As I Watch Bulgaria and Mainland China ...

[dulcinea]

... compete in basketball, I remember that B was not one of the first countries to march in the inaugural march of 08-08-08; obviously the Chinese "alphabet" is not similar to the Latin alphabet. Is there a WIKIPEDIA article that shows how countries like Bulgaria are named in Chinese, and how countries like China are named in Bulgarian, plus of course how every other country is named in the different languages of the world?

[dulcinea]

Croatia in Croatian: HRVATSKA; Germany in German and Spanish: DEUTSCHLAND and ALEMANIA; Japan in Japanese: NIHON.
Country names can be very confusing!

[Madame]

... compete in basketball, I remember that B was not one of the first countries to march in the inaugural march of 08-08-08; obviously the Chinese "alphabet" is not similar to the Latin alphabet. Is there a WIKIPEDIA article that shows how countries like Bulgaria are named in Chinese, and how countries like China are named in Bulgarian, plus of course how every other country is named in the different languages of the world?

I thought some countries seemed to be in confusing order, too. Chinese languages don't have an alphabet, per se -- I, too, wonder about the 'translation'.

[RebLem]

And, as everyone who has ever collected stamps knows, Switzerland is Helvetia.

But I heard Bob Costas explaining that countries are ranked in ascending order according to the number of brushstokes used to spell the country's name in Chinese.

Posted on August 10th, 2008, the 1,929th day after Shrub announced that major combat operations in Iraq had ended, the 86th day before the November 4th US general election, and the 163rd day before the end of the Cheney Kakistocracy. RebLem

[Gary]

But I heard Bob Costas explaining that countries are ranked in ascending order according to the number of brushstokes used to spell the country's name in Chinese.

It is quite possible for several characters--each representing a different country--to have the same number of brushstrokes and yet look totally different from each other. I don't know what they would've done in a situation like this. It is a shortcoming of ideograms.

[living_stradivarius]

Most words in Chinese use a specific radical that typically associates the word with the context/theme of the definition. The radicals are ordered by brush strokes. Once the radical is identified, all characters associated with the radical are listed in brush stroke order.
There are a limited set of words of any particular number of brush strokes associated with a radical.

It still holds true that there is no formal means of ordering words sharing the same radical and same number of brush strokes, so the ordering for the words ultimately depends on the disposition of the writer (whether s/he prefers "big" before "small" etc.). You'd probably want to consult a feng shui manual for that.


NBC should have borrowed Connie Chung to help explain all this.