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Comment by leeoniya | Hacker News Reader

I've pondered on multiple occasions, what if computing was born somewhere other than the west and we had to use roman numerals and/or Chinese/Arabic for software development. I could never understand how anyone can quickly discern/read a huge dictionary of such dense and wildly intricate glyphs.

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For what it's worth, although English is based on a small alphabet, we read whole words at a time (rather than one letter at a time). So although we are bewildered by the idea of learning thousands of characters, we exercise similar skill in recognising tens of thousands (out of a total of millions) of English words.

Also English is not that phonological. In reality, you need to learn how combinations of 3-4 letters are mapped to sound. It's more like syllabary, really, except you don't have a separate glyph for each syllable.

English has middling-simple grammar [+] and you really can make a good start with a few hundred words. But learning those first few hundred words ... about half of them have such completely ridiculous spelling, you might as well be learning pictograms anyway. (I'd like you to picture trying to explain this to a confused four-year-old. Her spelling's good now, a few years later ...)

[+] no genders, no inflection, not many cases. Of course, articles are just ridiculous, and I challenge any English speaker to explain to a native Russian speaker the rules for when and when not to use "a" and "the" without looking it up ...

i'm native russian and english, Russian rules and exceptions are even more ridiculous and have all the [+]

Inventing computer with Chinese/Arabic is inherently harder because it's more difficult to type such characters. Once you pass the punctuation card stage, now what? Build a huge keyboard with 10s of thousand of Chinese characters? It took 13 years for MS-DOS to support typing in Chinese.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_typewriter

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/Chinese_t...

That's an English way to think about Chinese.

How do the Chinese approach this problem? Even something as simple things as looking up a word in a dictionary seems impossible in a language like Chinese where every work is a unique cahracter but obviously the people who actually deal with the language will have solutions I've not thought of.

(Disclaimer: Not to argue for who invented computers first.)

Yeah, there is a famous computer geek who invented a super nice Chinese input method named "Cangjie" in Assembly and it can be used with a special Chinese CPU. (Now he is an old man.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chu_Bong-Foo

To answer your question on looking up a character in a dictionary, there are 3 ways, which are 3 indexing systems, all present in a dictionary. One can decide which index to use, either based on its pronunciation or its composition.

I can't speak directly to Chinese, but I am studying Japanese, which has a writing system derived from Chinese. Essentially each character can be broken up into smaller components (called radicals). This allows characters to be ordered somewhat 'alphabetically'. In theory, the radicals also carry some sementic and phonetic meaning, although (at least in Japanese) many characters have deviated significantly from what you would expect from the roots.

Also, although Japanese has been (through deliberate effort) simplified to about 2,000 characters needed to be considered literate, it still takes until high-school for students to be able to fully read and write all 2,000.

Two ways. If you know what it sounds like, you look in the phonetic index, which is ordered alphabetically according to the pronunciation; if you know what it looks like, you can look in the radical index, which lists characters by their radicals, ordered by how many strokes they have.

Human ingenuity always finds a way. In Chinese dictionaries, there are simply multiple indices: you can look up characters by pronunciation (if you know the word but not how to write it) or by shape (if you know the character but not how to say it). The latter works because there is a small set of shapes (“radicals”) that are combined to produce new characters.

Largely, they don't, without a great deal of training. http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

Hard to really guess what would have happened but it's possible that a Chinese speaker could have opted to start with one of the romanization systems or zhuyin fuhao and then build a system to inputs characters at a later point.

For Arabic the challenge is more akin to this type of problem: "create a computer that can handle a cursive form of the Latin alphabet". You could start with something really rudimentary like allow for Arabic characters in isolated form. It would be ugly and challenging to read, but a start. Wouldn't be too hard to add the initial, medial and final forms, eventually diacritics as well.

The first solution that came into my mind, type using strokes.

Here is a list of 11 strokes:

http://www.121chineselessons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/...

Every word's strokes has a pre-determined "correct" order.

Once you list out the word's strokes, there are only a a couple of possibilities of characters left.

A blog post on `Chinese Python`. http://reganmian.net/blog/2008/11/21/chinese-python-translat...

Unfortunately, Chinese Python maps English words to 2-character Chinese words, so the translation requires spaces between the Chinese words. So

    while running:
      guess = int(raw_input('Enter integer: '))
      if guess == number:
        print 'Congratulations'
        running = False
      elif guess < number:
        print 'No, higher'
      else:
        print 'No, lower'

translates to

    當 運行:
      猜測 = 整數(輸入('輸入數字: '))
      如果 猜測 == 數字:
        印出 '恭喜'
        運行 = 假
      假使 猜測 < 數字:
        印出 '錯了, 再大'
      否則:
        印出 '錯了, 再小'

But if we map English words in programming to single Chinese characters, we wouldn't need spaces, so perhaps

    當運:
      猜=整(輸('輸入數字: '))
      如猜==數:
        印'恭喜'
        運=假
      否如猜<數:
        印'錯了, 再大'
      否:
        印'錯了, 再小'

And if we made the syntax more C-like to fully make use of the spaceless syntax

    當運{
      猜=整(輸('輸入數字: '))
      如猜==數{印'恭喜';運=假}
      否如猜<數{印'錯了, 再大'}
      否{印'錯了, 再小'}
    }

One could program on one's smartphone screen on the train!

You can use semi-colons in Python to put multiple lines in one line, as well as inline blocks next to the colon. So, you can remove the braces, too. Added parenthesis for python 3.

    當運:
      猜=整(輸('輸入數字: '))
      如猜==數:印('恭喜');運=假;
      否如猜<數:印('錯了, 再大');
      否:印('錯了, 再小')

Arabic would actually be easier. It has about the same amount of letters and no capital letters.

It only seems difficult because you lack knowledge. Once you study a little you can break everything up into radicals pretty easy. It's one of the first things you learn so that you can lookup unfamiliar symbols in the dictionary by something other than stroke count.

I had a similar thought. I think if modern computing arose in China, technological progress would have been slower by a decade or so, simply because you need 16-bit computing before you can do any reasonable Chinese word processing.

After all, the printing press was invented in China, but it went nowhere there.

I've read that in China they didn't have typewriters and everything was hand-written right up till they got computers.

Edit: They had printing presses, but those are for newspapers etc. Ordinary people had to handwrite.

China did have typewriters, but the sheer number of keys made them impractical. The first practical ones came after the invention of dot matriz printing.

If computer languages were invented by Chinese, it would be written in pinyin and it would be as easy as English syntax is (the vocabulary used in computer languages are very limited after all). People always find ways to simply things, so no need to worry.

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