[HN Gopher] The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards
___________________________________________________________________
The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 117 points
Date : 2024-05-31 16:55 UTC (2 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/
| omoikane wrote:
| Lin Yutang had a few patents related to this typewriter, I
| believe this is the main one:
|
| https://patents.google.com/patent/US2613795A/
|
| The idea of searching for characters via parts is similar to
| how Cangjie input method selects characters from radicals. I
| read somewhere that Cangjie input method was indeed inspired by
| Ming Kwai typewriter, but I can't find the citation for it.
| 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.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Is bringing back Chu Nom script going to simplify
| Vietnamese support on computers by a lot? It's
| unintelligible to CJK users, but as far as text rendering
| goes, it seems just simple Kanji/Hanzi.
| 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.
| gumby wrote:
| Latin is a borrowed writing system not native to English,
| German, Polish and many others which aren't even Romance
| languages to begin with and must resort to di- and
| trigraphs _plus_ non-Latin characters like J, V, ss, l or
| a, among others (not to mention diacritics).
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| Alphabets are much more flexible than the Chinese
| characters.
|
| An alphabet can be adapted to basically any language. You
| just have to map the letters to the sounds, and you're
| pretty much done.
|
| By contrast, the Chinese writing system is adapted very
| specifically to the properties of Chinese language. Every
| syllable in Chinese has a meaning (or set of meanings),
| so every character represents one meaning (or a few).
| English does not have that structure: words can have very
| arbitrary syllables that don't have any meaning on their
| own. Chinese characters encode a meaning plus a sound,
| which is often reflected in how they're composed (i.e., a
| character will often be composed of two simpler
| characters, one of which has the correct meaning and one
| of which has the correct sound). Chinese words do not
| change form: there's no conjugation, no plural form, etc.
| As a consequence, the writing system has no way to deal
| with things like conjugation.
|
| I have no idea how one would even begin trying to adapt
| Chinese characters to write English. On the other hand,
| it's relatively easy to come up with a way to write
| Chinese in any alphabet.
| int_19h wrote:
| "A" is just "O" stacked on top of "A" though. And "V" is
| in fact the OG Latin form ("U" is the newly introduced
| one).
|
| But yeah, the whole notion is kinda silly. Most writing
| systems in the world are developed from very few
| originals. E.g. for most of Eurasia, the source is either
| Egyptian hieroglyphs or the Shang Oracle bone script.
| 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
| alexlur wrote:
| Again, this is a very mainland-centric view. Hong Kong has
| never simplified their writing system or even developed a
| proper romanization, and yet has consistently one of the
| highest literacy rates in the world. Guess what helped
| literacy? Post-war socioeconomic development like poverty
| reduction, mass education and industrialization.
|
| > it added a phonetic component to the language
|
| Fanqie has been a thing since the 2nd century. Zhuyin was
| invented in 1913.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| Agreed. I have seen kids from mainland China spending
| lots of time learning pinyin while kids from Hong Kong at
| the same age can already write some characters and
| pronounce the words accurately
| vunderba wrote:
| Uh... no. Bopomofo which is used in Taiwan is a phonetic
| script that is used as a popular IME.
|
| And simplification's only "arguable merit" is that it saves
| a fortune in ink at the expense of losing its historical
| roots. But guess what? We mostly use computers now. So
| great job Mao, now we have two competing standards. (Nod to
| XKCD).
|
| Unrelated but to those of us who started with Fan Ti Zi ,
| simplified just looks ugly. (Long vs Long )
| rjh29 wrote:
| I feel like Japanese strikes the right balance, no ugly
| oversimplified characters but making common kanji easier
| to write for children (Guo -Guo , Ying -Ying )
|
| For example Long is a fairly common simplification of
| Long and imo not nearly as ugly
| Vt71fcAqt7 wrote:
| Yeah except hiragana and especially katakana both look
| ugly though.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| Sure traditional looks nicer, but holy fuck is writing it
| (by hand) ever annoying. When I asked friends who grew up
| with the traditional characters about it they said a lot
| of people use some form of simplification when taking
| notes or leaving messages for friends/family. People from
| mainland seem to only shorten words by omitting
| characters of longer words, if at all.
