English, Chinese and ER diagrams

摘要

This paper examines the similarities and correspondence between the Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD) technique and the constructs of two natural languages: English and Chinese. The correspondence between English and ERD was based on the author's previous work, and it was found that the ERD constructs have direct correspondence to the English sentence structure. The correspondence between Chinese and ERD is new research work. It is found that the Chinese character construction has a direct correspondence to the ERD modeling principles. The main result, however, is philosophical in nature: it shows the universality of the primitives used in conceptual modeling no matter whether the primitives are used in data/information modeling or used in recognition/construction of Chinese characters. It also shows that these primitives are embedded in human thinking, and, therefore, their use is very natural in the conceptual modeling process. The results of this research can be useful for improving modeling methodologies, techniques and tools and for improving language translators or better ways to learn or understand a text written in English or Chinese.