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Apple’s new keyboard feature in iOS 15 is insult to Cantonese speaking community

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Re: Apple’s new keyboard feature in iOS 15 is insult to Cantonese speaking community

#121

Post by throwaway2037 »

yorwba wrote: post #93
inkyoto wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, one can speak their own first Sinitic language on the mainland (and they do, and many even speak more than 2) and that is not banned. But they can't buy a textbook on their first language because the official policy is that everything that is not Mandarin is a «dialect», and dialects can't be studied (as in «are impossible to study due to not deserving to be studied»), therefore there is no need for textbooks.

Jingdong has a large selection of Cantonese textbooks: https://so.m.jd.com/ware/search.action?keyword=%E7%B2%A4%E8%... Have you tried to buy one?

Why was this downvoted? It makes no sense. I am not an apologist for CCP but this is a terrific retort!

Re: Apple’s new keyboard feature in iOS 15 is insult to Cantonese speaking community

#122

Post by throwaway2037 »

ksec wrote: post #117
throwaway2037 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't read this as me trying to defend CCP's policy to discourage non-Mandarin languages in China: What you wrote is somewhat misleading to readers not familiar with the region. There has been massive internal migration to Guangdong province in the last 30 years. These migrants speak Cantonese at varying levels. It would be more accurate to make a comment about multi-generation Guangdong residents and their knowledge…

Except they actively discourage the use of cantonese even for those who have cantonese as their mother tongue and their parents who speak cantonese. To the point they communicate with their parents using Mandarin. Why? Because they have been taught at school speaking Cantonese in any circumstances were barbaric. > Shenzhen Shenzhen used to speak with Cantonese. All the way back from 70s to 90s after it was a fishing…

You wrote: > Sorry, but I disagree from personal experience. I am not a native level Canto speaker, but I work with many! Chinese families that speak 'minority' languages (including Fujian province) work very hard to transfer this culture to the next generation -- inside or outside East Asia.

If you wish to dispute my comment, please provide anecdata or a peer reviewed study or poll/survey that supports your view.

Also, you wrote > This statement makes no sense. Deng Xiaopeng did not 'open' Shenzhen until 1979. It was still a small, regional city well into the 1980s. It wasn't a multi-million person metropolis until the mid-1990s.

Re: Apple’s new keyboard feature in iOS 15 is insult to Cantonese speaking community

#123

Post by throwaway2037 »

yorwba wrote: post #82
throwaway2037 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't read this as me trying to defend CCP's policy to discourage non-Mandarin languages in China: What you wrote is somewhat misleading to readers not familiar with the region. There has been massive internal migration to Guangdong province in the last 30 years. These migrants speak Cantonese at varying levels. It would be more accurate to make a comment about multi-generation Guangdong residents and their knowledge…

It's not just recent migration to Guangdong province. The eastern half of Guangdong is traditionally Hakka-speaking. Most Hakkas don't speak Cantonese, and that shouldn't be surprising.

I am confused by this comment. Are you talking about Chaozhou (潮州)? That city is on the border between Guangdong and Fujian (but lies in GD), but the locals are overwelming Canto speakers. There are many who have migrated to Hongkong over the last 75 years.

Re: Apple’s new keyboard feature in iOS 15 is insult to Cantonese speaking community

#124

Post by ksec »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #122
ksec wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they actively discourage the use of cantonese even for those who have cantonese as their mother tongue and their parents who speak cantonese. To the point they communicate with their parents using Mandarin. Why? Because they have been taught at school speaking Cantonese in any circumstances were barbaric. > Shenzhen Shenzhen used to speak with Cantonese. All the way back from 70s to 90s after it was a fishing…

You wrote: > Sorry, but I disagree from personal experience. I am not a native level Canto speaker, but I work with many! Chinese families that speak 'minority' languages (including Fujian province) work very hard to transfer this culture to the next generation -- inside or outside East Asia. If you wish to dispute my comment, please provide anecdata or a peer reviewed study or poll/survey that supports your view. Al…

If you are working with those small minority then they are not teens anymore. Yes, they work hard to have their child speaking, that is why only half of those minority speaks the language and other half barely use it. I say barely as in they do understand and speak it, but no longer a native tongue and cant describe things without going back to mandarin.

Should have written 80s to 90s. Generally speaking we talk about Fishing village as before all the manufacturing investment going up to China. That was when the whole manufacturing industry in HK moved up north, where north meant across the border to Shenzhen.

Re: Apple’s new keyboard feature in iOS 15 is insult to Cantonese speaking community

#125

Post by crooked-v »

raverbashing wrote: post #75
crooked-v wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, so now imagine Apple actually doing that in regards to German people. Would the many angry German consumers who had paid quite a bit for Apple phones be 'overreacting' to publicly complain about it?

