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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

#71

Post by xnyan »

anonymousiam wrote: post #32

This is a good story for the modern age. Not so much because of the technical achievements of the protagonist, but more as a warning for the perpetrators/victims of class warfare in the world today. My father-in-law (now deceased) was similarly branded and nearly died while spending several years in a labor camp. He was forbidden to work upon his release, and banished to the countryside along with his family. Decades…

Trading class war on the educated rich for class war on the less educated poor (gains have generally gone to the very rich for ~40 years) is not any better.

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

#73

Post by shard »

WaxedChewbacca wrote: post #55
pseingatl wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> But Hangul is great, I wish Thailand would adopt it. What a weird wish. Does Hangul even have ways to write the in-between consonants in Thai like dt or bp? Does Hangul even have the Thai vowel sound ื (which certainly has no unambiguous way to be written in English)? And then what about tones? Tones in Thai are not written explicitly, but computed based on a number of factors including character classes, length of…

I don't know Thai, but if Thai has an F sound, or if there are distinct L and R sounds, then Hangul would need new symbols.

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

#74

Post by russellbeattie »

csa wrote: post #60
russellbeattie wrote: post #44

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 th…

> Even the most basic "alphabetization" is based on strokes of the characters I guess? That is one way characters and words can be ordered. Another is pinyin order. > And Pinyin is mind boggling to me. It’s the English alphabet without “v”. What’s mind boggling about it? > I have this sense that touch screens and the smartphones must have had an outsized impact on societies with character based languages, with predic…

Thanks for the reply!

Just to be clear, the concept of Pinyin isn't bewildering, it's the daily use of it. Imagine the reverse, having to type in a completely different character set in order to produce Latin characters. It's amazing that it works.

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

#75

Post by philliphaydon »

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.

If you wanna see a complicated writing system check out Bernese in Myanmar. It’s like a bunch of circles.

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

#76

Post by csa »

russellbeattie wrote: post #74
csa wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even the most basic "alphabetization" is based on strokes of the characters I guess? That is one way characters and words can be ordered. Another is pinyin order. > And Pinyin is mind boggling to me. It’s the English alphabet without “v”. What’s mind boggling about it? > I have this sense that touch screens and the smartphones must have had an outsized impact on societies with character based languages, with predic…

Thanks for the reply! Just to be clear, the concept of Pinyin isn't bewildering, it's the daily use of it. Imagine the reverse, having to type in a completely different character set in order to produce Latin characters. It's amazing that it works.

> Imagine the reverse, having to type in a completely different character set in order to produce Latin characters.

Like using 0s and 1s?

It’s not really that tough.

PRC kids learn pinyin before characters. It’s just easier that way for a number of reasons.

Also, PRC kids study English. Iirc, public education starts English in 3rd grade. Parents often start their kids earlier.

Pinyin is not particularly “foreign” in China.

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

#77

Post by eloisius »

frogulis wrote: post #62
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.

> Taiwan's Zhuyin is 90+% the same as Pinyin except the input is composed with Chinese script radicals I wouldn't say that's true. It's phonetic, sure, but it relates much more closely to the syllable structure than Pinyin does. Simple example: 南, Pinyin: nán, Zhuyin: ㄋㄢˊ In Pinyin, we use the same letter "n" in initial and final position. In Zhuyin, the word is composed of two letters, ㄋ （initial n), and ㄢ (final an…

It’s also far more consistent. The ü of Pinyin only has umlauts with l because lü and lu are both valid syllables. That the u of qu and ju is actually ü, and the u of chu and zhu is u is confusing, to say nothing of yong/-iong. In Zhuyin you have discrete ㄨ u and ㄩ ü, and yong doesn’t masquerade is a rare vowel, it’s just ㄩㄥ。
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