|
| And about losing the historical roots, I guess if you're
| interested in it, the characters will always be there and
| accessible for you to study. I'd be interested how much
| the average Joe from Taiwan really remembers about random
| characters' roots, composition and meaning. I know much
| more people from the mainland, and among them are people
| who don't give shit, and those who can also write a lot
| of traditional characters and give lectures about the
| origin of meaning of some character and whatnot.
|
| Also, since this is about computers after all, I've seen
| a study a while ago about from mainland where they tested
| how many mistakes people make writing less common
| characters. There was a bar chart that went down between
| 10 and 20ish, then went up a bit and started to go down
| again at around 30. It was speculated that people in
| school still have to write a lot by hand, and
| during/after college that stops and everything has been
| digital for a decade now so people just forget again, but
| folks old enough to have used pen and paper for a couple
| decades just had enough practice. I wonder if this effect
| would be more or less pronounced with traditional
| characters.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Simplification is just bad. It removes too much that it
| breaks ability for non-speakers to infer meanings.
| Complexity of letter shapes is irrelevant to ease of use in
| computer usage, so it's just a massive loss.
| rurban wrote:
| Worked out excellent for Korean (Hangul) though. Also
| English.
|
| Both massive wins
| numpad0 wrote:
| I don't think it did for Korean, though I need input from
| speakers to be sure. From my experience, Korean MT
| routinely stops halfway through inputs and dumps
| nonsensical phonetic transcripts, likely from failing to
| identify words. I suspect they were just being
| complaisant to American influence in postwar years.
| Computers failing to even isolate and match words in this
| day and age is not a sign of an excellent working script.
| yorwba wrote:
| Translation needs phonetic transcription to handle proper
| names. If there are words that may or may not be proper
| names depending on context, machine translation will
| guess the context wrong at least some of the time and
| phonetically transcribe what should be translated, or
| translate names that should be transcribed.
|
| The problem also can also happen when translating from
| English, if you think about all the surnames that are
| occupations, or names like "bill" or "lily."
| Capitalization usually helps disambiguate, but there's
| title case and all caps and people who never capitalize
| anything...
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| Simplified Chinese characters are already difficult
| enough for foreigners to learn. Making them learn
| traditional characters would just be sadistic.
| fjdjshsh wrote:
| >it breaks ability for non-speakers to infer meanings
|
| Not sure what you mean by this. Do you mean that it's
| less convenient for people that don't speak / read
| Chinese? Why would that be a relevant metric?
|
| You may be missing that character standards have changed
| over time and that different writing styles (Cao Shu
| ,Xing Shu ) are implicitly simplifications. You can think
| of latin or Russian cursive as a simplification of the
| printed letters.
|
| In practice, the phonetic component has been mangled /
| evolved over time, so simplification doesn't make things
| more or less difficult for students (be it 5 year old
| native speakers or 50 year old non native speakers).
| ogurechny wrote:
| "Literacy rate" is just a bureaucratic index. It was
| increased in most countries with mostly the same measures,
| no matter which their writing system was. If look closely,
| "literacy" meant "making mass of workers and soldiers
| capable of following basic instructions", and there often
| was not much for them to read except for parroted
| propaganda (obviously, I'm not talking about China
| specifically, as it has been the same everywhere).
| z2 wrote:
| Much of the simplification adopted shorthand already in
| common use, which is why Japanese shinjitai simplification
| independently arrived at many similar characters and
| patterns. The second simplification round was an abysmal
| newspeak-esque failure, and thank goodness _that_ wasn't
| adopted either.
| publicola1990 wrote:
| The Vietnamese romanized their writing, they seems to be
| doing fine.
| 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.
