[HN Gopher] The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards
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The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 47 points
Date : 2024-05-31 16:55 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| dang wrote:
| See also " _How the quest to type Chinese on a QWERTY keyboard
| created autocomplete_ ":
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/27/1092876/type-chi...
|
| (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40548356, but no
| comments there)
| upon_drumhead wrote:
| Radiolab also did an excellent podcast on the topic
|
| https://radiolab.org/podcast/wubi-effect
| grendelt wrote:
| That one was so good. I was completely ignorant of the topic
| before that episode aired.
| mjklin wrote:
| No mention of the competing MingKwai typewriter of Lin Yutang,
| the famous popularizer of Chinese culture to the west. Apparently
| his prototype suffered an embarrassing failure at an investor
| meeting and couldn't get off the ground. But the idea was good.
| Article here: https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-uncanny-
| keyboard/
| asdasdsddd wrote:
| > like Chairman Mao Zedong, who seemed to equate Chinese
| modernization with the Romanization of Chinese script
|
| One of Mao's better ideas
| alexlur wrote:
| Thank God it didn't happen.
| wolfgangbabad wrote:
| Vietnamese is relatively OK.
| acwan93 wrote:
| Relatively. The amount of diacritics on Vietnamese
| surpasses European languages so text rendering becomes a
| challenge if a naive developer doesn't test with
| Vietnamese.
| alexlur wrote:
| Chu Nom is a borrowed writing system and not native to
| Vietnamese, which isn't even a Sino-Tibetan language to
| begin with.
| asdasdsddd wrote:
| pinyin is the best thing that happened to the language after
| simplification.
|
| Not only did it propel literacy rates to basically 100%, but
| it added a phonetic component to the language
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| Romanization of Chinese writing was already proposed during the
| New Culture movement in the 1910s-20s. China's most famous
| modern writer supported it.
|
| However, the Chinese language has evolved alongside the
| characters for about 3000 years, and it's very difficult to
| just separate the two. A huge amount of culture is bound up
| with the characters. Not only that, but the Romanized writing
| system is viewed as something that only little children use (as
| an aid to learn the characters). Once you've put in the effort
| to learn the characters (as about a billion people have), it's
| very difficult to accept their replacement by what is viewed as
| a script for children.
| asdasdsddd wrote:
| Almost all digital communication is written using pinyin,
| which today is almost all written communication
| alexlur wrote:
| This is an extremely mainland-centric view. Cangjie is the
| dominant IME in Hong Kong.
| asdasdsddd wrote:
| That's why I said almost all
| alexlur wrote:
| It's only almost all if you only interact with the
| millennials or younger. Pinyin is an IME for Mandarin. If
| you aren't fluent in Mandarin, chances are you use voice
| input or stroke typing.
| mchaver wrote:
| The nice thing about Chinese is information density of
| writing. Something nice about seeing how much information can
| be squeezed into a small space. Feels like you front load
| more on the learning side, but get rewarded when reading and
| scanning texts. Not sure how much scientific evidence is
| behind that, just an anecdotal observation. Relatively few
| Chinese speakers want to give up characters.
| wolfgangbabad wrote:
| @xahmotherefffinlee ;)
| acheong08 wrote:
| "Safari can't open the page because the address is invalid"
|
| How strange.
|
| More on topic: Considering how inefficient Chinese characters are
| in general (but especially evident in computing) as one of the
| few languages where characters have no direct relation to
| phonetics, I wonder why there hasn't been an effort to modernize
| it similar to Hiragana in Japan. Well, considering how Chinese is
| basically Kanji, why not just adopt Japanese?
| alexlur wrote:
| > how inefficient Chinese characters are in general (but
| especially evident in computing)
|
| We are not in the 90s anymore. UTF-8 has been around for 32
| years now. If you're working for a system that has no UTF-8
| support, you have a much bigger problem to worry about.
|
| > characters have no direct relation to phonetics
|
| Most characters are phono-semantic where one part of the
| character is a phonetic hint and the other is a semantic hint.
|
| > modernize it similar to Hiragana
|
| Hiragana isn't and wasn't intended to replace kanji (unless you
| are from the fringe Kanamozikai). It serves a different
| grammatical purpose and is complementary to the other two. Kana
| is useful for an agglutinating language like Japanese, but not
| Chinese languages.
| shiomiru wrote:
| > Kana is useful for an agglutinating language like Japanese,
| but not Chinese languages.
|
| FWIW, the Japanese did develop a kana-based system for
| Taiwanese during the occupation, but it was an
| abomination.[1]
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_kana
| highwind wrote:
| I'm guessing you are not familiar with how Chinese characters
| work nor how Japanese Hiragana or Kanji work.
| karma_pharmer wrote:
| This is not a helpful comment.
| canjobear wrote:
| There were various attempts to develop an organic phonetic
| writing system for Chinese, like hiragana for Japanese, for
| example Bopomofo (still used in Taiwan) and General Chinese
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Chinese). The Simplified
| characters that you see on the mainland today were originally
| part of a multi-phase scheme to eventually replace characters
| altogether, but the second phase (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
| /Second_round_of_simplified_Chi...) was bungled so badly that
| it didn't continue. In practice Pinyin is the standard phonetic
| writing now and is used when people can't remember a character.
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