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The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

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Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#41

Post by sho_hn »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #14
asdasdsddd wrote: post #5

> like Chairman Mao Zedong, who seemed to equate Chinese modernization with the Romanization of Chinese script One of Mao's better ideas

Romanization of Chinese writing was already proposed during the New Culture movement in the 1910s-20s. China's most famous modern writer supported it. However, the Chinese language has evolved alongside the characters for about 3000 years, and it's very difficult to just separate the two. A huge amount of culture is bound up with the characters. Not only that, but the Romanized writing system is viewed as something t…

Here is wonderful article by John DeFrancis on the topic:

The Prospects for Chinese Writing Reform (2006)

https://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp171_chinese_writing_re...

It is cited frequently.

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#42

Post by geraldwhen »

I find it humorous that 鷹 was described as a difficult character in the article. It’s like 3 radicals and the character for bird.

Perhaps it’s difficult to render in tiny Latin alphabet font, but if you have any Japanese or Chinese study under you, you could read and reproduce that nearly instantly on sight.

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#43

Post by vunderba »

_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…

Non-native speakers who suggest that countries arbitrarily modernize or change their language remind me of non-musicians who come around with a new replacement for traditional sheet music. Even if it was a good idea, which in this case it's patently not, it's just not gonna happen.

It's a failure to recognize that languages (which I would rank music a kind of) evolve organically, and outside of some edge cases, like Esperanto, they're not artificially created in a vacuum.

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#44

Post by alexlur »

causality0 wrote: post #36
alexlur wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Because China is not the only place where Chinese languages are spoken. There’s more than 10 million ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia alone. And it’s not only a mainland-centric view: it’s a mainland–Mandarin speaking centric view.

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#45

Post by sho_hn »

_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…

See https://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp171_chinese_writing_re...

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#46

Post by hker »

tdeck wrote: post #26
_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…

> one of the few languages where characters have no direct relation to phonetics nit: It's not accurate to say that the characters have no direct relation to phonetics. Thousands of them are semanto-phonetic compounds, meaning they combine a character relating to the word's (or syllable's) meaning with a character relating to pronunciation. Sinitic languages tend to have a lot of homophones or near-homophones, so thi…

Native Cantonese speaker here, glad that you are interested in learning Cantonese.

I am working with other volunteers to improve Cantonese teaching, and wonder what difficulties you have encountered when learning Cantonese, and what materials or communities would be helpful for Cantonese learners.

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#47

Post by barronli »

numpad0 wrote: post #33
_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 univer…

It is still very useful to standardize the pronunciations, since people with different dialects had to meet especially those officials in government. There was “yayan” for this purpose.

https://en.wikimedia.org/wiki/Yayan

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#48

Post by yongjik »

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 don't speak Chinese, but my understanding is that it's not a totally fair comparison: classical Chinese text was often highly abbreviated, to such a degree that you have to be an expert historian to interpret it correctly.

For example, the characters comprising your example text starts like:

collect (收) [from] [all] soldiers (兵) under the sky (天下), gather (聚) at(?) (之) Xianyang (咸陽), melt (銷) and (以) become(?) (為) bell-stand (鍾鐻) metal (金) person (人) twelve (十二) ...

As you can see, the English "translation" is more like an annotated translation. E.g., the original doesn't say who did it, or what he collected from soldiers: we just inferred "weapon" because what else could be melted into statues?

Similarly, "standardized the axle width of carriages" is just: cart (車) same (同) axle width (軌). We're supposed to infer "standardized" because we are talking about the Emperor's deeds.

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#49

Post by gumby »

alexlur wrote: post #12
wolfgangbabad wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vietnamese is relatively OK.

Chữ Nôm is a borrowed writing system and not native to Vietnamese, which isn’t even a Sino-Tibetan language to begin with.

Latin is a borrowed writing system not native to English, German, Polish and many others which aren’t even Romance languages to begin with and must resort to di- and trigraphs plus non-Latin characters like J, V, ß, ł or å, among others (not to mention diacritics).

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#50

Post by numpad0 »

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

Simplification is just bad. It removes too much that it breaks ability for non-speakers to infer meanings. Complexity of letter shapes is irrelevant to ease of use in computer usage, so it's just a massive loss.
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