| causality0 wrote:
| Why shouldn't it be mainland-centric? Mainland China is
| 99.5 percent of the population of China. That's like
| refuting a claim about Americans by calling it "a very
| non-Pennsylvanian view".
| alexlur wrote:
| Because China is not the only place where Chinese
| languages are spoken. There's more than 10 million ethnic
| Chinese in Southeast Asia alone. And it's not only a
| mainland-centric view: it's a mainland-Mandarin speaking
| centric view.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| Pinyin is used as input to select characters, but the final
| text that's used to communicate is composed of characters.
| 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.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > information density of writing
|
| I feel like a proper comparison would not be number of
| characters, but a kind of pixel-budget, assuming both meet
| a certain reading speed and accuracy rate.
| user982 wrote:
| I was reading a Wikipedia page
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Metal_Colossi) and
| was struck by the difference in length of the Chinese
| quotes and translations. E.g.: Shou Tian
| Xia Bing , Ju Zhi Xian Yang , Xiao Yi Wei Zhong Ju Jin
| Ren Shi Er , Zhong Ge Qian Shi , Zhi Ting Gong Zhong . Yi
| Fa Du Heng Shi Zhang Chi . Che Tong Gui . Shu Tong Wen Zi
| .
|
| was translated into He collected the
| weapons of All-Under-Heaven in Xianyang, and cast them
| into twelve bronze figures of the type of bell stands,
| each 1000 dan [about 30 tons] in weight, and displayed
| them in the palace. He unified the law, weights and
| measurements, standardized the axle width of carriages,
| and standardized the writing system.
| cwilby wrote:
| I just started learning Chinese about 2 months ago, to me
| it seems they stuff whole concepts into characters.
|
| For example,
|
| "Qu " (pronounced "Qu") is "going to the". "Chao Shi "
| (prounced "Chao Shi") is "supermarket" "Qu Chao Shi "
| (pronounced "Qu Chao Shi") is "going to the supermarket".
|
| 3 syllables vs 7 syllables.
|
| To me, it seems that instead of composing letters into
| words to convey meaning, they have more letters that are
| mini-words unto themselves.
| mook wrote:
| Don't forget all the abbreviation. "Chao Shi ",
| supermarket, is abbreviated from "Chao Ji ", super, and
| "Shi Chang ", market. The equivalent in English would be
| "sup-mark" or something along those lines. (Or in
| Japanese, just "super".)
| Terr_ wrote:
| Since we're now talking about verbal rather than written:
|
| > No matter how fast or slow, how simple or complex, each
| language gravitated toward an average rate of 39.15 bits
| per second, they report today in Science Advances.
|
| -- https://www.science.org/content/article/human-speech-
| may-hav...
| yongjik wrote:
| I don't speak Chinese, but my understanding is that it's
| not a totally fair comparison: classical Chinese text was
| often highly abbreviated, to such a degree that you have
| to be an expert historian to interpret it correctly.
|
| For example, the characters comprising your example text
| starts like:
|
| collect (Shou ) [from] [all] soldiers (Bing ) under the
| sky (Tian Xia ), gather (Ju ) at(?) (Zhi ) Xianyang (Xian
| Yang ), melt (Xiao ) and (Yi ) become(?) (Wei ) bell-
| stand (Zhong Ju ) metal (Jin ) person (Ren ) twelve (Shi
| Er ) ...
|
| As you can see, the English "translation" is more like an
| annotated translation. E.g., the original doesn't say who
| did it, or what he collected from soldiers: we just
| inferred "weapon" because what else could be melted into
| statues?
|
| Similarly, "standardized the axle width of carriages" is
| just: cart (Che ) same (Tong ) axle width (Gui ). We're
| supposed to infer "standardized" because we are talking
| about the Emperor's deeds.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| I'm not sure how much evidence there is for that either --
| a Chinese friend couldn't believe that I could just look at
| a paragraph of English and instantly know roughly what it
| was about; she, despite her fluency in written English,
| thought only Chinese characters would allow for such rapid
| comprehension.
