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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: 5, Interesting) by fyngyrz on Thursday August 01 2019, @04:06PM (7 children)

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Thursday August 01 2019, @04:06PM (#874083) Journal

    that doesn't make a bigger tree better.

    As someone who has more than a passing familiarity with both modern and traditional Chinese character reading and writing, lemme tell you, the Chinese character tree is a freaking mess.

    The number of drag-along meanings that are highly obscure, indirect, and/or downright lost-in-time in even the small subset that your average Chinese has to wrap their head around is astonishing. Most Chinese don't know the 50k or so characters that comprise the set in a good Chinese dictionary, only a fraction of those; and as a result, most of the predictive software they use tends to devolve their writings into mediocrity (even if a prediction is right, they don't actually know what it means, so they choose a different one.)

    They decided to abandon the traditional character group for a "simplified" one, mainly to reduce stroke count when hand-writing the characters. Hand-writing is now fading into obscurity (and not just in Chinese) and it is looking more and more like that was a bad decision WRT keeping the culturally relative links that tie to the older set. If they aren't — and it really appears that they aren't — they'd be much better off if they could revamp the whole thing with new characters that are considerably more direct. But that's hard because retraining everyone? Oy.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Thursday August 01 2019, @07:03PM (2 children)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Thursday August 01 2019, @07:03PM (#874185) Homepage
    Thank you for confirming my prejudice. I know the Korean view on traditional Chinese - the inventor of Hangul basically said Chinese was unlearnable, and came up with a syllabic replacement, much more sane. And that was just for the subset of the script that was relevant for Korean. I've seen Koreans composing their syllables on a small mobile phone keyboard, and it looks remarkably efficient - perhaps even more than qwerty typing. However, I don't know enough Korean to know the information density of those strings of syllables.

    From all I've learnt about written, spoken, and typed Chinese, it seems to have no properties that make it even vaguely desirable for use in any of those media (it's terrible on a noisy line, for example). However, at least the photos of old Chinese typewriters were good for a belly laugh. Some keys are good, therefore more keys are better, eh?
    --
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    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday August 01 2019, @09:09PM

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 01 2019, @09:09PM (#874259) Journal

      old Chinese typewriters

      If not for the Google search, I never would have thought a Chinese typewriter is an actual thing.

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    • (Score: 2) by hwertz on Friday August 02 2019, @06:16AM

      by hwertz (8141) on Friday August 02 2019, @06:16AM (#874498)

      Korean has a fairly small set of consonant and vowel characters (and a few accent marks, there's 24-40 depending on how they are counted); they are combined usually 2 or 3 characters into a single symbol (usually by just stacking the symbols on top of each other), with each symbol representing one syllable.

      I don't know if the Korean keyboard is more efficient or not; probably, I doubt English for example can average 3 characters per syllable. In terms of reading back a text, it definitely won't average 1 symbol per syllable.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @07:35PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @07:35PM (#874201)

    I made an attempt to learn Chinese many years ago.

    It reminded me of the Star Trek episode, Darmok and Jilad (spelling may be incorrect.)

    It felt like Chinese was a language of metaphors. Without a lifetime of cultural background and symbolism, true meanings are hopelessly lost.

    The specificity of western languages seem like a huge advantage over the suggestiveness of Chinese when it comes to engineering and science. And the opposite when it comes to poetry and literature. But then, I know nothing of Chinese literature.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 04 2019, @07:18PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 04 2019, @07:18PM (#875630)

      How did you set your expectations? Is that why Chinese never set well with you? The set of characters is too large, or the meaning you set on was too often in the wrong set?

      "The word with the most meanings in English is the verb 'set', with 430 senses listed in the Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, published in 1989. The word commands the longest entry in the dictionary at 60,000 words, or 326,000 characters."

  • (Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Thursday August 01 2019, @08:39PM

    by Rupert Pupnick (7277) on Thursday August 01 2019, @08:39PM (#874229) Journal

    I have a very basic working knowledge of Chinese and agree with all of your points and some others made earlier by FatPhil.

    Speaking of trees, ever tried to look up a character in a print edition of a Chinese dictionary? Major sorting issue.

    Also, to my aged Western ear, many Chinese consonants like Pinyin s, sh and x can be difficult to distinguish if you are thinking about using spoken Chinese for data entry, plus you have tones, and generally more contextual dependency. On the other hand, with enough processing power for ML based language processing maybe those things aren’t a big deal.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 03 2019, @02:30PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 03 2019, @02:30PM (#875143)

    Monkeybutt!