Three-stroke chinese dictionary

Details Three-stroke chinese dictionary Three-stroke chinese dictionary

1999-06-25

2001-04-17

Johns, Andrew W. (Department: 2721)

Image analysis

Pattern recognition

Ideographic characters

C382S226000, C707S793000, C707S793000

Reexamination Certificate

active

06219448

ABSTRACT:

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED PATENT APPLICATIONS
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/132,453.
STATEMENT REGARDING FEDERALLY SPONSORED RESEARCH OR DEVELOPMENT
Not Applicable.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
This invention is related to a Chinese language dictionary of characters.
2. Description of Related Art
A Character by definition, is a symbol or a picture. The original Chinese characters were actual physical pictures. They were used to record events and to express thoughts. The character SUN was a picture of the sun
and the character MOON was a half-picture of the moon
.
After centuries of transformation and simplification, Chinese characters lost their original identities and pictures. The character SUN became
and the character MOON became
as used today.
Because of the limited supply of pictures and the complexity of some pictures, existing pictures were combined with others to meet the demand for expressing various thoughts and events. The new combined pictures (consisting of a simple character or a root) generally reflected the characteristics of the old ones or instance, the character (CLEAR
) is derived by combining the characters (SUN
) and (MOON
). The sun gives light during the day and the moon gives light at night. Things on earth are always clear because there is light from the sky during the day and night.
Another example is the character (GOOD
). It is made of the characters (GIRL
and BOY
). The marriage between a body and a girl creates joy, and produces babies that preserves the human race, so this is good. A forest (
) is a place where many tree/wood (
) grow. It can be seen that the Chinese characters were pictures with thoughts drawn together.
Many of the original pictures became the basic building blocks (Roots in today's dictionary) for the Chinese written language. There are 210 roots listed in Root-Table in the Chinese dictionary for finding characters. The majority of these roots are related to the objects that were known by man during the early age of history, such as:
(sun
), (moon
), (gold
), (tree
), (fire
), (water
), (land
), (glass
), (fish
), (bird
), (insect
), (horse
), (man
), (boy
), and (girl
).
A “Root” is a simple character and has meaning. It has one or more strokes or other roots such as root SOUND
which has roots
and
. A root can be anywhere in a character. By definition, all roots in the Root-Table in a dictionary are the HEAD (
) of the character (principle root). Root after the HEAD (
) is BODY (
) of the character (secondary root). The character HEAD has only one root and BODY may have one or more roots as illustrated below.
With the “roots”, other characters were formed by combining with itself or with others root(s). such as shown in the FIG.
1
:
The Chinese written language and its writing rules had been invented and used over 5,000 years ago. They were formalized (characters used today) about 3000 years ago. These characters were recorded in a book according their Roots and number of strokes for each root. A Root-Table (Index) shown in
FIG. 2
, contains all the roots for looking for characters.
To look for a character, the user has to: 1) know what is the head (root) for the character, 2) count the number of strokes in the Root, 3) look for the root in the group of roots with the same number of strokes in the Root-table, 4) go to the page number in the dictionary indicated by the Root-table, 5) count the remaining strokes (without its principal Root) in the character, 6) look for the character where the group of characters with the same strokes are located.
Based on above instructions, one might expect that looking for a character in a Chinese dictionary is clear without obstacles, but it is not. The most difficult obstacle faced in trying to locate a character is the requirement of knowing what is the head of the character.
Although Roots in a dictionary are the head (
) of the character by definition, some Roots such as
are actually the last parts of the characters, such as
and
.
In addition, some characters have the head and body interchanged, such as
. According to the Root-Table, its head is
but its first root is
. By the same token,
whose first root is
but
is the head root according to the Root-Table.
Furthermore, some characters whose Roots are not recognizable by users with average knowledge of Chinese writing, such as
. According to the Root-Table,
is with root
—
and
is with root
.
In view of these problems, about 1000 characters are hard to find. These characters are listed under the title “Hard To Find Characters
” see Table 4 of the Appendix. The characters here are listed by number of strokes and page number, not by roots.
Due to the complexity in looking for characters with the Root-Table, the Root-Table had been revised a few times since its inception. The number of Roots were reduced from about 500 to the 210 in today's Root-Table which was revised in the 1800s.). To use today's Root-table to find characters, however, faces the same problems as before.
By late 1920/early 1930, a new method was invented by Chinese scholars. This method used numerical number 0 to 9 to present the stroke type at each corner of the character. The title for this method was called the “FOUR CORNER METHOD” (U.S. Pat. No. 4,559,615 Adapted this method for a Chinese word-processor).
One of the inventors was impressed with the simplicity to use the “FOUR CORNER METHOD” method to find characters in this new dictionary. However, after continual use, the one inventor found that the new method to find characters was more difficult to use in practice then using the Root-table. Today, the “FOUR CORNER METHOD” is still used by a few dictionaries to supplement the Root-Table.
BRIEF SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
An advantage from using this three-stroke Chinese dictionary invention is that its users do not have to count the total number of strokes in the principal and secondary root. All the users have to know are the first stroke in the character and the first 1 to 3 strokes of its secondary roots.


REFERENCES:
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patent: 5119296 (1992-06-01), Zheung et al.
patent: 5187480 (1993-02-01), Thomas et al.
patent: 5212769 (1993-05-01), Pong
patent: 5360343 (1994-11-01), Tang
patent: 5410306 (1995-04-01), Ye
patent: 5844561 (1998-12-01), Tanimoto et al.
patent: 5940532 (1999-01-01), Tanaka

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