|
| It's certainly denser, though. And I agree about the front-
| loading of learning. It's like learning vi. An absolute
| pain at first, then very comfortable.
| rjh29 wrote:
| I don't think (for me) chinese or english reading is
| particularly different. In both cases you're scanning
| whole blocks (words, phrases) at a time. Sometimes I feel
| like I read Chinese slower purely because of how dense it
| is.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| Yeah. That was pretty much my point -- no native speaker
| is even looking at each letter (or even each word), wnlch
| js wzy yxu cyn upigemqand thws siktsmce wjtdut mnrh of a
| ptublim. Each word is its own shape, much like how
| Chinese speakers aren't looking at each stroke.
| mchaver wrote:
| Much like in English you can pull out lots of vowels and
| still read the text, you can cover up the about bottom
| 40% of the characters in a sentence and still read it.
| sho_hn wrote:
| Here is wonderful article by John DeFrancis on the topic:
|
| The Prospects for Chinese Writing Reform (2006)
|
| https://sino-
| platonic.org/complete/spp171_chinese_writing_re...
|
| It is cited frequently.
| kalleboo wrote:
| > _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._
|
| How did that work out for Korea when they switched to Hangul?
| alexlur wrote:
| They are not comparable. The Chinese script was tailor-made
| for Chinese languages, while it was simply adopted by the
| Koreans, which arguably was a bad fit because it's 1)
| agglutinative and 2) not even a Sino-Tibetan language. Even
| then hanja is still part of the national education
| curriculum today (look up hanmun gyoyugyong gico hanja).
| numpad0 wrote:
| Prewar Korean written script used Japanese style Kanji for
| nouns intermeshed between Hangul phonetics. Postwar, under
| US influence they transitioned into all-Hangul phonetic
| language, but IMO it looks a big regression in their
| communication ability due to resulting arrays of pure
| homonyms.
|
| They rely purely on context to distinguish {"apples",
| "apologies"}, {"mayor", "market"}, {"stomach", "ship",
| "pear", "double"}, {"acting", "delays", "smoke"} so on and
| so forth if what I'm scrolling is right. There's no tonal
| or character distinction. That surely isn't great.
| yongjik wrote:
| I don't know where you got the idea of "under US
| influence", but mixed Korean/Chinese character writing
| was common in South Korea well into 1980s, long after
| Korea became its own country. For example, in 1987, the
| newly founded Hankyoreh newspaper made a splash by
| deliberately writing all articles in pure Korean script,
| which was not the norm until then.
|
| Gradually more books and newspapers followed suit,
| because pretty much everybody found that writing
| everything in Korean letters actually make communication
| less ambiguous and easier to understand. If your phrase
| is ambiguous between whether someone's offering apples or
| apologies, then you just change the word or add
| additional context to make it clear which one is being
| offered. It's no different from how English speakers deal
| with bear/bear, tear/tear, arm/arm, ground/ground, and so
| on.
| int_19h wrote:
| Pure Hangul was used for a long time before then, just
| not in any kind of official capacity after Sejong. But
| e.g. most "women's literature" would be written in it.
|
| And back when it was first introduced, it certainly did
| wonders for literacy. Although it should be noted that
| original Hangul was more phonemic wrt its contemporary
| Korean, and the letter shapes were a bit simpler as well.
| 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
| numpad0 wrote:
| I think one of statements with respect to CJK languages that
| has to be made more often is that each of the languages has
| own numerous dialects with dubious mutual intelligibilities,
| e.g. Tsugaru and Kagoshima dialects against standard
| Japanese.
|
| The phrase "a language is a dialect with an army" often
| appears in topic of Asian languages, and causing frictions
| between CJK non-speakers wondering about compatibilities
| between the three and speakers showing near vile dissents to
| those questions. While I understand both sides of these
| sentiments, the situation is not ideal for both sides.
|
| IMO, it might be weird to refer to these languages as
| "Beijing Tokyo Seoul" languages, but doing so
| occasionally(just _occasionally_ ) could create more tangible
| feel as to why these three seem to exist side by side so
| utterly disconnected against each others.
