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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

#51

Post by tasogare »

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? :\

Wu language has a written form: Chinese characters. You can check reading of characters on this website: http://wu-chinese.com/minidict/ or this one https://www.wugniu.com

The fact you don't know about it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Same goes for Taiwanese Southern Min: a lot of natives think "it's not a written language" where in fact there are both romanizations and a way to write it with Chinese characters.

The central government is actively fighting standardization effort (both romanization and writing in Chinese characters) and push the fiction of Wu and other Sinitic languages (Cantonese, Hakka, Min, etc.) as merely dialects, as a way to destroy them. The method is not new, is has been policy in France, Taiwan and probably other countries. It's a real shame that Apple is validation China's propaganda on that front.

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

#52

Post by 07d046 »

bsaul wrote: post #3

The hypothesis never mentioned in the post, is i think that apple fears being kicked out of China for promoting cantonese or regional languages, going against the will of the CCP to make Mandarin the only official chineese language.

I doubt this is the case here. Cantonese is an official language of Hong Kong and Macau and the mother tongue of tens of millions in Guangdong. Language politics is complicated but I don't think the CCP is so crudely trying to eliminate languages. Apple also has keyboards for Uyghur and Tibetan, which are probably more sensitive languages.

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

#53

Post by tasogare »

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…

> but in written form, at least without colloquialisms, they are basically the same language.

No they're not. Time to go studying linguistic before writing false statements on the internet. Even if most characters and words are shared in-between Sinitic languages, there are difference in lexicon, grammar, syntax and other subtle grammatical phenomena. Phonology is also distinct. It would be incredibly painful for someone the write its native language using an input method made for another language.

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

#54

Post by pdpi »

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.

English keyboards (especially ANSI-style US English keyboards) are very popular, but that's largely a matter of historical availability and (in hacker circles) bad support for the sort of punctuation you use for programming.

Flip it on its head then — would you want to type English on a Cyrillic keyboard?

Even just sticking to Latin alphabet keyboard layouts, there's plenty of variations that make different keyboards quite inconvenient for the wrong language — Spanish and Portuguese are very similar languages, yet you wouldn't want to write Spanish using a Portuguese layout (You can probably type ñ, but I don't think there's a way to type ¿ and ¡ directly).

I use the US International layout because it's "good enough" to write Portuguese while being a lot more convenient for programming, but the standard US English layout is completely unusable for me, and for most European languages, which tend to have a variety of diacritics. Even on US International, I can type umlauts (ä) but have no idea how to type Hungarian double acute marks (a̋).

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

#55

Post by qw »

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.

Even though the characters are mostly the same for most European languages, the mobile keyboard is often tightly connected to spell checking and auto correct for a specific language. It can be a struggle to "fight" the autocorrect when using the wrong keyboard.

Physical keyboards don't have the same issues.

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

#56

Post by chemmail »

07d046 wrote: post #52
bsaul wrote: post #3

The hypothesis never mentioned in the post, is i think that apple fears being kicked out of China for promoting cantonese or regional languages, going against the will of the CCP to make Mandarin the only official chineese language.

I doubt this is the case here. Cantonese is an official language of Hong Kong and Macau and the mother tongue of tens of millions in Guangdong. Language politics is complicated but I don't think the CCP is so crudely trying to eliminate languages. Apple also has keyboards for Uyghur and Tibetan, which are probably more sensitive languages.

Do you live in Hong Kong? They are slowly but systematically and surely doing that to Cantonese.

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

#57

Post by blowski »

jiofih wrote: post #39

> Is this it? Is Apple done pretending to support linguistic diversity? Calm down, Karen. You just showed us how Apple is shipping custom keyboards to regional dialects in China, and adding support for endangered languages, what is the “pretending” part there. You can be unhappy with changes without taking a crap on the entire thing. The outrage in this post seems a bit unnecessary and not the kind of dialogue that b…

I think you could express your point better if you didn't start with "Calm down, Karen.".

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

#58

Post by docdeek »

permo-w wrote: post #45
docdeek wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Correct - the number of specific characters different to standard English is minimal, nothing like a Russian keyboard.

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

#59

Post by wruza »

Apple also translated “hey siri” into “privet siri” in russian. “Hey” means both greeting and exclamation (like oy) in english, but “privet” is just a greeting that is used only once a day. It’s like you have a coworker Alice and when you ask her something instead of saying “hey Alice could you please …” you say “greetings Alice …” every single time, sometimes few times in a row. It’s sounds so creepy.

But the reason for that is likely just an ignorance, not political games.

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

#60

Post by pdpi »

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.

As a native Portuguese speaker, I don't have a need for umlauts, but do need easy access to the tilde, acute, grave, and circumflex. English is the odd one out, because it's the least common denominator in terms of the characters you need.
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