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From: david@linc.cis.upenn.edu (David Feldman)
Newsgroups: sci.lang,comp.ai,comp.ai.neural-nets
Subject: Re: Infinite alphabets - (Turing via Berke)
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Date: Wed, 14-Oct-87 11:17:47 EDT
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Posted: Wed Oct 14 11:17:47 1987
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Summary: Chinese written language (Zhong wen)
Xref: mnetor sci.lang:1560 comp.ai:895 comp.ai.neural-nets:7

In <8583@shemp.UCLA.EDU>, Peter asks:

>By Turing's above remarks, I think by his definition, Chinese cannot
>succeed at having an enumerable infinity of symbols.  It can only
>"attempt" to have them.  Unless you "go down a level" and consider
>"things that make up" Chinese symbols "the symbols."  Then, there
>must be a finite number of them.  Does anyone know if this is true
>about Chinese?  It would seem that even in English it does not apply to
>
>Peter Berke

Chinese characters are by and large composed of 'radicals' which have base
meanings.  These meanings are not necessarily related to the meanings of the
characters that are composed of the radicals, but they sometimes do.  For
instance, the question particle 'ma' has the 'ko' radical which is associated
with the mouth.  And indeed, there is a finite number of radicals.  I have
a couple of sheets describing them.  Anything component of a character that is
not a radical can be classified as a stroke, and there are specific kinds of
strokes also.

					Dave Feldman
					david@linc.cis.upenn.edu