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In article <436@russell.STANFORD.EDU>, nakashim@russell.STANFORD.EDU (Hideyuki Nakashima) writes:
> >In article <417@russell.STANFORD.EDU> nakashim@russell.UUCP (Hideyuki Nakashima) writes:
> >> Chinese can DO have infinite characters.

> What I wanted to say was, however, not that point.  What Chinese tried
> was (or so seems tome was) to assign a symbol for each distinct
> concepts.  So, as the number of concepts grow, so does the number of
> symbols (potentially).  Europian "word"s correspond to Chinese
> "character"s.  
Most Chinese "words" these days consist of two characters.  Some "words" are
made up of more characters.  There are less than 10,000 Chinese characters,
but the language is not that limited.  New words are created all the time
generally composed of characters with related meanings.  "Telephone", for
example is two characters, the first for electricity, & the second for 
speech.

Other "words" are formed in the way we form acronyms.  A poor example, but
to the  point: I taught at He-fei Gong-ye Da-xue (the 3rd "word", "University",
is composed of the characters for "big" and a root for "study/school"), 
however it was almost always refered to as He-gong-da. This works for 
things other than names also.  

I am quoting the word "word", because the concept is often slippery in 
Chinese.  In writing, each character is the separated by the same space
whether or not it is part of the same "word".

> No Chinese equivalent of Europian "alphabet"s exist.

True, but as someone has mentioned, It has a very limited number of strokes.
In fact a typewriter keyboard hooked to a microprocessor was invented in 
1982 that could accept characters as input from a combination of as few as
5 types of strokes.  The keyboard also has a number of standard stroke
combinations that are part of many characters.  These save time, but the
5 strokes are all that is needed.  A key to this process is that the 
strokes in a Chinese character are to be written in a specific order. Thus,
the character dictionary consists of ordered sets of the 5 strokes.

The most complex single character has about 24 strokes.  If we take that as
a limit then the maximum number of characters, (assuming all combinations would
be acceptable, which i doubt), would be :

	i=24
	___
	\     5^i	or about 7*10^16
	/
	---
 	i=1

70 quadrillion, although rather large is not infinite.  In fact, few people
would be able to spend the time to learn them all -)

> Hideyuki Nakashima


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