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

61–70 of 96 posts

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#61

Post by numpad0 »

kalleboo wrote: post #56
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. How did that work out for Korea when they switched to Hangul?

Prewar Korean written script used Japanese style Kanji for nouns intermeshed between Hangul phonetics. Postwar, under US influence they transitioned into all-Hangul phonetic language, but IMO it looks a big regression in their communication ability due to resulting arrays of pure homonyms.

They rely purely on context to distinguish {"apples", "apologies"}, {"mayor", "market"}, {"stomach", "ship", "pear", "double"}, {"acting", "delays", "smoke"} so on and so forth if what I'm scrolling is right. There's no tonal or character distinction. That surely isn't great.

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#62

Post by Terr_ »

mook wrote: post #57
cwilby wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-wor…

Don't forget all the abbreviation. "超市", supermarket, is abbreviated from "超級", super, and "市場", market. The equivalent in English would be "sup-mark" or something along those lines. (Or in Japanese, just "super".)

Since we're now talking about verbal rather than written:

> No matter how fast or slow, how simple or complex, each language gravitated toward an average rate of 39.15 bits per second, they report today in Science Advances.

-- https://www.science.org/content/article/human-speech-may-hav...

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#63

Post by numpad0 »

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…

GP is making understandable misunderstanding due to how the three Far East countries are presented in the world at large, that there are three countries in Asia that practically touches each others, just like Germany is with Belgium and Netherlands in Europe.

Tokyo from Beijing(2000km/1200mi) is about as far out as Paris to Kyiv. Far East countries are also separated by seas, like Mediterranean countries across the sea. I doubt a lot of Parisians have meaningful ideas of "basically Latin" Ukrainian any way or form, or Italians with Tunisian, but there's such false instinct that forms out of above-mentioned presentation that those Asians are rather next door neighbors.

That and mistaking personal difficulties and inefficiencies associated with understanding languages in non-native manners as inferiority of the foreign one.

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#64

Post by rurban »

numpad0 wrote: post #50
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

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.

Worked out excellent for Korean (Hangul) though. Also English.

Both massive wins

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#65

Post by xanderlewis »

rjh29 wrote: post #54
xanderlewis wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure how much evidence there is for that either — a Chinese friend couldn’t believe that I could just look at a paragraph of English and instantly know roughly what it was about; she, despite her fluency in written English, thought only Chinese characters would allow for such rapid comprehension. It’s certainly denser, though. And I agree about the front-loading of learning. It’s like learning vi. An absolute…

I don't think (for me) chinese or english reading is particularly different. In both cases you're scanning whole blocks (words, phrases) at a time. Sometimes I feel like I read Chinese slower purely because of how dense it is.

Yeah. That was pretty much my point — no native speaker is even looking at each letter (or even each word), wnlch js wzy yxu cyn upigemqand thws siktsmce wjtdut mnrh of a ptublim. Each word is its own shape, much like how Chinese speakers aren’t looking at each stroke.

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#66

Post by mchaver »

xanderlewis wrote: post #65
rjh29 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think (for me) chinese or english reading is particularly different. In both cases you're scanning whole blocks (words, phrases) at a time. Sometimes I feel like I read Chinese slower purely because of how dense it is.

Yeah. That was pretty much my point — no native speaker is even looking at each letter (or even each word), wnlch js wzy yxu cyn upigemqand thws siktsmce wjtdut mnrh of a ptublim. Each word is its own shape, much like how Chinese speakers aren’t looking at each stroke.

Much like in English you can pull out lots of vowels and still read the text, you can cover up the about bottom 40% of the characters in a sentence and still read it.

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#67

Post by numpad0 »

rurban wrote: post #64
numpad0 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Worked out excellent for Korean (Hangul) though. Also English. Both massive wins

I don't think it did for Korean, though I need input from speakers to be sure. From my experience, Korean MT routinely stops halfway through inputs and dumps nonsensical phonetic transcripts, likely from failing to identify words. I suspect they were just being complaisant to American influence in postwar years. Computers failing to even isolate and match words in this day and age is not a sign of an excellent working script.

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#68

Post by surrTurr »

geraldwhen wrote: post #42

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.

i think he meant difficult in the sense that it consists of many strokes, not in the sense how difficult it is to remember. however, one could argue that there are many other, more complex to write, kanji than 鷹

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#69

Post by mrweasel »

It interesting to consider that both Japan and China might have been prevent from ever being first with general purpose computers. ASCII, and other encoding schemes, only needed to make provisions for less than 200 characters, making it possible to implement with the limited storage and memory available to early computers. The shear amount of characters in some languages, like Chinese may have served as a distraction or roadblock for early computers in the those countries.

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#70

Post by [deleted] »

xanderlewis wrote: post #65
rjh29 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think (for me) chinese or english reading is particularly different. In both cases you're scanning whole blocks (words, phrases) at a time. Sometimes I feel like I read Chinese slower purely because of how dense it is.

Yeah. That was pretty much my point — no native speaker is even looking at each letter (or even each word), wnlch js wzy yxu cyn upigemqand thws siktsmce wjtdut mnrh of a ptublim. Each word is its own shape, much like how Chinese speakers aren’t looking at each stroke.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN