Subject: A little history on indexing...

From: Dorothy Day <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 May 90 00:28:00 EST

It's true that traditional Chinese books, as those of most pre-
modern societies (including the West), were published without
indexes. As Teng and Biggerstaff put it, "The ideal of the old-
fashioned Chinese scholar was to know his books by heart and to
carry a sort of index in his head." However, separate indexes to
major collections were sometimes compiled by imperial decree.

Also, of course, even in pre-modern times there had to be indexes
to dictionaries, or schemes by which dictionaries were arranged.
If you read the modern prefaces to dictionaries, you'll find all
you need to know about the method used for arrangement of charac
ters and phrases. The most common of these have already been dis-
cussed on CCNET-L:

*The 214 K'ang-hsi radicals (bu4shou3),
*Total number of strokes,
*Stroke type or shape,

(and in this century:)
*Four-corner and its variants,
*Pinyin or other pronouncing schemes,
*A modified set of radicals used in mainland China (not always
consistently), e.g. the set of 282 radicals in the *Cihai* pub-
lished in the late 1970's.

Usually characters grouped by radical (bu4shou3) are further sub-
divided by number of remaining strokes, then by shape of the
first stroke. Other subdivision systems are used by other primary
schemes.

There are deficiencies, or inconsistency of application, is
nearly every scheme. Not everyone counts strokes with the same
result. Not everyone selects the "radical" actually used by a
dictionary for a particular character. Users of the four-corner
system are notoriously inaccurate, but it has devoted followers.
Speakers of different dialects can't always produce the diction-
ary pronunciation of a character, or romanize it correctly by
pinyin or other scheme. If tones are used to subdivide sounds,
the (non-Beijing native) user may make further errors. But it
could get worse:

*The P'ei-wen yun-fu of 1711 arranged phrases and allusions by
the rhyme of the last character in the phrase. (Some rhyming dic-
tionaries are arranged by the rhyme of the first character of the
phrase, rather than the last character.) Since the "rhyme" is
based on sound, and sound changed over time, the presumed sound
of an arbitrary period was assigned to each character; even if
the character's pronunciation changed, the rhyme class was
artificially preserved. So, to use the P'ei-wen yun-fu today
requires looking up the rhyme in another dictionary first.
The richness of the results makes it worth all the trouble.

During the 1930's a group of Sinologists at Yenching University
(including William Hung and Nieh Ch'ung-ch'i) carried out a mas-
sive project to index important Chinese works. The Harvard-
Yenching Institute Sinological Index Series uses the *kuei-hsieh*
system to convert characters into numbers with minimal duplica-
tion; additional stroke-count and romanization indexes are also
provided.

During the Second Sino-Japanese War, Nieh Ch'ung-ch'i also
prepared indexes, arranged by stroke count, for the Universite de
Paris, Centre d'etudes sinologique de Pekin.

Before re-inventing the wheel, it might be a good idea to look at
some of these indexes, as well as other reference tools in the
reference section of the Chinese collection in the nearest large
university library. A list of some major indexes can be found in
Teng Ssu-yu and Knight Biggerstaff's *Annotated Bibliography of
Selected Chinese Reference Works* (Harvard U. Press).

Inputting is essentially irrelevant to whatever indexing system
is selected. Multiple inputting schemes can be keyed to whatever
index number is assigned to each character.

Electronically speaking, frequency order may be most efficient
for searching algorithms. But if the index itself is going to be
viewed by human eyes, one of the ordering schemes already in use
may serve quite nicely.
        Dorothy Day, Indiana University
        DAY@IUBACS

---

From: Huijie <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 May 90 13:54:00 EST

Hi, Netters,

Dorothy made a very reliable account on the Chinese indexing history.
The following methods are listed:

>the rhyme of the last character in the phrase.
> The Harvard-

I worked in Chinese Library for a while, and I have accessed to all
indeces mentioned above.  One of my observations is that 99% of those
indeces has more than one index approach.  The main text may be
arrange in a order, and then another one or more access approaches
are attached.  If the original work had no additional index at all,
the decent people would add some in, especially those book re-published
in this century.  Why, it is because no single one index approach can
take place of others so far.

Therefore, I would like to make a suggestion to those are working in the
frontier of Chinese computing system design and programming.  Will that
be possible to produce more than one access approach to the text index?
I think that using computer will be much easily to implement that than
manual.  Double (or triple) indeces in the end of text may add a few
pages, however, it is much convinient for different readers.  Plus, mult-
index is not my invention.  You can find some English books have "Name
Index", "Subject Index".

The 15th version Encyclopedia of Britanica used the "index to index"
apporach.  We may also design a primary index and then add some supplimental
indeces (Jian3 Zi4) to it.

Will that be possible?  Will that be easier than selecting ONE index
method only?

Huijie