A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine
wired.com
wired.com
Today, input methods were dominated by pronunciation based one like Pinyin. The heuristics based "smart" Pinyin input methods was actually invented by a non-tech folk and eventually hired by a then-large Internet company called Sogou, it was quite novel for the input method to suggest word pairs like a search engine with most frequent used ones readily type-able. Some later versions even include crazy macros like the current timestamp, emojis, or even read your contact list (!!) for quicker name & address suggestions.
Both generally use Traditional instead of Simplified characters and HK's Cantonese has an underused pinyin equivalent, but that isn't a cause. Other systems became prevalent first, and stuck.
> Both generally use Traditional instead of Simplified
That doesn't impact the human side of the IME. It's just different output for the same input. And the input (Mandarin pronunciation) is the same for mainland and Taiwan.
Stuff like that occasionally trips me up when switching between pinyin and zhuyin.
tl;dr Zhuyin and and Taiwanese kana were developed during approximately the same time, but separately, and for separate languages.
I wouldn't say that's true. It's phonetic, sure, but it relates much more closely to the syllable structure than Pinyin does.
Simple example: 南, Pinyin: nán, Zhuyin: ㄋㄢˊ
In Pinyin, we use the same letter "n" in initial and final position. In Zhuyin, the word is composed of two letters, ㄋ （initial n), and ㄢ (final an). The only time that ㄢ begins a syllable is when it's the whole syllable, e.g. 安, ㄢ, "ān"
I still remember entering Chinese using a pinyin T9 method on my Nokia handset in 2002. Pinyin on a 0-9 number pad, fun times.
The least-bad Android keyboard I've ever used is the HTC keyboard, since it had a setting to only learn words I explicitly told it to remember.
It's very different than alphabetical languages. Chinese texts (Han scripts) were much different than the the spoken language, it's like a bytecode or some serialization format. There are cases where verbal vocabulary not "serializable" in Chinese characters (not orthographically at least)
I know some overseas Chinese people who (not being raised in China) never learned pinyin and prefer the stroke method. Some of the even prefer drawing the strokes by hand (instead of choosing from the keyboard).
Any Chinese word, I've ever learned, I can only input using pinyin. The stroke method adds so much more mental overhead.
I knew someone who used wubi in preference to pinyin input. She grew up in Guangzhou until age 16, so it wasn't an issue of not learning pinyin. The problem, for her, was that she had no way to know the correct pinyin for a character, since she didn't distinguish between a bunch of sounds that are distinct in pinyin.
> Any Chinese word, I've ever learned, I can only input using pinyin. The stroke method adds so much more mental overhead.
If you were capable of writing by hand, this wouldn't be true.
Yes. They aren't even related ideas. You can easily understand that a distinction exists despite the fact that you, personally, can't hear it. Is there a distinction between not understanding the RGB model and being colorblind?
> From your description it sounds like your friend being more comfortable in Cantonese than Mandarin.
She was fully fluent in Mandarin. Just Cantonese-accented Mandarin. Mandarin is the language of instruction everywhere in China; it isn't possible not to speak it.
The other great thing about it is if you remember the pronunciation of a word but forget the tone and/or character, it’s usually automatically corrected.
The nicer thing is they you can type timeless pinyin and then pick the characters you actually meant, useful if you can sort of recognize what you want to say.
However it could be explained by the fact predictive typing on iOS is quite poor. Often a wrong letter in a word need to be corrected and the next predicted word (and it's conjugation; I'm speaking of French and English input) is often wrong. It may not be noticeable for someone who never used another keyboard, but as a former Windows Phone user the difference is very easy to see. The WP prediction was mind blowing and I could indeed write long sentences in French just by typing a few letter and using one of the prediction candidates.
This bit is really interesting. This is one of the motivations for an open source Chinese IME framework called RIME: https://rime.im There are configurations available for a number of dialects like Suzhou or Shanghai dialects so that users who prefer those languages don’t have to use Mandarin/putonghua pinyin.
My father-in-law (now deceased) was similarly branded and nearly died while spending several years in a labor camp. He was forbidden to work upon his release, and banished to the countryside along with his family. Decades later, he received a formal apology from the CCP, but no compensation.
Apparently some dialects of Korean are still tonal.
So for example analytic languages tend to lack things like complex verb conjugation systems and instead use context or additional words to mark information about the time, subject, object, etc. of a verb.
English for example is usually considered fairly analytic. While there are inflections, they tend to be a lot simpler than many other languages.
What a weird wish. Does Hangul even have ways to write the in-between consonants in Thai like dt or bp? Does Hangul even have the Thai vowel sound ื (which certainly has no unambiguous way to be written in English)? And then what about tones? Tones in Thai are not written explicitly, but computed based on a number of factors including character classes, length of vowel sound (does Hangul have a way to indicate short or long vowels?), end-of-syllable sound, and tone mark. If you wrote Thai in Hangul, how would you pay homage to loan words from Pali/Sanskrit? Again, just... what a weird wish!
Cangjie is at least still used a little bit.
I am not sure what to make of the information that is given. Does it imply he was treated poorly, even tortured, until 1991 when he relented?
