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A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine

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Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine

#41

Post by nojs »

est wrote: post #4

He is just one of the early pioneers of Chinese input methods, his particular method is stroke-based and works on 0-9 number pads, went obsolete decades ago, but surely had an influence over later popular ones like Wubi. Today, input methods were dominated by pronunciation based one like Pinyin. The heuristics based "smart" Pinyin input methods was actually invented by a non-tech folk and eventually hired by a then-l…

As a non-chinese pinyin input is so much easier. One of the cool things about it is you can type a whole sentence just using the first letter of each character. Eg “wxzdnwsmbq” on my phone is sufficient to produce “我想知道你为什么不去”. In English I’d have to type the whole sentence “I want to know why you didn’t go”.

The other great thing about it is if you remember the pronunciation of a word but forget the tone and/or character, it’s usually automatically corrected.

Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine

#42

Post by dwohnitmok »

btbuildem wrote: post #8

I guess I get why he persisted while imprisoned -- anything to do to keep the mind busy. But why would he continue to work afterwards, and benefit the regime that betrayed him? I'd want to watch it burn and then sink, be left as far behind as possible, not enable them to keep up with technological advancements.

The regime after the Cultural Revolution and the regime during the revolution were totally different people.

The majority of China's post-Cultural Revolution leaders had themselves been at least purged, but often also imprisoned and even tortured during that period. For example Deng Xiaoping had been purged and his son left permanently paralyzed (after a failed suicide attempt due to persecution) after the two became targets during the Cultural Revolution.

Basically anyone who had any sort of political power, educational attainment, or wealth was a target during the Cultural Revolution (a mildly difficult challenge is to find any Chinese figure of note who wasn't Mao who came of age before the Cultural Revolution and wasn't at least denounced. It's possible, but not as trivial as one might think).

The persecution was also often bottom-up, rather than top-down. If you had any attainment or pre-Cultural Revolution power at all, you were much more likely to be beaten, strung up, and imprisoned by local teenage Red Guards often acting of their own accord than the central government.

And so as a result there wasn't as much enmity towards the post-Cultural Revolution government by people who had suffered during the Cultural Revolution because often they had suffered together.

Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine

#43

Post by 1986 »

hbarka wrote: post #24

This man’s biography would make an epic movie. From China, how did he manage to attend and graduate from Leipzig University in Germany during the height of WW2?

Wouldn't this have been during Japanese occupation of China, then? Probably enabled good relations with German universities.

Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine

#44

Post by russellbeattie »

The honest truth is that despite trying to read up on the topic, I still don't understand how Chinese is used on a daily basis. Even the most basic "alphabetization" is based on strokes of the characters I guess? And Pinyin is mind boggling to me. I guess I'll just have to actually sit down and learn some Chinese - like a course or something so I can work it out in my head.

I have this sense that touch screens and the smartphones must have had an outsized impact on societies with character based languages, with prediction making it orders of magnitude easier to enter text. Additionally, the compact nature of Chinese means you can fit a ton more info onto a screen AND there's no need for icons, as the entire written language is basically icons. That means learning how to use apps and menus is marginally easier.

Please correct me if this is a wrong assumption.

Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine

#45

Post by eloisius »

yorwba wrote: post #18
xster wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taiwan's Zhuyin is 90+% the same as Pinyin except the input is composed with Chinese script radicals (like hiragana) rather than Latin script. > Both generally use Traditional instead of Simplified That doesn't impact the human side of the IME. It's just different output for the same input. And the input (Mandarin pronunciation) is the same for mainland and Taiwan.

There are differences in the Mandarin pronunciations standardized on the Mainland and Taiwan. Most of them involve using the fifth tone or not, but there are a few more noticeable exceptions, like 和 hé ㄏㄢˋ (which would correspond to pinyin hàn ) and 崖 yá ㄧㄞˊ (which would correspond to pinyin yái ). Stuff like that occasionally trips me up when switching between pinyin and zhuyin.

和 is also hé/ㄏㄜˊ in Taiwan sometimes, as in 永和. Those differences aren’t intrinsic to Zhuyin or Pinyin.

Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine

#46

Post by dustintrex »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #33
odiroot wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pinyin is really peculiar. It makes it so much easier to learn to outsiders. I know some overseas Chinese people who (not being raised in China) never learned pinyin and prefer the stroke method. Some of the even prefer drawing the strokes by hand (instead of choosing from the keyboard). Any Chinese word, I've ever learned, I can only input using pinyin. The stroke method adds so much more mental overhead.

> I know some overseas Chinese people who (not being raised in China) never learned pinyin and prefer the stroke method. I knew someone who used wubi in preference to pinyin input. She grew up in Guangzhou until age 16, so it wasn't an issue of not learning pinyin. The problem, for her, was that she had no way to know the correct pinyin for a character, since she didn't distinguish between a bunch of sounds that are…

It's a death spiral though: Computer/mobile input has long since displaced writing by hand for many people, so many of them are no longer fully capable of writing by hand, particularly when it comes to complex and/or rare characters.

Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine

#47

Post by mistrial9 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #16
est wrote: post #4

He is just one of the early pioneers of Chinese input methods, his particular method is stroke-based and works on 0-9 number pads, went obsolete decades ago, but surely had an influence over later popular ones like Wubi. Today, input methods were dominated by pronunciation based one like Pinyin. The heuristics based "smart" Pinyin input methods was actually invented by a non-tech folk and eventually hired by a then-l…

Pinyin is popular in the PRC, but not in Taiwan or HK. Taiwan input is dominated by Bopomofo, which is also pronunciation based. Mainland China is the largest country that uses Chinese input methods, however. I still remember entering Chinese using a pinyin T9 method on my Nokia handset in 2002. Pinyin on a 0-9 number pad, fun times.

I used pinyin and bopomofo on Macs in the 90s, pre-OSX

Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine

#48

Post by eloisius »

xster wrote: post #14
gibolt wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pinyin may dominate in Mainland China, but places like Taiwan and Hong Kong still prefer their own input methods. Both generally use Traditional instead of Simplified characters and HK's Cantonese has an underused pinyin equivalent, but that isn't a cause. Other systems became prevalent first, and stuck.

Taiwan's Zhuyin is 90+% the same as Pinyin except the input is composed with Chinese script radicals (like hiragana) rather than Latin script. > Both generally use Traditional instead of Simplified That doesn't impact the human side of the IME. It's just different output for the same input. And the input (Mandarin pronunciation) is the same for mainland and Taiwan.

Zhuyin aren’t Chinese radicals. They are derived from characters. For example the “b” sounds ㄅ comes from the character 包 bāo.

Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine

#50

Post by dwohnitmok »

karmakaze wrote: post #39
pseingatl wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Korean is not a tonal language. But Hangul is great, I wish Thailand would adopt it.

Thai spoken language is the opposite extreme of German, vowels are the salient parts and consonants are often barely present and highly interchangeable. I don't know how the Thai written language works or how complex it is in comparison but I imagine it also wouldn't be a straightforward mapping. Quick lookup says it's tonal and analytic [idk what this is] like Chinese and Vietnamese.

Analytic languages tend to spread complex meaning across multiple words (e.g. stuff like when an action happened or the ordering of actions, etc.). Its opposite is synthetic languages, that tend to group complex meaning into a single word, such as via inflections (e.g. different tenses, prefixes, suffixes, etc.) or agglutination (glomming multiple words into a single word).

So for example analytic languages tend to lack things like complex verb conjugation systems and instead use context or additional words to mark information about the time, subject, object, etc. of a verb.

English for example is usually considered fairly analytic. While there are inflections, they tend to be a lot simpler than many other languages.

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