The Friday Fillip

First, two confessions: I’m not a fan of the Olympics. And the problem raised in today’s fillip had never once occurred to me before today. I know which of the two is the more shameful as far as I’m concerned.

I find the nationalism in the Olympics more than I can handle. If I were Kronos or Zeus — or even just the Dactyl Heracles (the daemon who founded the games) — I’d have everyone compete wearing orange jumpsuits, or perhaps nothing at all, and punish any mention of a country with one of those great olympian spells that turned people into trees or made them work in due diligence departments forever.

Even so, I went to CBC’s live coverage of the opening ceremonies on the internet to watch Lichtenstein strut its stuff, only to find that some daemon had prevented Mac users from joining the fun. (Not only is the CBS supressing classical music, it appears, but it’s also been bought by Microsoft!) And then it occurred to me. In what order would the countries march?

Yes, yes: Greece is always first; and the host country is always last. But who follows Greece? And the problem, of course (I can say “of course” now that I’ve understood the problem), is that there’s no alphabet in Chinese. Only hundreds, nay thousands, of characters.

Suddenly I thought about dictionaries. About indices. About all manner of texts — perhaps especially in law, which does so like its orderings — that require to be sorted and, so, made accessible.

It will be obvious by this time that I do not speak or read Mandarin.

But I do work the internet. And I found pretty quickly both the order of the nations in the opening ceremonies (Guinea follows Greece, and Canada comes in the top third, between Ghana and Gabon) and the principle upon which such sorting is based in Chinese. Apparently words are sorted on the basis of the number of strokes it takes to make the character. Unless the order is based on the number of strokes in the radical, rather than the character as a combination of radicals. I gather that the former has the advantage of allowing sub-ordering on the basis of radicals, because there will likely be a fair number of words that have radicals with the same number of strokes. You can find a short summary of this in Wikipedia.

This can’t be easy. And with so much nationalism riding on it at the Olympics, I think China missed a bet; I think they should simply have thrown up their hands and said, Sorry but we don’t sort here so the athletes can parade in whatever order they’d like or in no order at all if that suits them. That would have shown… character.

Canada, by the way, is 加拿大 in Chinese. Or 名 加拿大. But who’s counting?