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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

#41

Post by fredwu »

colordrops wrote: post #27
fredwu wrote: post #22

As a native Shanghainese speaker I am extremely confused (and curious!). Cantonese at least has a written form, but Shanghainese AFAIK has no written form, so what does "Shanghainese dialectal spelling" even mean? :\

This article definitely has a political subtext. Spoken Cantonese and mandarin are mutually unintelligible, but in written form, at least without colloquialisms, they are basically the same language. I'm a non-chinese that studied Chinese, so I have no horse in this race. I do think they should support the Cantonese input method, but there's no reason the pinyin method wouldn't work just as well, other than lack of f…

My assumption is that Apple _is_ referring to the colloquialisms.

The confusing part for me as a Shanghainese speaker though is that we don't have a way to write Shanghainese, this "spelling" concept AFAIK simply doesn't exist. So I'm very curious to see who actually designed this functionality and what does it actually do.

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

#42

Post by diveanon »

Havoc wrote: post #5

Pretty bizarre that stuff like this happens. I'd have thought that Apple would have a native focus group of sorts to check this out. Or failing that just scrape together a couple actual chinese among their 150k employees to get some relevant eyeballs on it. And not just China...in general. Even small companies (<500) often keep track of their employee's nationality and language proficiency.

They do have a native focus group in China, composed entirely of senior party officials.

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

#43

Post by golergka »

blowski wrote: post #6

> Would you type Russian with an American keyboard? I thought that was relatively common, just one of those things people are accustomed to.

In the 90s, before wide adoption of Unicode, there were several competing encodings for Russian in ASCII, such as KOI-8, Windows and others. In some cases, it was just easier to type Russian in English language as it was spoken, which was called "translit", from transliteration: naprimer, vot tak. Later, as first mobile phones got wide adoption in late 90s and early 00s, they, too, didn't yet have russian keyboards, and translit was once again used, although in modified form, with wider use of digits in place of letters.

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

#44

Post by crooked-v »

raverbashing wrote: post #40
crooked-v wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> since you write Cantonese and Mandarin with the same alphabet Pinyin is a system designed for Mandarin specifically, while Jyutping[1] is the missing input method for Cantonese. To put it another way, this is like giving a German person an English keyboard and, when they ask you where the umlauts and eszett are, telling them that they don't need that because the English keyboard now has autocomplete support for Ger…

Yes, so my analogy makes sense (see the before the last paragraph in my comment)

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?

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

#45

Post by permo-w »

docdeek wrote: post #24
blowski wrote: post #6

> Would you type Russian with an American keyboard? I thought that was relatively common, just one of those things people are accustomed to.

Agreed. I type almost exclusively in English on a non-English keyboard.

yeah but I’d imagine it’s not a Russian keyboard. Russian characters look like йуукенгшщзхфывапролджэячсмитьбю. You’d have a hard time writing in English using them

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

#46

Post by jiofih »

creshal wrote: post #23
LeffeBrune wrote: post #16

> Why would I type my native language with a foreign language keyboard? Would you type Russian with an American keyboard? Yes, I would, and I have been doing this all my life when no Russian layout is available. This is called transliteration, and I would argue most Russian speaking tech users used it at least once in their life.

Emphasis on "when no Russian layout is available". If anyone told you "no, this is the Russian layout", you'd still flip them off.

Doesn’t seem to be the case here. More like “improved autocomplete for Russian words in the English keyboard”.

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

#48

Post by amanbolat »

As I know there are more people in the south part of China Mainland, who speak and write Cantonese and they have always been using pinyin or keyboard. So if you already can use one type of input why bother and create one more for a smaller group? Nobody in government cares about what type of keyboard you use...

In addition, most of native Russian speakers do use English/American keyboard to write Russian because it is much easier rather than finding one with Cyrillic symbols.

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

#50

Post by jiofih »

crooked-v wrote: post #44
raverbashing wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, so my analogy makes sense (see the before the last paragraph in my comment)

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?

Yes, if the the tone was the same as this post.
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