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

71–80 of 96 posts

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#71

Post by _xnmw »

mrweasel wrote: post #69

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…

Makes you wonder what limitations of our own language and culture are preventing us from inventing certain things?

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#72

Post by yorwba »

numpad0 wrote: post #67
rurban wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 workin…

Translation needs phonetic transcription to handle proper names. If there are words that may or may not be proper names depending on context, machine translation will guess the context wrong at least some of the time and phonetically transcribe what should be translated, or translate names that should be transcribed.

The problem also can also happen when translating from English, if you think about all the surnames that are occupations, or names like "bill" or "lily." Capitalization usually helps disambiguate, but there's title case and all caps and people who never capitalize anything...

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#73

Post by yongjik »

numpad0 wrote: post #61
kalleboo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"}, {…

I don't know where you got the idea of "under US influence", but mixed Korean/Chinese character writing was common in South Korea well into 1980s, long after Korea became its own country. For example, in 1987, the newly founded Hankyoreh newspaper made a splash by deliberately writing all articles in pure Korean script, which was not the norm until then.

Gradually more books and newspapers followed suit, because pretty much everybody found that writing everything in Korean letters actually make communication less ambiguous and easier to understand. If your phrase is ambiguous between whether someone's offering apples or apologies, then you just change the word or add additional context to make it clear which one is being offered. It's no different from how English speakers deal with bear/bear, tear/tear, arm/arm, ground/ground, and so on.

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#74

Post by omoikane »

mjklin wrote: post #4

No mention of the competing MingKwai typewriter of Lin Yutang, the famous popularizer of Chinese culture to the west. Apparently his prototype suffered an embarrassing failure at an investor meeting and couldn’t get off the ground. But the idea was good. Article here: https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-uncanny-keyboard/

Lin Yutang had a few patents related to this typewriter, I believe this is the main one:

https://patents.google.com/patent/US2613795A/

The idea of searching for characters via parts is similar to how Cangjie input method selects characters from radicals. I read somewhere that Cangjie input method was indeed inspired by Ming Kwai typewriter, but I can't find the citation for it.

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#75

Post by publicola1990 »

alexlur wrote: post #7
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

Thank God it didn’t happen.

The Vietnamese romanized their writing, they seems to be doing fine.

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#76

Post by iforgotpassword »

vunderba wrote: post #38
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

Uh... no. Bopomofo which is used in Taiwan is a phonetic script that is used as a popular IME. And simplification's only "arguable merit" is that it saves a fortune in ink at the expense of losing its historical roots. But guess what? We mostly use computers now. So great job Mao, now we have two competing standards. (Nod to XKCD). Unrelated but to those of us who started with 繁體字, simplified just looks ugly. (龙 vs 龍…

Sure traditional looks nicer, but holy fuck is writing it (by hand) ever annoying. When I asked friends who grew up with the traditional characters about it they said a lot of people use some form of simplification when taking notes or leaving messages for friends/family. People from mainland seem to only shorten words by omitting characters of longer words, if at all.

And about losing the historical roots, I guess if you're interested in it, the characters will always be there and accessible for you to study. I'd be interested how much the average Joe from Taiwan really remembers about random characters' roots, composition and meaning. I know much more people from the mainland, and among them are people who don't give shit, and those who can also write a lot of traditional characters and give lectures about the origin of meaning of some character and whatnot.

Also, since this is about computers after all, I've seen a study a while ago about from mainland where they tested how many mistakes people make writing less common characters. There was a bar chart that went down between 10 and 20ish, then went up a bit and started to go down again at around 30. It was speculated that people in school still have to write a lot by hand, and during/after college that stops and everything has been digital for a decade now so people just forget again, but folks old enough to have used pen and paper for a couple decades just had enough practice. I wonder if this effect would be more or less pronounced with traditional characters.

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#77

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

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.

Simplified Chinese characters are already difficult enough for foreigners to learn. Making them learn traditional characters would just be sadistic.

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#78

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

gumby wrote: post #49
alexlur wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Alphabets are much more flexible than the Chinese characters.

An alphabet can be adapted to basically any language. You just have to map the letters to the sounds, and you're pretty much done.

By contrast, the Chinese writing system is adapted very specifically to the properties of Chinese language. Every syllable in Chinese has a meaning (or set of meanings), so every character represents one meaning (or a few). English does not have that structure: words can have very arbitrary syllables that don't have any meaning on their own. Chinese characters encode a meaning plus a sound, which is often reflected in how they're composed (i.e., a character will often be composed of two simpler characters, one of which has the correct meaning and one of which has the correct sound). Chinese words do not change form: there's no conjugation, no plural form, etc. As a consequence, the writing system has no way to deal with things like conjugation.

I have no idea how one would even begin trying to adapt Chinese characters to write English. On the other hand, it's relatively easy to come up with a way to write Chinese in any alphabet.

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#79

Post by int_19h »

gumby wrote: post #49
alexlur wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

"Å" is just "O" stacked on top of "A" though. And "V" is in fact the OG Latin form ("U" is the newly introduced one).

But yeah, the whole notion is kinda silly. Most writing systems in the world are developed from very few originals. E.g. for most of Eurasia, the source is either Egyptian hieroglyphs or the Shang Oracle bone script.

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#80

Post by int_19h »

numpad0 wrote: post #61
kalleboo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"}, {…

Pure Hangul was used for a long time before then, just not in any kind of official capacity after Sejong. But e.g. most "women's literature" would be written in it.

And back when it was first introduced, it certainly did wonders for literacy. Although it should be noted that original Hangul was more phonemic wrt its contemporary Korean, and the letter shapes were a bit simpler as well.

Post reply on HN