Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

I've visited all the links and honestly still don't have the slightest idea what this input method does, or exactly what problem it's trying to solve, or why it's a good solution to the problem. I found the video [1] but it has no audio or explanations at all.

I also don't understand why you'd want phonetic input methods, rather than wanting to input your desired character directly. For languages like Chinese I understand because there are thousands of characters, but aren't most or all African writing systems based on small alphabets? I shudder to think of having to learn to input English phonetically.

So if you're looking for opinions, my first one is that your pages need to do a better job at explaining what current problems are (with multiple clear examples for each), where current solutions fail (with clear examples of how), and how your solution is different and better (again, with clear examples).

Good luck!

[1] https://github.com/pythonbrad/afrim-keyboard/?tab=readme-ov-...

> aren't most or all African writing systems based on small alphabets?

well, perhaps the most famous african writing system has a fairly large inventory of over 1000 characters, but it hasn't been widely used for about 2000 years due to religious persecution

the writing systems that are most widely used in africa are the latin alphabet and the arabic abjad, but as i tiresomely repeat every time the subject comes up, africa is immensely diverse, to the point that generalizations about africa are only slightly more useful than generalizations about non-elephant mammals

> well, perhaps the most famous african writing system has a fairly large inventory of over 1000 characters, but it hasn't been widely used for about 2000 years due to religious persecution

Which is ...?

I believe they're referring to hieroglyphics, although I didn't know the story about religious persecution and would be interested in some context there.

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

> Where the pagan religion of the Graeco-Roman world accepted the influence and integration of native Egyptian deities and practices into its tradition, Christianity was not nearly as accepting. The strict monotheism of the latter was in stark opposition to the freeform syncretism of paganism. Local Christians engaged in campaigns of proselytism and iconoclasm that contributed even more to the erosion of traditional religion. In AD 333, the number of Egyptian bishops is estimated to be just under 100; the Christianisation of the Roman Empire itself, and edicts by Christian emperors in the third and fourth centuries AD compounded the decline, and the last known inscription[16] in hieroglyphics (regarded by some as a symbol of the decline of the religion itself due to their close ties) dates from AD 394, known as the Graffito of Esmet-Akhom. It is located at the temple of Isis on the island of Philae, in Upper Egypt believed to be one of the final remaining places of worship of native Egyptian religion.[17] By this time, Egyptian religion was largely confined to the south of the country and to the distant, isolated Siwa Oasis in the west.[18] This century also saw significant expansion of institutionalised Christianity into Egypt, but adherence to the old religion on a smaller, more local scale was still prevalent.[19] Philae is also the site of the final demotic inscription, dating to AD 452. The temple was closed in AD 553 by Byzantine emperor Justinian I,[20] who ruled from 527 to 565. As official temples fell into disrepair, and religious structures across Egypt declined, the religion gradually faded away.[21]

> I also don't understand why you'd want phonetic input methods

I'm from Morocco, and most people here (myself included) are accustomed to typing on an AZERTY (or QWERTY) keyboard. Typing in Arabic using a standard keyboard layout can be quite cumbersome and slow for us (Most people never took the time to learn it), using latin alphabet for us is just more practical, and doesn't require you to learn a new way to type.

In our daily communication, when we text, whether with friends or family, we often switch between English, French, or Moroccan dialects. When writing in Moroccan dialect, we frequently use a phonetic system (read in french way) that combines the Latin alphabet with numbers to represent specific sounds or letters that don’t have a direct equivalent in the Latin script.

For example:

    ق is replaced by "q"
    ع is replaced by "3"
    خ is replaced by "5" (though "kh" is more common)
    غ is replaced by "4" (or "gh")
    The rest is just a 1 to 1 conversion to how the letter sounds in french

Example phrase :

Bro, I woke up and had a sick breakfast.

Sat, 3ad fe9t o drabt wa7d ftor khatir.

Really? That’s surprising to me. The Arabic keyboard layout is very simple to learn, and people in the Eastern Arabic-speaking world (Egypt, Jordan, etc.) seem to use it pretty universally. Obviously people write online with the “chat alphabet,” but I’ve never heard of anyone in the Levant actually using it to input Arabic characters.

The existence of direct keyboard layouts doesn't always imply that they would be popular though. I think this happens fairly regularly around the world and the only major exception I'm aware of is Korean where no phonetic input methods were widespread at any moment.

It’s also related to the the layout of the first phone’s keyboards, where you had to type up to three times to select a letter ( it also was latin characters only)

Korean is phonetic.

Not exactly, though. And Japanese kana should be phonetic enough that a direct input method should be used for kana, but the dominant input method there is Romaji, i.e. typing Latin characters to get both kana and kanji. So that is not a defining factor.

Yeah, it's the same in Algeria and Tunisa. I was working with a derja tutor for a while and on day one she gave me the phonetic map like the parent comment pointed out, as it's ubiquitous.

very interesting approach! in south asia, due to similar exposure to tech (through qwerty), we too use a phonetic approach, but without touching the visual aspect of the script.

it gets a little ambiguous, however, because we have ~2x the symbols that latin allows (before you get into accents). the workaround is to combine multiple symbols to replicate the phonetic sound the target character is meant to capture.

curious to see if the tooling can be combined to use across languages that can work with similar approach as the OP.

this was the inspiration for http://canonical.org/~kragen/alphanumerenglish, in which i would write 'bro, ai dj7st wok 7p en h4d e s1k br3kfest', because it turns out that english also has a lot of specific sounds that don't have a direct equivalent in the latin script, and i think the solution people have been using for 1000 years in english is a lot worse than the solution arabic-speakers commonly use

(unfortunately i don't even speak enough arabic to know if you're actually writing in arabic or in a berber language like tamazight here)

(ai 4m ev k0rs w3l ew3r qet ref0rmi6 i6gl1c sp3l16 1z e fulz 3rend, qe d4wnfal ev m3ni en eks3ntr1k over qe sentceriz)

Shouldn't that be "q3t"? Or do some English speakers really pronounce "that" with the vowel in "the"?

most do in that context, though not in cases like this sentence, where 'that' takes a heavy stress and therefore doesn't undergo vowel reduction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_and_vowel_reduction_in_...

(a shortcoming of that article, and often of linguistic studies of english in general, is that indian english has more speakers than either american english or british english, but gets rather short shrift in it; in particular, i don't know how consistently vowel reduction is applied in indian english, and its prosody is very notably different)

Urdu uses a QWERTY-based layout (so ق is where Q normally is, etc.), and adapts the shift key for additional characters. I find this much easier than the Arabic keyboard layout. I think non-Latin script alphabets should try to match QWERTY as much as possible.

I like the 3 for the 'ayn (since it's the same shape, only backwards). My Darija is poor, what's the 9 standing in for in "fe9t"? Is the 7 in "wa7d" a ح ?

I forgot the 7! yes you're correct it's for ح

9 is for ق

Ah, qaaf, that totally makes sense (same shape again, I guess you could say the same for faaf too, but since the sounds are the same 'f' works fine already).

Great to see more support for African communities!

I have to concur with the previous comment though that I'm unclear as to what this adds.

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