| 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.
| acheong08 wrote:
| Well obviously not. Posting a dumb question tends to return
| some very helpful responses
| 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.
| tdeck wrote:
| > one of the few languages where characters have no direct
| relation to phonetics
|
| nit: It's not accurate to say that the characters have no
| direct relation to phonetics. Thousands of them are semanto-
| phonetic compounds, meaning they combine a character relating
| to the word's (or syllable's) meaning with a character relating
| to pronunciation. Sinitic languages tend to have a lot of
| homophones or near-homophones, so this approach works
| reasonably well as a memory aid once you've memorized a bunch
| of the basic characters.
|
| One problem is that many of the pronunciations have drifted
| from the Middle Chinese pronunciation of the words. Also, some
| of them have been simplified in Simplified Chinese which makes
| the components a bit harder to discern.
|
| I've been learning some Cantonese recently and this is very
| apparent with certain common Cantonese words. For example, the
| first-person pronoun in Cantonese is pronounced ngo, with a
| low-rising tone, and written like this:
|
| Wo https://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/1/
|
| The word for goose in Cantonese is also "ngo", but with a
| different tone. Here's the character for that:
|
| E
| https://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/1200...
|
| If you enlarge it, you'll see that the left side is the same Wo
| from before. The right side is Niao , which means "bird"
| (https://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/161/).
| So if you saw this character and knew the basic characters for
| the pronouns and the word "bird", and you spoke Cantonese,
| you'd be able to easily understand what it meant.
|
| Here's another one. The word "ngo" with still a different tone
| means "hungry". How do we write it?
|
| E :
| https://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/740/
|
| In this one the phonetic component is on the right instead,
| which is a bit inconsistent. The left side is this:
|
| Shi :
| https://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/116/
|
| What does Shi mean? It's the verb "to eat". So if you saw this
| E character and knew a couple of other basic characters, you
| could figure out that it's the word "ngo6" meaning "hungry".
| Many of the characters still work like this although the sound
| shift I mentioned above means that some work in some Chinese
| languages and not others.
| hker wrote:
| Native Cantonese speaker here, glad that you are interested
| in learning Cantonese.
|
| I am working with other volunteers to improve Cantonese
| teaching, and wonder what difficulties you have encountered
| when learning Cantonese, and what materials or communities
| would be helpful for Cantonese learners.
| numpad0 wrote:
| > why not just adopt Japanese
|
| Because Japanese characters have no direct relation to Chinese
| phonetics. Both belong to different dialect continuums,
| phonetics aren't compatible.
|
| And I suspect same might explain lack of native Chinese
| phonetic script; `Chinese` isn't a single spoken language, but
| what is called as such is its Beijing area version of one of
| Chinese(or Sinitic) languages. The written language was
| universally understood in China due to bureaucratic needs, but
| AIUI it's not same as spoken language and it's not necessarily
| used everywhere. Maybe they just had little uses for a
| standardized phonetic script?
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_varieties_of_Chinese
| barronli wrote:
| It is still very useful to standardize the pronunciations,
| since people with different dialects had to meet especially
| those officials in government. There was "yayan" for this
| purpose.
|
| https://en.wikimedia.org/wiki/Yayan
| faitswulff wrote:
| There are a lot of underlying assumptions here:
|
| 1. That Chinese writing is inherently inefficient. It's
| actually very efficient...to _read._ And nothing beats the
| efficiency of having a script that maps perfectly to the
| language. Also as sibling comment notes, UTF-8 is a thing.
|
| 2. That there is no relation between written characters and
| phonetics. Incorrect, as several sibling comments point out.
|
| 3. That Japanese kana represents a successful "modernization"
| of kanji that Chinese should emulate.
|
| 4. That Chinese is "basically kanji" - assuming the Chinese and
| Japanese languages are essentially interchangeable. They...are
| not. I can't even begin to emphasize how much they are not.
