The CacheRat source list landed on a small Zhongwen.com page that transliterates English given names into Chinese. The rabbit hole behind it is much bigger.
Visit Zhongwen.com’s English-name page
Zhongwen.com was built by Rick Harbaugh around a project he called Chinese character genealogies: diagrams showing how characters are related through their component parts.
The site’s web edition dates to the 1990s, and Harbaugh’s Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary was self-published in 1998 before publication was later taken over by Yale University Press.
The central idea is computationally elegant.
Traditional Chinese dictionaries often organize characters through a fixed list of section headings commonly called radicals. Harbaugh’s system instead uses computerized cross-referencing to connect characters through all of their meaningful components.
The site says more than 4,000 characters can be arranged into these graphical family trees.
A dictionary that behaves like a graph
Harbaugh’s explanation is that every component of a character can itself be treated as a character or historical component, allowing the reader to trace relationships backward toward a relatively small set of roots.
That makes the site useful in two ways.
First, a student who recognizes part of a complicated character has another route to finding it. Second, the structure makes relationships visible rather than reducing every character to an isolated dictionary entry.
The web edition also preserves classical reading material, character FAQs, etymology pages and other language resources. Some pages proudly recommend Netscape Navigator 3.0 or higher, which is the kind of sentence that now functions as its own timestamp.
The project is also unusually transparent about its limits.
Harbaugh notes that the genealogies are based mainly on traditional etymologies derived from ancient seal-script evidence and do not represent the final word in modern historical linguistics.
That caveat makes the project more useful, not less. It tells the reader what kind of map this is.
The little English-name transliteration page is still handy, but it is almost incidental compared with the deeper accomplishment: a 1990s website using hypertext and computer cross-referencing to make a writing system’s internal structure visible.
That is exactly the sort of thing early web enthusiasts were good at doing—building a specialized tool because the medium suddenly made it possible.
Explore Zhongwen.com starting from the original name-transliteration page