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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

#61

Post by tikkabhuna »

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.

Chinese is different from every other language I've seen. The written language shares meaning, but with different pronunciation. Mandarin uses pinyin as its romanisation, where Cantonese uses jyutping.

Duck[1], for example, has different pronounciations (Cantonese has aap3, Mandarin uses ya1). If you read a menu, the character will be the same, but it'll be pronounced differently.

This article is asking why pinyin in supported for writing Cantonese, when Cantonese's romanization is jyutping. I've installed GBoard on my iPhone to have access to a jyutping keyboard.

Note this is from someone who hasn't been learning Cantonese for long, so someone may want to correct any mistakes I've made!

[1] http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/168/

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

#62

Post by blowski »

slver wrote: post #29
blowski wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any times when it is acceptable to be insulted or outraged?

I know it feels like too much, you just feel like being outraged sometimes, don't you? But trust me, we gotta try it for a few centuries and see how it works out. You'll be surprised by our progress.

There are times when outrage is entirely the right emotion to feel. The problem is when we live in a permanent state of outrage, or when we pretend to be outraged to get what we want.

If we "ban outrage", then somebody needs to be the outrage police and decide when it's acceptable.

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

#63

Post by thisgoodlife »

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.

Most likely the people who wrote the feature note didn’t know what they were talking about

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

#64

Post by blowski »

docdeek wrote: post #58
permo-w wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it not common in Russia then?

I had a Russian housemate in London who exclusively used an English keyboard because he liked that model and it wasn't available in Cyrillic. He gave me the impression that a lot of people in Russia used English keyboards. But then he was an English-speaking programmer, and not representative of the "average Russian".

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

#65

Post by Quiark »

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.

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.

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

#66

Post by tasogare »

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.

> I don't think the CCP is so crudely trying to eliminate languages

They are doing it. Sources: few HK friends that were really worried about the future of their language and culture. And this was before the security law.

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

#67

Post by metgen »

crooked-v wrote: post #31
raverbashing wrote: post #9

Edit 2: ok apparently iOS doesn't support Jyutping out of the box, which seems to be the whole issue here, and with this detail I agree that one shouldn't be more prioritary than having Jyutping first. > Pinyin is a romanization system designed for Mandarin. Why type Cantonese and Shanghainese in Mandarin Pinyin? (Edit: yes it might have to do with political pressure as well) I'm assuming if Apple did this (which is…

> 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…

> 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 German dialectal spellings.

German persons are normally quite accustomed to typing umlauts and eszett as ae/oe/ue/ss. Just think about domain names with German words, let alone pretty much every English-based website form would not accept any umlauts as an input.

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

#68

Post by fredwu »

tasogare wrote: post #51
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…

Thanks for the info, that's very interesting.

> The fact you don't know about it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

I take your point.

Interestingly, growing up in the late 80s, we were briefly taught Zhuyin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo), but not this. I don't believe my parents (both native Shanghainese) even know how to "spell" Shanghainese.

Ah, the lost art...

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

#69

Post by yorwba »

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.

If that were the case, input methods by Chinese companies like Sogou wouldn't support Cantonese either. The opposite is true: here's a description of how to enable Cantonese Jyutping input in Sogou for iOS: https://jingyan.baidu.com/article/60ccbceb100b7c25cab197c4.h...

I think the more likely explanation is that Apple has a small team supporting all of the world's languages, mostly focusing on widely-spoken ones, while Sogou has a small team focusing on languages widely spoken in China, so their Cantonese support is better.

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

#70

Post by The_suffocated »

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.

> "...but I don't think the CCP is so crudely trying to eliminate languages."

Last time I checked, less than half of the population in Guangzhou knew how to speak Cantonese.

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