Among my standard daily duties is a bit of paperwork filing, and the fact that my place of business provides services that cater to a non-U.S. clientele means I have a lot of foreign names to alphabetize. This has led me to wonder what kind of systems would be used for sorting and ordering names or files in, let’s say, Mandarin, or Arabic?
Fight my ignorance.
Arabic is its own alphabet with its own standardized order, so far as I know.
There was a challenge on Amazing Race last week where the teams, who were in Moscow, had to locate books in a massive library using the card catalogue in the Cyrillic alphabet and Russian language, so it involved figuring out (to a degree) what the correct order of the Cyrillic alphabet is.
Mandarin has a traditional set of characters called radicals that can be used to order other characters, such as in dictionaries. I believe either this same system or similar ones are used for other forms of Chinese, such as Cantonese and Wu.
There seem to be a few variations, interestingly enough – but there is one order that seems to have currency in modern reference works.
Mandarin is complex. It can be sorted according to its transliteration into the Latin alphabet, e.g., into Pinyin. Alternatively, it can be sorted by a order of the Chinese characters. I’ve seen two ways of doing that:
(1) By stroke number, starting with one-stroke characters. If you look at this library catalogue that I saw about 16 years ago in Beijing, you’ll see that the characters are sComplex orted by stroke number. Within each stroke number, there wold be some kind of traditional arrangement.
(2) By radical. Complex Chinese characters can be broken up into parts, one of which is traditionally treated as the radical, so that all characters with the same radical are in the same group.
Thai has some fairly complicated rules:
Japanese is a more complex case than Chinese, because it uses both Chinese characters (kanji) and Japanese characters (hiragana and katakana). It can be arranged in Chinese-character order, which is useful if you are given a kanji but don’t know how it is pronounced in Japanese. It can also be arranged in the hiragana/katakana order – with words written in kanji intermingled according to what they would be in hiragana. Hiragana and katakana have the same number of characters which correspond exactly with each other, so they just sort together. However, there are actually two arrangements of hiragana/katakana, though one predominates in everyday use. So there are at least 5 different ways of sorting Japanese.
Hie ye to the A-Z Index of Languages on Omniglot and click on the language whose script you desire to use for sorting.
The OP’s mentioning of sorting names reminded me that when I was first introduced to how books are sorted in a public school library in the US, the librarian mentioned that “Mc” names were sorted as “Mac” names. Is that still done or do libraries simply go stricly alphabetical when they need to sort the books by author?
Hebrew (like Arabic) has a clear and persistent alphabetical order.
Interestingly, the first letters are “Aleph” and “Bet” 
While it took me maybe a week to learn the sounds associated with the Russian/Cyrillic alphabet, I have yet to master the order. My dreams of life as a Russian file clerk are dashed. 
That’s putting the (ox)cart before the horse (I mean house).
Funny! 
I’ve also seen the “Mc” and “Mac” names sorted separate, coming before all other M’s, but it seems very old school.
With the arrival of computers, which used to be quite literal and stupid, the separating out of Mc and Mac has diminished in favor of strict alphabetical order these days.
There is really only one way of sorting Japanese in actual use in Japan. Any index, list, etc., you come across will be sorted using the Gojuon order (A,K,S,T,N,H,M,Y,R,W).
Thanks! It’s original, but I’m probably not the first person to come up with that.
Juuuust to burst your bubble (because I can, and feel like being a meanie… :D) – an aleph would almost certainly be a bull, not an ox. 
Nope.
Arabic has *two *standard alphabetical orders.
One is called hijā’:
’ b t th j ḥ kh d dh r z s sh ṣ ḍ ṭ ẓ ‘ gh f q k l m n h w y
The other is called abjad:
’ b j d h w z ḥ ṭ y k l m n s ‘ f ṣ q r sh t th kh dh ḍ ẓ gh
Hijā’ is the normal one used in dictionaries and everything. It’s based on letters with similar shape being grouped together. Abjad is the same as Hebrew alphabetical order, which is why it has more slightly more similarity to Roman alphabetical order. The 6 Arabic letters that don’t exist in Hebrew are simply tacked onto the end (in hijā’ order). The other quality of *abjad *is that it’s arranged in numerical order, because each letter has a numerical value, same as Hebrew gematria. It was how the ancient Hebrews wrote numerals too. So abjad is used as an alternative numbering system apart from the regular Hindu-Arabic numerals. Like in the pagination of front matter in books, the way western printers use lowercase Roman numerals.
Wordnerdgasmic!!
Funny…I had considered this possibility while contemplating the issue before I wrote the OP. I know that Classical Greek had an alphabet-driven numbering system similar to Roman numerals, so it makes plenty of sense that the cross-pollination of cultures in the Hellenistic Mediterranean might lead to the same idea being applied to other forms of writing.