Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

spectrum.ieee.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 96 posts

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#31

Post by charlieyu1 »

ande-mnoc wrote: post #27
asdasdsddd wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 2n…

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

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#32

Post by cwilby »

user982 wrote: post #30
Terr_ wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.: 收天下兵, 聚之咸陽, 銷以為鍾鐻金人十二, 重各千石, 置廷宮中. 一法度衡石丈尺. 車同軌. 書同文字. 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, an…

I just started learning Chinese about 2 months ago, to me it seems they stuff whole concepts into characters.

For example,

"去" (pronounced "Qú") is "going to the". "超市" (prounced "Chao Shi") is "supermarket" "去超市" (pronounced "Qú 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.

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#33

Post by numpad0 »

_lvbh wrote: post #10

“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…

> 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

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#34

Post by faitswulff »

_lvbh wrote: post #10

“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…

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

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#35

Post by numpad0 »

acwan93 wrote: post #11
wolfgangbabad wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vietnamese is relatively OK.

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.

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.

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#36

Post by causality0 »

alexlur wrote: post #18
asdasdsddd wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost all digital communication is written using pinyin, which today is almost all written communication

This is an extremely mainland-centric view. Cangjie is the dominant IME in Hong Kong.

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".

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#37

Post by _lvbh »

highwind wrote: post #22
_lvbh wrote: post #10

“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…

I'm guessing you are not familiar with how Chinese characters work nor how Japanese Hiragana or Kanji work.

Well obviously not. Posting a dumb question tends to return some very helpful responses

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#38

Post by vunderba »

asdasdsddd wrote: post #15
alexlur wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank God it didn’t happen.

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

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 繁體字, simplified just looks ugly. (龙 vs 龍)

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#39

Post by numpad0 »

alexlur wrote: post #13
_lvbh wrote: post #10

“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…

> 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…

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.

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#40

Post by alexlur »

faitswulff wrote: post #34
_lvbh wrote: post #10

“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…

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…

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.
Post reply on HN