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Please, help translate a tiny Chinese sentence. All hieroglyphs are known, but I cannot glue them.

农业部5月4日接到青海省农牧厅报告,...
Nóngyèbù 5 yuè 4 rí jie dào Qinhâi shêng nóngmùting bàogào.

What I'm confident in:
nóngyèbù (ministry of agriculture)
5月4日 (May 4)
Qinhâi shêng (Qinhai province)

Hi Yuri,
Tov she-matzata ha-maqom ha-ze, be-levadkha!

Your Chinese sentence means;
Ministry of agriculture on 4th of May received a report from the department of agriculture and livestock, of Qinhai province.

Tóv shemacâthí b`'acmí êth ha makóm hazeh? Lô! Êth zeh âní 'ascíthí b`'ezrath xavernú Anders!

Flam! Thank you. With your help, I may say that I've translated my first article. What a fun these walks in mist!

Regards.

欢迎, friend Yuri!

I was of course slower than the experts on this one. And I guessed the sender was "the office of stock-farming", and lacking a 了 I wasn't sure if it was something that had happened or if it meant that the ministry was open to receiving future reports from that date.

I am not sure when it happened or will happen. But as they say, "We are not interested in these things in Asia."

I think this is an abbreviated form used, e.g., for newspaper headlines. I notice in all the languages I know headlines are allowed to be slightly ungrammatical as long as their accurate meaning is comprehendable by reading the main article.

I'm curious: how do the Chinese look up kanji (they say hanzi, right?) that they have forgotten/never learned? Do they use pinyin? Do the entries have similar-sounding "kanjis" with definitions in Chinese for the use of that particular kanji they are interested in?

Brazilian dude

Flaminius:

I am not sure when it happened or will happen

Unfortunately, this report is just the first one on the bird-flu epidemy among wild geese and gulls in Western China, which is going on.

As to the problem of the Chinese writing, I think it may be solved only if somebody invents cheap and uncumbersome means to accompany a Hanzi with clear phonetic and semantic hints. I've seen Pinyin under slogans on streamers in China (watching magazine pictures).

Regards.

I'm curious: how do the Chinese look up kanji (they say hanzi, right?) that they have forgotten/never learned? Do they use pinyin? Do the entries have similar-sounding "kanjis" with definitions in Chinese for the use of that particular kanji they are interested in?

As is also the case in Japanese, Chinese dictionaries, even those which are arranged, as modern dictionaries usually - but not always - are, according to the 拼音 (pinyin) readings, contain an index of radicals (component parts) which can be used to look up graphs one doesn't know. Thus the entry «休» can be found by going to the radical «亻» «人» and looking for the remaining component «木». Modern dictionaries often also contain an index ordered according to the so-called «four-corner system», i e, according to the type of stroke found at the four corners of a particular graph. I have never learned this system, but those who can use it tell me that it is much faster than that using radicals and, due to the incredible number of homonymic graphs, often faster than pinyin….

Henri

The recent Chinese-Russian dictionaries use phonetical principle. Every glyph is situated according to its pinyin transliteration. All words are situated according to its pronunciation under its first glyph. Its a remarkable system. However, pronunciation of the glyph must be stored in your brain or defined on line.
I would prefer situation of Chinese words without dividing according to its first glyph

Can pinyin also be spelled in Cyrillic? I don't see why not.

Brazilian dude

Such system is called Palladium. But it is not used now because pinyin is official and sufficient.

Спасибо за информацию, Юрифинк.

Brazilian dude

... However, pronunciation of the glyph must be stored in your brain or defined on line. ...

You surprise me, yurifink - all the Sino-Russian dictionaries I have seen have included a radical index. Do you really mean that the most recent ones do not ?!!...

Henri

M Henri Day

Do you really mean that the most recent ones do not ?!!...

Of course there's a radical index. But the Chinese characters are situated phonetically. This is a very good innovation.

Just what I thought - but then obviously it is not the case that «pronunciation of the glyph must be stored in your brain or defined on line», as the radical index provides this information either explicitly or, as is most often the case, implicitly by referring the reader to a page number in a work which is ordered alphabetically. In any event, I agree that arranging entries in the dictionary phonetically (OK, phonemically) - at least as regards the first graph in a compound - is a great step forward with regard to accessibility. The problem I encounter is that the multi-volume dictionaries that one has to consult when dealing with classical texts are all arranged according to the Kangxi radical index, which means that a great deal of time is sometimes lost in looking up even words beginning with graphs that one knows very well (Morohashi, at least, provides both 音読み and 、訓読み indices, but the 汉语大词典, published several decades later, provides no help whatever in this regard - it doesn't even give the pronunciation of the second graph in a compound !). If I understand aright, the Волъшой китайско- русский словаръ from 1983 is arranged according to the classical pattern ; do you know if there are any plans afoot to reissue this work in a alphabetically-ordered version ?...

Henri