Chinese Make up word strings for countries

AUSTRALIA is blessed with an A-name. Like Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Andorra, Argentina and Austria, we normally can expect to be alphabetically near the head of the queue.

But not in the announced marching order of teams at last night's opening of the Beijing Olympics, where we were 203rd, just ahead of Zambia.

Explanations in the Australian media about "the Chinese alphabet" are hopelessly wrong.

The Chinese Language does not have an alphabet. It has characters. And unlike the letters of the English alphabet, which give a (sometimes approximate) guide to pronunciation, the strokes in Chinese characters cannot be interpreted to designate specific sounds.

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What the Chinese do when assigning a Chinese name to a foreign nation is to find words in Chinese which sound reasonably like the syllables of the name of the country, and then string them together, using the characters which stand for those syllables.
"Australia" in Chinese is "ao da li ya", with a falling tone on each syllable. The characters which match these four words mean, in order: harbour, big, advantage, Asia.

The sequence of meanings is accidental and has no relation to the name "Australia".

Now, consider a dictionary. English dictionaries work on the alphabetical principle. Words with aa- before words with ab- and so on: aardvark before absent before absinthe.

You can't do that in Chinese, since you have no letters.

So the Chinese have several ways of organising words in a dictionary.

There are alphabetical dictionaries based on pinyin, the standard way of representing Chinese in Roman letters. But the traditional way relies on the number of basic strokes – radicals – in a character.

Characters with only one stroke are listed first. Then characters with two strokes. And so on.

The first character of ao da li ya has 15 strokes, which places Australia towards the end of the list: the character for ao is one of the most complex of the characters which the Chinese have assigned to be used as names for foreign nations. It would be better to start with da, the second character in ao da li ya: da, meaning "big", has only three strokes.

The French are closer to their normal position. The Chinese for France is fa guo, and the character fa has eight strokes. Denmark is dan mai, and the character dan (which happens to mean "red") has only four strokes. The Danes are nearer the front of the procession.

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The first character of the Chinese name for Zambia has 16 strokes. Zambia marches penultimately, before the Chinese who, according to custom, march last as the host nation. The first character of Zhong guo, the Chinese name for China, has four strokes. The characters mean "middle kingdom" – eerily like the meaning of Mediterranean, when you think about it.