But you can still type German or Cantonese with a specific keyboard/phonetic system right? This is on top of what exists.

The Jyutping method, which is the proper way to input Cantonese, isn't available.

Instead, Apple looked at people using the Pinyin keyboard to awkwardly input Cantonese (because Jyutping wasn't available) and decided to enhance that instead of just giving a Jyutping keyboard.

Re: Apple’s new keyboard feature in iOS 15 is insult to Cantonese speaking community

#126

Post by yorwba »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #123
yorwba wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just recent migration to Guangdong province. The eastern half of Guangdong is traditionally Hakka-speaking. Most Hakkas don't speak Cantonese, and that shouldn't be surprising.

I am confused by this comment. Are you talking about Chaozhou (潮州)? That city is on the border between Guangdong and Fujian (but lies in GD), but the locals are overwelming Canto speakers. There are many who have migrated to Hongkong over the last 75 years.

Isn't Chaozhou mostly Teochew-speaking? Wikipedia claims there are 10 million Teochew speakers in Chaozhou while listing the total population as 2.7 million, which obviously doesn't add up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaozhou#Language (My guess is metropolitan area vs. city boundaries.) But given that Teochew is named after Chaozhou (modulo romanization) I would've expected it to be locally dominant over Cantonese.

But what I was actually talking about were Huizhou, Heyuan, Meizhou etc. Basically, Cantonese extends as far east as Hong Kong and further east of that is marked as Hakka territory in the Language Atlas of China https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/Map_of_s... Meixian Hakka from Meizhou in particular has a prominent position within Hakka culture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meixian_dialect

Re: Apple’s new keyboard feature in iOS 15 is insult to Cantonese speaking community

#127

Post by samus »

calyth2018 wrote: post #108
Quiark wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably a bad example. The problem with typing pinyin instead of jyutping is that you must type a very different set of latin characters to get the result you want.

And the problem with jyutping is that it's not a standard romanization taught to Hong Kongers. Wasn't the case for sure when I was in school in Colonial Hong Kong. Pretty sure not the case in SAR Hong Kong. Some of the romanization of Cantonese sounds are baffling. It's a bit like watching English speakers struggle to pronounce the Q sound in Qing (e.g. Qing dynasty).

Then they should use a different one. There are at least half a dozen of these, and most of them do not require any symbols not found on most keyboards. Jyutping is actually an outlier among them for how it uses j and z. These are truly not intuitive for people used to the english, french or spanish alphabets.

Re: Apple’s new keyboard feature in iOS 15 is insult to Cantonese speaking community

#128

Post by samus »

soco wrote: post #38
blntechie wrote: post #14

> Why would I type my native language with a foreign language keyboard? Would you type Russian with an American keyboard? I don’t know the intricacies of the Chinese languages but typing foreign languages with English keyboard is pretty common worldwide I guess? It certainly is for Indian languages at least.

I never thought it was something special to type English on a Swiss keyboard. Do people switch keyboards when they switch languages? To me it seems an unnecessary hassle, to remember where's the Z or why aren't there umlauts or or or, whenever I send an email to another person in a different language.

German is so similar to english that switching is not really a thing. It's mostly programmers that do it to have easier access to punctuation and brackets. Frankly, I cannot understand why the Z and Y were swapped in the first place.

German keyboards are just flexible enough for writing the odd french or spanish loanword. Other languages pretty much always require specific keyboard layouts.

Edit: The [Neo2 and Bone](https://neo-layout.org/) layouts make it possible to easily type in most latin-based writing systems.

Re: Apple’s new keyboard feature in iOS 15 is insult to Cantonese speaking community

#129

Post by calyth2018 »

samus wrote: post #127
calyth2018 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the problem with jyutping is that it's not a standard romanization taught to Hong Kongers. Wasn't the case for sure when I was in school in Colonial Hong Kong. Pretty sure not the case in SAR Hong Kong. Some of the romanization of Cantonese sounds are baffling. It's a bit like watching English speakers struggle to pronounce the Q sound in Qing (e.g. Qing dynasty).

Then they should use a different one. There are at least half a dozen of these, and most of them do not require any symbols not found on most keyboards. Jyutping is actually an outlier among them for how it uses j and z . These are truly not intuitive for people used to the english, french or spanish alphabets.

The key thing, IMO, isn't whether they should use a different one. The key thing is to pick one that will be taught to all student, so that it becomes a standard.

Good luck to anyone in the HKSAR government trying to propose that though - it would just be politicized like what the author of the article tried.

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