
idea.



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