Marching Orders
How does Tokyo put 200 countries in alphabetical order without an alphabet?
A few months before the 1988 Seoul Olympics, frantic meetings were held in TV broadcaster offices around the world: Parade of Nations would be conducted in Korea’s traditional hangul order. Obviously, this was a potential catastrophe—what if you cut to commercial while the boring countries are coming out and accidentally skipped your own national team? Viewers would be revolt and advertisers protest at being made party to such an outrage. And what the hell was hangul order, anyway?
This had never happened before. Since its modern rebirth in 1896, the Olympic Parade of Nations has always followed a strict order: Greece goes first, the current and future hosts go last, Taiwan does not exist, and the other 200-odd countries go in alphabetical order. That order has been the same, with minor variations, since at least the 14th century BC, where we have inscriptions in Proto-Sinaitic with all the letters in an order close to their placement in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Ethiopian scripts today. Because of Iron Age trade networks, the expansion of Islam, and European colonialism, much of the world now uses one of these scripts and their order.
A map of the world’s major writing systems tells the story:
Even the apparent diversity of this map can be simplified: Arabic, Hebrew, and Ethiopian scripts1 share a common ancestor with Greek and Latin. The Armenian and Georgian alphabets borrow much of their form and all of their order from Greek. Even India’s the origins of India’s native scripts are usually thought to have one foot in Phoenician-adjacent Aramaic writing, borrowing some of the form and much of the idea, even if their letters eventually sorted into a different, much cooler order. And since the major scripts of Tibet, Nepal, and Southeast Asia come from India, it’s very possible that most of the world now belongs to a united alphabetical tradition, inheriting with it the idea of alphabetical order. China, Japan, and Korea are the only major outliers to a global Alphabetica and phonic (purely sound-based) writing.
Even that list of three is too large: Korean hangul may technically be the world’s only major “featural” script, but all this means is that it prints its 24 jamo (letters) in little syllabic blocks instead of a straight line. The first block of hangul for instance, is han 한, with the jamo for H (ㅎ) A (ㅏ) and N (ㄴ) arranged clockwise. Alphabetization in Korean is simple and predictable. The individual jamo that form syllable blocks are sorted in a regular order. Sorting words in Korean is as simple as identifying the initial jamo of a word and sorting from there. Since the first consonant is G and the first vowel is A, Ghana and the other G countries came first in the 1988 Olympic parade order, while Hungary and Hong Kong went last.
Japan, too, isn’t entirely non-alphabetic. Instead of a writing system, Japan has interlocking systems: Chinese-style characters (kanji) that number in the tens of thousands, and a few dozen sound-based characters (kana) that are written in two very different styles (hiragana and katakana) depending on their function in a sentence. I won’t pretend to understand the nuances of the system, but the easiest way to explain it is that most Japanese words are written with kanji, while grammatical particles and foreign words are written with kana. In theory, there’s no reason why Japanese can’t be written entirely in kana—and in practice it often has been, from children’s books to The Tale of Genji—but Japan is stubbornly attached to its kanji, turning down every proposal to ditch the characters and simplify their writing.2
Sorting by kanji is weird, as we’ll see, but the good news for Olympic broadcasters is that sorting by kana is actually easier than alphabetical order. While western alphabets are in a completely arbitrary order that just has to be memorized, Japan has a system: the gojuon, or “fifty sounds,” though only 46 are now in use. It’s written out in a neat little grid with all consonants in one row and all vowels on the other. The first consonant row is empty, representing kana that have no consonants: a, i, u, e, o. Accordingly, the initial-vowel countries started first with Iceland (A-i-su-ra-n-do) down to the Netherlands (O-ra-n-da), then the initial-consonant countries, from Ga-na to Re-ba-no-n. This is the basic ordering system used in dictionaries, files, libraries, archives, and most other written Japanese.
Most, but not all. Historically, the gojuon grid had a competitor that went like this:
If you read it vertically from right to left and happen to be an expert in Medieval Japanese, this string of syllables will actually read as:
Although its scent still lingers on
the form of a flower has scattered away
For whom will the glory
of this world remain unchanged?
Arriving today at the yonder side
of the deep mountains of evanescent existence
We shall never allow ourselves to drift away
intoxicated, in the world of shallow dreams.
The Iroha, as this poem is called, is at least a thousand years old, and is a very rare thing: a perfect pangram, using every kana only once. By all accounts, it’s not the easiest thing to understand, sounding to the average Japanese person about as smooth as the Anglo-Saxon riddles to an English speaker, but it’s short enough to memorize easily. Because it’s a perfect pangram, the Iroha has been used for centuries as an ordering mnemonic for Japanese, like an ABC song that doubles as a bleak, medieval poem about impermanence. The Iroha is about as old as the gojuon grid, and both were used for centuries depending on which court, library, or other kind of system you were using, but with the modernizing Meiji reforms of the late 1800s, Japan decided to go with the clean, scientific-looking grid over the depressing old poem. I still wish the Tokyo Olympics had gone with the Iroha.
Imagine if you had to use kanji, though: imagine having to sort through thousands of unique characters with only the most tenuous relationship between its form and the sounds or ideas it represents. Imagine dealing with a character set so large that no grid or poem could ever contain it, so large that not even the most dedicated reader can recognize a quarter of them all. Imagine knowing a word and not being able to write it down because you don’t know what its written form looks like. Imagine, in short, that you are dealing with Chinese.