| Chinese is subject-verb-object while Japanese is subject-
| object-verb, for instance. Chinese also has many phonemes that
| are incompatible with Japanese, which would not be covered in
| hiragana. Finally, kanji came from Chinese and has subtle
| differences and while it is mostly a subset of Chinese hanz, it
| has its own slightly different character set
| alexlur wrote:
| It's really bizarre to see someone claim kana has anything to
| do with "modernization". The Japanese modernization and
| industrialization period is famously associated with
| translating Western concepts and terminologies into _Sinitic
| words_ that later spread to China, Korea and Vietnam.
| rjh29 wrote:
| That was true like 100 years ago, but nowadays katakana
| words are extremely popular and increasingly used over
| their Sinitic counterparts, so I feel it's a valid
| argument.
|
| Also it's not uncommon for words like roGuo (Lu Guo )to be
| written in part kanji especially in news... if that trend
| continues beyond the Chang Yong kanji we might end up with
| a Japanese that is closer to Korean.
| alexlur wrote:
| The modernization argument only makes sense if your
| society is economically or militarily inferior to the
| society you want to emulate. It was the case 100 years
| ago, but not today.
|
| The Japanese economy has been stagnant for over 30 years
| with no end in sight. Following the same logic, Japan
| should perhaps "modernize" their language by following
| China, which is a ridiculous conclusion as you can tell.
| numpad0 wrote:
| GP is making understandable misunderstanding due to how the
| three Far East countries are presented in the world at large,
| that there are three countries in Asia that practically
| touches each others, just like Germany is with Belgium and
| Netherlands in Europe.
|
| Tokyo from Beijing(2000km/1200mi) is about as far out as
| Paris to Kyiv. Far East countries are also separated by seas,
| like Mediterranean countries across the sea. I doubt a lot of
| Parisians have meaningful ideas of "basically Latin"
| Ukrainian any way or form, or Italians with Tunisian, but
| there's such false instinct that forms out of above-mentioned
| presentation that those Asians are rather next door
| neighbors.
|
| That and mistaking personal difficulties and inefficiencies
| associated with understanding languages in non-native manners
| as inferiority of the foreign one.
| vunderba wrote:
| Non-native speakers who suggest that countries arbitrarily
| modernize or change their language remind me of non-musicians
| who come around with a new replacement for traditional sheet
| music. Even if it was a good idea, which in this case it's
| patently not, it's just not gonna happen.
|
| It's a failure to recognize that languages (which I would rank
| music a kind of) evolve organically, and outside of some edge
| cases, like Esperanto, they're not artificially created in a
| vacuum.
| sho_hn wrote:
| See https://sino-
| platonic.org/complete/spp171_chinese_writing_re...
| tonetegeatinst wrote:
| Asianometry has a good video on this if my memory serves me
| right.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| I find it humorous that Ying was described as a difficult
| character in the article. It's like 3 radicals and the character
| for bird.
|
| Perhaps it's difficult to render in tiny Latin alphabet font, but
| if you have any Japanese or Chinese study under you, you could
| read and reproduce that nearly instantly on sight.
| surrTurr wrote:
| i think he meant difficult in the sense that it consists of
| many strokes, not in the sense how difficult it is to remember.
| however, one could argue that there are many other, more
| complex to write, kanji than Ying
| mrweasel wrote:
| It interesting to consider that both Japan and China might have
| been prevent from ever being first with general purpose
| computers. ASCII, and other encoding schemes, only needed to make
| provisions for less than 200 characters, making it possible to
| implement with the limited storage and memory available to early
| computers. The shear amount of characters in some languages, like
| Chinese may have served as a distraction or roadblock for early
| computers in the those countries.
| igammarays wrote:
| Makes you wonder what limitations of our own language and
| culture are preventing us from inventing certain things?
| raincole wrote:
| In an alternative history timeline it might be true.
|
| In our timeline I highly doubt whether it was the main reason
| why general purpose computers didn't happen first in China or
| Japan.
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