More on Chinese telegraph codes
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John McVey was rooting around in Language Log for recent posts about telegraphic codes, and stumbled upon this:
"Chinese Telegraph Code (CTC)" (5/24/15)
What we learned there is that the CTC consists of 10,000 numbers arbitrarily assigned to the same amount of characters, one number per character.
John calls our attention to a different kind of telegraphic code (in Chinese), along the lines of conventional commercial codes of the time (and including Japanese commercial codes). On his website, he provides a brief description (and a couple of scans) of The China Republican Telegraphic Code (Qīnmín diànbào huìbiān 親民電報彙編 [Shanghai, 1915]):
…with phrases arranged under topical headings, those headings themselves arranged arbitrarily. This code does not, that is to say, follow the convention of one (Chinese) character per number.
Here are a couple of additional posts about telegraphic language.
"Do not leave if you can help" (8/3/09)
"Telegraphic language" (12/31/11)