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posted by chromas on Thursday August 01 2019, @12:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the everyone-loves-autocomplete dept.

Submitted via IRC for Sulla

On a bright fall morning at Stanford, Tom Mullaney is telling me what's wrong with QWERTY keyboards. Mullaney is not a technologist, nor is he one of those Dvorak keyboard enthusiasts. He's a historian of modern China and we're perusing his exhibit of Chinese typewriters and keyboards, the curation of which has led Mullaney to the conclusion that China is rising ahead technologically while the West falls behind, clinging to its QWERTY keyboard.

Now this was and still is an unusual view because Chinese—with its 75,000 individual characters rather than an alphabet—had historically been the language considered incompatible with modern technology. How do you send a telegram or use a typewriter with all those characters? How do you even communicate with the modern world? If you're a Cambridge-educated classicist enamored with the Greeks, you might just conclude Chinese script is "archaic." Long live the alphabet.

But, Mullaney argues, the invention of the computer could turn China's enormous catalog of characters into an advantage.

His argument is [...] about our relationship to computers, not just as physical objects but as conduits to intangible software. Typing English on a QWERTY computer keyboard, he says, "is about the most basic rudimentary way you can use a keyboard." You press the "a" key and "a" appears on your screen. "It doesn't make use of a computer's processing power and memory and the cheapening thereof." Type "a" on a QWERTY keyboard hooked up to a Chinese computer, on the other hand, and the computer is off anticipating the next characters. Typing in Chinese requires mediation from a layer of software that is obvious to the user.

[...] The Chinese way of inputting text—the software-mediated way—will win out, says Mullaney. Actually, it's already won out. Our mobile phones now have predictive text and autocomplete. It took the constraint of mobile to get Westerners to realize the limits of the simple what-you-type-is-what-you-get keyboard. But even then, you could only get Americans to go so far.

Read more at The Atlantic.


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  • (Score: 2) by shortscreen on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:15PM (3 children)

    by shortscreen (2252) on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:15PM (#873990) Journal

    The non-advantage of having to rely on software to guess what you meant to type has already been addressed. But there is one potential use case for Chinese characters that hasn't been explored much outside Asia. That is for the product and UI designers who insist on labeling everything with cryptic little pictures instead of words. Instead of a button with a black circle with a dot inside it, maybe we could have a 幅 button, which at least some portion of the world's population would be able to infer the meaning of, and the rest might be able to learn a thing which then transfers to another context.

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:52PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:52PM (#874011)

    The makers of a comic decided to use arabic for some text quite possibly to make it look otherworldly or some crap.
    How does one find out what these characters mean? If they mean anything.

    I copied that one: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=幅 [duckduckgo.com]
    but, hey, that doesn't help.

    Is it "breadth range width"?

    • (Score: 2) by shortscreen on Thursday August 01 2019, @11:37PM (1 child)

      by shortscreen (2252) on Thursday August 01 2019, @11:37PM (#874358) Journal

      Is it "breadth range width"?

      That, or whatever a black circle with a dot in it means.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @09:14AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @09:14AM (#874533)

        Okay so that is a sai to the left of a table with a pot with a lid.
        So let's translate

        Sai = killing or penetration or death
        Table = storage or bench space or furniture
        Pot = food or meal or water
        Lid = covering or disk to throw

        So this symbol 幅 means "killing food on your table" meaning "home cooked meal"

        I can so Do This!

        Next! Let's do another one!