Apple’s new keyboard feature in iOS 15 is insult to Cantonese speaking community • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by 07d046 » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 9:43 AM UTC

chemmail wrote: post #56

07d046 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As far as I know, there is a gradual trend to push Mandarin at the expense of Cantonese, and there is reason for concern, but I doubt there's a connection between this and Apple's decision here. (There's a reason I said "crudely".)

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

#72

Post by ksec » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 9:44 AM UTC

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.

Probably true. Half of the teens in the region dont speak the language anymore. So CCP is admittedly quite effective at it. Although Cantonese Voice recognition still works.

And somehow Apple Arcade still not available in HK and Mainland China?

Edit: Actually this brings back memory. About twenty+ years ago I made an English to Cantonese Translation with Romanization Input Method on Windows and later on Mac using VanillaInput / OpenVanilla so I could use it for IRC and ICQ. At the time voice recognition of anything was sci-fi stuff. Dragon speech recognition sucks no matter how much training time you give it. Twenty years later we are close to real time on devices speech recognition.

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

#73

Post by elros » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 9:44 AM UTC

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.

I think the comparison made by the author is unfortunate because of their lack of context of Russian transliteration. I speak Chinese and have some Russian language understanding so I feel I can give a better explanation:

Imagine you had no Cyrillic keyboard and had to instead type in transliteration. So that if you want to obtain the following sentence:

Все люди рождаются свободными и равными в своем достоинстве и правах.

You'd have to type this instead:

Vse lyudi rozhdayutsya svobodnymi i ravnymi v svoyem dostoinstve i pravakh.

Not so bad, millions of people do it every day. However, this only works because the transliteration system is based on mapping common values of the Latin alphabet into Russian. So the cognitive distance is not so bad.

Now, let's imagine instead, that you'd be forced to use a transliteration that was originally used based on mapping English language pronounciation values, such that you'd have to type something like:

Vsay lyoodee rogedahyootseea svoughboughdnuhmee ee rahvnuhmee v svohyam doughstougheenstvay ee prahvahch.

That's closer to the idea of what the typing of Cantonese in Pinyin instead of Jyutping would feel like.

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

#74

Post by MagnumOpus » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 9:48 AM UTC

pdpi wrote: post #54

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…

There is no way to type Hungarian double acute accents on US International or UK Extended keyboards. You have to use workarounds like copy/paste, Alt-codes, or substitution macros.

(Also, there is no double acute a in Hungarian, only o and u.)

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

#75

Post by raverbashing » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 9:54 AM UTC

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?

But you can still type German or Cantonese with a specific keyboard/phonetic system right?

This is on top of what exists.

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

#76

Post by YouthfulMarxism » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 9:55 AM UTC

creshal wrote: post #26

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.

[flagged]

We need to seriously discuss your use of a g-word. One moment, i need to crusade my kitchen to genocide a pancake or two.

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

#77

Post by throwaway2037 » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 9:57 AM UTC

The_suffocated wrote: post #70

07d046 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't read this as me trying to defend CCP's policy to discourage non-Mandarin languages in China: What you wrote is somewhat misleading to readers not familiar with the region. There has been massive internal migration to Guangdong province in the last 30 years. These migrants speak Cantonese at varying levels. It would be more accurate to make a comment about multi-generation Guangdong residents and their knowledge of Cantonese. (If you want to discuss Shenzhen, there is virtually zero Cantonese used there, because it was only a fishing village with ~25k people when it was opened for trade. It is nearly 100% internal migrants -- mostly from outside Guangdong province.)

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

#78

Post by pdpi » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 9:58 AM UTC

MagnumOpus wrote: post #74

pdpi wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is no way to type Hungarian double acute accents on US International or UK Extended keyboards. You have to use workarounds like copy/paste, Alt-codes, or substitution macros. (Also, there is no double acute a in Hungarian, only o and u.)

Thanks for the correction. I knew Hungarian used double acutes in some vowels, and should've looked up which ones instead of picking one at random.

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

#79

Post by throwaway2037 » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 10:03 AM UTC

elros wrote: post #73

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.

I think the comparison made by the author is unfortunate because of their lack of context of Russian transliteration. I speak Chinese and have some Russian language understanding so I feel I can give a better explanation: Imagine you had no Cyrillic keyboard and had to instead type in transliteration. So that if you want to obtain the following sentence: Все люди рождаются свободными и равными в своем достоинстве и п…

This is a very good post!

Related: I had a Bulgarian co-worker years ago. She said growing up, there was wide-spread use of both Cyrillic and Roman characters for Bulgarian language. She said she was always able to express herself using either character set. However, I don't know anything about the cultural context of Russian. Naively, I assume it is strictly Cyrillic. It would be nice if some native Russian speakers can comment about transliteration systems used on PCs.

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

#80

Post by dathinab » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 10:05 AM UTC

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.

The article is about the software layout, not the physical layout as far as I can tell.

And people "typing non-English languages on a english keyboard" generally use a software layout native to their language on a physical english layout.

Wrt. Europe the differences between languages are sometimes not that big (EDIT: in their alphabet), so it's not uncommon to have some form of "internationalized layout" which contains all english letters + many common non English letters (e.g. äöüß for German and similar). Still it's called an international layout not a english layout with support for English dialects like German...