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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Hiragana is used for phonetically spelling Japanese words, Katakana is used for phonetically spelling foreign words.

For instance there is the popular anime titled “Sailor Moon” which is written in Katakana like セーラームーン and stranger still the second season is called “Sailor Moon R” (I think for “return”) and is written セーラームーン R.

My understanding is that Bopomofo never caught on particularly well

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo

it is still used in education in Taiwan but in Taiwan, the mainland and the rest of the sinosphere people who want to spell out Chinese words are more likely to use Pinyin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin

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I feel like bopomofo and pinyin don't serve the same purpose as katakana.

If Chinese folks want to write Churchill, they might write:

A) Churchill

B) 丘吉尔

But they will never write:

C) Qiūjí'ěr (the pinyin for B)

I've never seen an adult Chinese use pinyin for anything other than typing (as an input method for Chinese characters).

The purpose of bopomofo was, historically, to standardize Mandarin across the whole China (ROC, not PROC). It was not invented to spell foregin words.

I understand it they incorporate foreign words by matching up with Chinese characters bearing the matching syllables with some preference for preserving semantics, repetition, and an implied semantic anyway that is in the consciousness of the reader for either the native or foreign word: it must matter that a person’s name is spelled “stream creek creek” but in the end it is best kept in 中文.

This is the modern usage of hiragana and katakana.

Earlier, e.g. in the books written a few hundred years ago, hiragana was used like today, i.e. inlined with kanji, for writing verb and adjective terminations or various grammatical particles, but katakana was used as furigana, for showing the pronunciation of the more seldom used or ambiguous kanji, especially when the Chinese reading was used for those kanji.

The use of katakana for the writing of foreign words has developed from its use for writing the approximate pronunciation of Chinese words.

The writing reform enforced after WWII has introduced significant changes in the use of hiragana and in the correspondences between kanji and hiragana (and also many kanji have been substituted with simplified variants), so reading a pre-war book can be challenging for someone familiar only with modern Japanese.

Unless things have changed in the last 15 years, when I lived there most of my Taiwanese peers used bopomofo aka 注音 as their primary IME for smartphones / laptops / etc.

The few English ex-pats that I knew used the 搜狗 software which defaults to pinyin I think.

I mostly used pinyin on my laptop and bopomofo on my phone (old model that didn't support pinyin) which was mildly annoying. I constantly got it confused with my Japanese since I also read hiragana/katakana and some of the symbols are highly similar.

This is still mostly true. Kids books also have bopomofo rubies, like the kana rubies in Japanese. And occasionally you'll see bopomofo as a typographic choice to represent a sound that feels more natural in Taiwanese amidst an otherwise Mandarin sentence.

This is just my personal experience, but I think the big change in the past 15 years isn't Bopomofo -> Pinyin, but rather Wade Giles -> Pinyin. Bopomofo seems equally prevalent, but the Wade Giles romanizations on street signs have begin to get replaced with Pinyin for the sake of non-native speakers who are almost certainly more familiar with Pinyin than WG.

Ah, my source was a co-worker from Hong Kong, which is apparently a stronghold of Bopomofo. A little ironic that the more westernized island would prefer non-romanized spelling... politics with the mainland I guess. He mentioned Pinyin when talking about input methods though.

People from Hong Kong tend to use Cangjie or the number pad when entering Chinese characters. Pinyin is only really used on the mainland.

Very few people from Hong Kong know bopomofo. Your coworker is an exception.

He was definitely an exceptional and somewhat eccentric person, but it's probably my recollection that's muddled. He gave a presentation on Chinese character sets and encodings like big5 vs gb2312 vs unicode (we were an antispam shop, so very useful info) and also covered input methods, mentioning bopomofo and pinyin. The bopomofo topic segued into the four tones of Mandarin, so we spent the day saying "mā má mǎ mà" a lot, probably sounding like a Chinese kindergarten :)

Or romance

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