Japan and Korea are described, in overviews of world writing systems, as outliers, even though they both have straightforward, phonic letters (even if only as an option, for Japan). In these writing systems, as in most of the world, there are a few dozen characters represent the sounds that represent words. Chinese, though, is the real thing, a completely, emphatically, enthusiastically non-alphabetic writing system. Using the Latin alphabet, I can represent just about any sound in my language with only 26 letters and a few diphthongs; Chinese has many thousands of characters, and yet when the Chinese internet collectively lost its shit over Jackie Chan shouting a silly nonsense word on TV, there was no easy way to write it. The problem was, the word had no hanzi character.
Before I can explain how hanzi are sorted, it’s important to explain what they are and aren’t. There are tens of thousands of them, each representing a word or a part of a word—prefixes, suffixes, and so on. This doesn’t mean Chinese has thousands of consonants and vowels—rather, it’s rich in homophones and soundalikes. Every basic sound in Chinese has multiple characters used to write it depending on its meaning and placement in a word. most Chinese words are compounds of two or more hanzi, like “height,” 高矮, which has the hanzi for high and low. Despite popular myths, only a few hanzi are pictographic combinations of image and meaning. For every 木, “tree,” or 森, “forest,” there are many more hanzi that don’t look anything like what they mean. Basic literacy in Chinese requires knowing around two thousand hanzi, though tens of thousands exist. Most are obsolete or highly technical: exactly the kinds of words you’re most likely to need help finding. How the hell, then, do Chinese dictionaries work? How are books shelved? How did the Parade of Nations proceed at the 2008 Beijing Olympics?
The answer lies in the structure of hanzi characters. Although every hanzi is unique, they actually share a common set of building blocks, simple shapes like 亻or 灬. There are around two hundred of these radicals, as they’re called, and each hanzi has at least one. Every radical is composed of anywhere from 1 to 17 brush strokes, which in turn are broken down into a few basic types of brush movements (vertical, horizontal, dot, etc) that are always done in the same way and same order. After you draw the radical, the rest of the hanzi is always drawn in the same order, too. This makes teaching, learning, and reading easier, as hanzi would quickly degenerate into gibberish if everybody drew something like 䨻 in their own way. 3
This also has the neat side-effect of introducing an ordering principle to hanzi. Because all radicals are written in a fixed number of strokes done in the same order, it’s possible to arrange all Chinese writing by radical, stroke count, and stroke order. All characters starting with one-stroke radical go first, which in turn are arranged by the order of strokes; then you move on to two-stroke radicals in the same order, and so on all the way down to seventeen-stroke radicals. For characters with multiple radicals or extra strokes, you count the strokes of the first radical, plus all the extra strokes after that. A character like 岑 might have something like “7 (3+4)” next to it, meaning seven strokes: the three-stroke radical 山 plus four extra strokes to make 岑. A character with the same radical but fewer strokes like the six-stroke 両 (3+3) would go before, and the eight stroke 岡 (3+5) would go after. You can see how it works by playing with a kanji dictionary.
This is the basic ordering system of written Chinese from libraries to Olympic parades. Sure enough, at the 2008 Beijing games, there was Guinea at the front, starting with the two-stroke 几 in Chinese, going all the way down to Zambia and its 赞 sixteen strokes (radical 贝 plus twelve). If you scroll down the whole list, looking just at the first hanzi of each country name, you can actually see the increasing density of strokes. It still isn’t easy, but it’s systematic, it works, and it proves that tremendously sophisticated systems of organization can hang on the tiniest, strangest details. By drawing its hanzi in order, Chinese puts its entire written world in order. No wonder, then, that so many emperors practiced their calligraphy.
And if you happen to work in sports broadcasting, you might want to start brushing up on your hanzi radicals and their order. After all, the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics are only six months away.
Sources & Further Reading:
All my information on alphabetical ordering in other languages and the anecdote about TV broadcasters coping with hangul come from A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order by Judith Flanders.
Since I don’t read Chinese, Japanese, or Korean at all, I’ve relied on my Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems, edited by Florian Coulmas for this post. Any errors here are mine alone.
For more on Chinese calligraphy and writing, my favorites are Simon Leys’s The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays and Eliot Weinberger’s evergreen Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei.
Strictly speaking, Arabic and Hebrew are abjads and Ge’ez is an abugida. These work slightly differently than “proper” alphabets like Latin or Cyrillic in how they handle vowels, but they are all, essentially, phonic writing systems that ideally match one character with one sound. My use of “alphabet” here should be understood to contain these abjads and abugidas, too.
In fact, this is exactly what neighboring countries did. Writing foreign languages in Chinese, as Japan, Korea, and Vietnam used to, is extraordinarily hard, so all three developed home-grown alternative systems that pared down the thousands of characters to a few dozen to represent the sounds of their languages. Korea simplified even more with hangul and colonialism led Vietnam to use the Latin alphabet, but Japan has continued using kana and kanji together.
This isn’t always true in Chinese calligraphy, though. Many calligraphic traditions of China prize wild, spontaneous brush strokes, often to the point that the actual meaning of the writing is barely legible. But this isn’t the kind of writing they use in courts or teach in schools.