I have this sense that touch screens and the smartphones must have had an outsized impact on societies with character based languages, with prediction making it orders of magnitude easier to enter text. Additionally, the compact nature of Chinese means you can fit a ton more info onto a screen AND there's no need for icons, as the entire written language is basically icons. That means learning how to use apps and menus is marginally easier.
Please correct me if this is a wrong assumption.
That is one way characters and words can be ordered. Another is pinyin order.
> And Pinyin is mind boggling to me.
It’s the English alphabet without “v”. What’s mind boggling about it?
> I have this sense that touch screens and the smartphones must have had an outsized impact on societies with character based languages, with prediction making it orders of magnitude easier to enter text.
IMHO, computers had the outsized impact on printing and publishing in general.
I think smartphones and touch screens just built on that.
The prediction stuff is nice, but I don’t think it had as big of an impact as computer text in general. Big for sure, but not as big. I guess it depends on the evaluation heuristics.
> Chinese means you can fit a ton more info onto a screen
Yes. Chinese can be very information dense. It feels faster to read than English, and I’m a fast reader in English.
> AND there's no need for icons, as the entire written language is basically icons.
Hmmm… I’m not sure I would frame it that way. The characters are logograms. Icons are ideograms. They are different.
> That means learning how to use apps and menus is marginally easier.
Definitely not the case at all in my experience.
Just to be clear, the concept of Pinyin isn't bewildering, it's the daily use of it. Imagine the reverse, having to type in a completely different character set in order to produce Latin characters. It's amazing that it works.
Like using 0s and 1s?
It’s not really that tough.
PRC kids learn pinyin before characters. It’s just easier that way for a number of reasons.
Also, PRC kids study English. Iirc, public education starts English in 3rd grade. Parents often start their kids earlier.
Pinyin is not particularly “foreign” in China.
Shortly afterwards, Just began selling the Japanese word processor, Ichitaro. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichitaro_(word_processor)
Of course, not everyone agrees with these details;-)
This was a highly educated pioneer who studied in the West and was recruited in the West but chose to go help his country and was initially rewarded with a very prestigious and secure job and also deserved --to then get caught up in the hong weibing purges. This is the lesson of ideology -it goes astray fast. Lukily for him, he didn't end up beaten to a pulp and dead in a semi anonymous lynching[1] in a no-name square.
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/07/mao-little-gen...
I don't mean that it isn't exciting, but something can be both exciting, in the sense that it excites strong feelings, and boring, in the sense that it doesn't contain any new information. Rhetoric like "beaten to a pulp and dead in a semi anonymous lynching in a no-name square" is an excellent example of what I mean: it's highly exciting and at the same time not intellectually interesting.
The larger generic topics are like black holes that suck in inquisitive spaceships (us!) that happen to veer nearby (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). It takes a certain awareness to remember this, so that we can stick to more interesting conversation. Certainly the discovery of how to mechanize the processing of Chinese characters is much more interesting than "the lesson of ideology"—at least in HN's sense of the word "interesting".
That's why we have this rule in the site guidelines. If you'd please review them, we'd appreciate it: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Past explanations: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
The cultural revolution is a mystery to me just as much as anything else on HN, perhaps more so because it was about people, which are more complex and interesting than tech. The link to the article was useful.
I also understand it's difficult to keep a comment on politics, even when it's not a "generic ideological tangent", from prompting a mess, and respect your inteventions to avoid the messes.
But this was not a generic tangent.
Now watch it turn into a political flamewar and prove you right haha. I mean, you do generally know what you're doing. It was just the template "generic ideological tangent" that got me going, it wasn't at all generic or a tangent... it still might result in a mess though! We'll see!
From how the article is written (although admittedly I only skimmed it), it seems imprisonment didn't have a huge effect on his motivation to solve the problem.
While I can't say I'd be as chipper after being jailed for a year, I can certainly understand the allure of attacking a hard problem with tenacity.
He may have also separated the party from the people he interacted with everyday. In fact, I'd imagine being imprisoned built a lot of comradory with his fellow inmates.
(Would love for someone else more knowledgeable to chime in, I just wanted to start the conversation)
or maybe he just had an intellectual interest in the problem and wanted to solve it no matter what. who knows, but the world is better off for it
The majority of China's post-Cultural Revolution leaders had themselves been at least purged, but often also imprisoned and even tortured during that period. For example Deng Xiaoping had been purged and his son left permanently paralyzed (after a failed suicide attempt due to persecution) after the two became targets during the Cultural Revolution.
Basically anyone who had any sort of political power, educational attainment, or wealth was a target during the Cultural Revolution (a mildly difficult challenge is to find any Chinese figure of note who wasn't Mao who came of age before the Cultural Revolution and wasn't at least denounced. It's possible, but not as trivial as one might think).
The persecution was also often bottom-up, rather than top-down. If you had any attainment or pre-Cultural Revolution power at all, you were much more likely to be beaten, strung up, and imprisoned by local teenage Red Guards often acting of their own accord than the central government.
And so as a result there wasn't as much enmity towards the post-Cultural Revolution government by people who had suffered during the Cultural Revolution because often they had suffered together.