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The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

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Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#81

Post by raincole »

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…

In an alternative history timeline it might be true.

In our timeline I highly doubt whether it was the main reason why general purpose computers didn't happen first in China or Japan.

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#82

Post by fjdjshsh »

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.

>it breaks ability for non-speakers to infer meanings

Not sure what you mean by this. Do you mean that it's less convenient for people that don't speak / read Chinese? Why would that be a relevant metric?

You may be missing that character standards have changed over time and that different writing styles (草书，行书) are implicitly simplifications. You can think of latin or Russian cursive as a simplification of the printed letters.

In practice, the phonetic component has been mangled / evolved over time, so simplification doesn't make things more or less difficult for students (be it 5 year old native speakers or 50 year old non native speakers).

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#83

Post by Vt71fcAqt7 »

rjh29 wrote: post #53
vunderba wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I feel like Japanese strikes the right balance, no ugly oversimplified characters but making common kanji easier to write for children (國→国、櫻→桜） For example 竜 is a fairly common simplification of 龍 and imo not nearly as ugly

Yeah except hiragana and especially katakana both look ugly though.

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#84

Post by inkyoto »

user982 wrote: post #30
Terr_ wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> information density of writing I feel like a proper comparison would not be number of characters, but a kind of pixel-budget, assuming both meet a certain reading speed and accuracy rate.

I was reading a Wikipedia page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Metal_Colossi ) and was struck by the difference in length of the Chinese quotes and translations. E.g.: 收天下兵, 聚之咸陽, 銷以為鍾鐻金人十二, 重各千石, 置廷宮中. 一法度衡石丈尺. 車同軌. 書同文字. was translated into He collected the weapons of All-Under-Heaven in Xianyang, and cast them into twelve bronze figures of the type of bell stands, each 1000 dan [about 30 tons] in weight, an…

Classical Chinese (Ancient or Old Chinese – multiple terms are used), the language the quote was written in that predates Middle Chinese and, by extension all modern Chinese languages, had a very different grammar with many features of it having all but disappeared from all Chinese languages. Classical Chinese texts are incomprehensible to a modern Chinese person who has not invested sufficient amounts of time and effort into completing Classical Chinese studies first.

There is a book, «Classical Chinese for everyone: a guide for absolute beginners» by Bryan W. van Norden that is easy to read and gives a gentle introduction into Classical Chinese.

The old grammar and vocabulary coupled with the Chinese style of writing metaphorically with an abundant application of allusions and with the same Chinese characters having multiple unrelated meanings, makes Ancient Chinese texts very terse and notoriously difficult to understand even for the educated Chinese people.

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#85

Post by alexlur »

publicola1990 wrote: post #75
alexlur wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank God it didn’t happen.

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

This isn’t factually correct. The French colonial administration romanized their writing and enforced chữ Quốc ngữ.

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#86

Post by chai2010 »

Very good article, like it.

Chinese characters are a type of pictographs that have some characteristics of QR codes. In fact, there is indeed a word retrieval method called four-corner number, which quickly maps Chinese character graphics to four numbers through some simple formulas, which is especially suitable for one-way encoding and retrieval. For example, the four-corner number of "龍" is coded as 0121, and the code of "兲" is 1080 (please refer to https://github.com/chai2010/im4corner).

In addition, Chinese characters are actually more important as hieroglyphic shapes. For example, we have a "凹语言" (Wa-lang https://github.com/wa-lang/wa/ ) designed for WebAssembly (WASM for short, WebAssembly => WASM => Wa), in which the Chinese characters "凹" and WASM The logo is very similar, and there was even a pronunciation of "wa" in the past.

After the popularization of computers, the function input method has been greatly improved, but there is still a lot of input resistance. For example, in programming, frequent switching between Chinese character names and English keywords brings a loss of input efficiency. As a programmer, I hope Chinese users can continue to pay attention to and improve these in the future.

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#87

Post by z2 »

rjh29 wrote: post #53
vunderba wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I feel like Japanese strikes the right balance, no ugly oversimplified characters but making common kanji easier to write for children (國→国、櫻→桜） For example 竜 is a fairly common simplification of 龍 and imo not nearly as ugly

There are some strange-looking ones too (圖-図、圓-円), but agree that overall it was lighter touch. I think all simplification projects have an inherent awkwardness in taking handwriting shorthand or cursive and trying to reformalize it back to print. In any case it's a shame that there was no coordination due to obvious geopolitical conflicts, that we're now left with 3 sets. It was easier last time, 2.2k years ago when some dude took over all places that wrote Chinese characters and forced a single way of writing :)

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#88

Post by numpad0 »

yorwba wrote: post #72
numpad0 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

It's not just proper nouns. Korean MT seem to routinely "de-synchronize" into wonbonhangugeotegseuteububun mid-sentence and sometimes comes back in sync, sometime stays out of sync until the end of the sentence. it happens way more often than average with the Korean language.

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#89

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

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…

> simplified just looks ugly

I prefer simplified for the aesthetics alone. Traditional is cringe and ugly in typed form.

Re: The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

#90

Post by numpad0 »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #77
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.

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

Traditional characters is built on common parts for pronunciation and meaning cues. Simplified removed that so IMO it compresses worse and therefore harder. It's visually less dense, but, so what.
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