I have often wondered what a Chinese keyboard would look like. It seems to me that they would have to be a mile long to hold all of the symbols in their dialect. Has anyone ever seen one of these asian wonders?
Yes, I’ve seen them in Macao, Hong Kong, the Peoples Republic of China, Singapore, and in Japan. (Yes, there are Chinese speakers in Japan.)
Surprisingly, they’re the same size as the standard QWERTY keyboard and even more surprisingly they have the standard QWERTY English layout in addition to a Chinese phonetic syllabry on the keys.
With the advent of the computer and word processing, typing Chinese characters isn’t the time-consuming task it once was. Nowadays, the typist types the phonetic sounding of the phrase in question and a popup menu appears on the screen if there’s more than one rendering of the phrase.
Cheers!
-Chip
Here’s what Cecil said.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/951208.html
Pretty much the same thing.
With due respect, Cecil and Monty give an incomplete answer. There are other typing systems for generating Chinese characters from a QWERTY keyboard than merely the phonetic one described.
It’s important (for this exercise) to recognize that Chinese characters have smaller components to them, too. While English words have components called letters, Chinese written-word components are basically simpler word-characters, and there are more of them than 26. (A quick perusal of the compact traditional-Chinese dictionary here reveals that, in the section that contains words written with nine strokes (stroke-count being the basic organizing feature for the dictionary), there are 117 root characters used to organize the various contents of the section. I’m too lazy to find out how many root characters there “really” are.)
Any more complex character can be broken down to 2 to (6?, 7?) component characters. (As I’ve pointed out, that is a sub-principle for organizing dictionaries; it’s also how literate Chinese learn how to write. I’m sure with practice it becomes subconscious, just as with English writers. WE don’t consciously spell out every single word we write or type (if we are good typists), and they don’t consciously remember the components of their words. We and they remember the word, and can break it down when necessary.) The opposite is not true in my experience: one can rarely determine the precise meaning of an unknown character by piecing it together from its constituent parts. (But one might get lucky, I suppose, if one is not me, for the words are often related to the meaning of their major root component.)
Based on this, then, there are systems for writing Chinese on a computer that involve entering combinations of Chinese “roots,” or basic characters. I think that entering three or four will bring up a pretty specific list of possible words, for IIRC the order of entry also matters. My Chinese/English keyboard at home has three symbols on most keys: an English letter, a “BoPoMoFo” phonetic symbol, and a root character. I don’t know HOW to generate a given Chinese character from a combinations of root plus components (despite what might be inferred I am illiterate in Chinese), but I know that it CAN be done. I am also led to believe that, when one is trained in one of these methods (there are a couple different syustems at least, apparently), it makes typing Chinese much more time-efficient than does searching through long lists of homonyms looking for the word one wants.
(I also don’t know how the 100+ “roots” are filtered down to the 40+ I remember being on my home keyboard, but some of them are, IIRC, incomplete. That is, they aren’t true basic characters as one might find in the dictionary, but are partial-characters.)
Well, Monty pretty much covered it; you type the sounds of the word you want and pick the appropriate character from a popup window.
Unfortunately, this is pretty clunky, especially if the word processor doesn’t let you indicate tones. (Chinese has 5 tones which change the meaning and, obviously, character for, words) An alternative that I * think * exists someplace is one that uses the 26 strokes that make up all characters. This would require you to know the right stroke order, but native speakers and most foreign students know this anyway.
–John, the SDMB 1st (but not only) one semester’s worth of Chinese expert.
Hey, John. Good timing.
I think that what you describe in terms of “stroke order,” which is very important for writing Chinese characters by hand, is simplified to what I tried to describe above for computer entry.
As for “26 strokes” - is that something someone said about the types of strokes used in Chinese writing? Obviously to you and me, but maybe not to others, most characters have fewer strokes than that. Also, the dictionary here tops out with a 36-stroke character. I never heard about “the basic 26 strokes,” as it were (but my ignorance means little).
Yeah, 26 types of strokes. I’ll have to dig out my Chinese binder real quick–
Damn… I put away those papers… Aha, the manilla folder- er, sorry.
Well, actually, 25 basic strokes. But one is called the same whether it falls to the left or right, so it would probably need its own key. They are:
Dian: An apostrophe falling left or right
Heng: A horizontal line
Shu: A vertical
pie: a downward diagonal slash to the left
na: a left falling pie
ti: an upward diagonal slash right
hengzhe: horizontal with a downward right angle
shuzhe: vertical with rightward right angle
henggou: like a heng with a little hook at the end.
shugou: Like a shu with a little hook at the end.
xiegou: na with a little hook at the end
piedian: diagonal slash left then right
shupie: vertical line suddenly hooks to the left
hengpie: horizontal hooks to the left and down
hengzhewanpie: looks like a 3
pingna: like this: ~ Really.
shuti: vertical, up to the right
hengzheti: horizontal, then vertical, then up to the right.
piezhe: a leftward falling curve, the horizontally right.
hengzhegou: a horizontal, the down vertically a small amount, then hooks.
wangou: a wide curve that hooks at the end.
shuwangou: down, a broad flat curve right, then a hook
shuzhezhegou: down, right, down, hook
hengzhezhegou: right, down, right, hook
Ugh. Also, all characters are written in a precise order that runs, generally, from the upper right to the lower left.
-John
New SigLite™. Tastes great, less filling.
Oh, you want clunky? Okay, there’s also one other way of entering Chinese characters into a document on a computer. Each character has a numerical identifier, usually made up of four digits. If you know the number, just haul off and type that instead of the phrase.
Since Chinese writing, unlike Chinese speech, isn’t phonetic, it will never approach the fairly straight-forward typing of phonetic based writing systems.
Well, Monty, the system I’ve been trying to describe here would work just as well as a phonetic based language’s program. Unfortunately, very, very few programs actually use this. Why, I do not know. Maybe it’s printing all the new keyboards, maybe it’s the joy of making other people use our alphabet to try and convey sounds we don’t have.
But it’s possible to have a good system, it just isn’t done.
–John
John:
My favourite system for Chinese character writing is the SKIP (Simplified Kanji Indexing by Pattern) used in the New Japanese-English Character Dictionary (ISBN 4-7674-9040-5, edited by Jack Halpern of Showa Women’s University).
Every character is placed into one of four pattern types and the SKIP number is made up of type pattern plus number of strokes in first part of pattern and finally number of strokes in last part of pattern.
An example would be the character for Three (it looks like three horizontal lines, for those unfamiliar with it).
Its SKIP number is: 2-1-2, Pattern 2, 1 stroke in first part, and finally 2 strokes in second part of character.
This system makes it possible to find an unfamiliar character in less than 30 seconds without any concerns as to radical or character number.
P.S. Shouldn’t this thread be moved to the comments on Cecil’s columns board?
Sounds like a good system; it is for Chinese characters, right? You mentioned a Japenese-English dictionary, and kanji (a term I’ve only heard used for Japanese characters), and your example doesn’t clarify, because 3 is written the same in both languages. At any rate, I guess a similar program would work for both languages.
I haven’t heard of SKIP, but it sounds like a useful tool; I’ve been interested in this issue since I started studying Chinese. (read: August) Thanks for the info.
–John
Oops, missed the post just after; well, Cecil HAS done a column on it, but I don’t think the OP knew that.
If Nick moves it, he’ll have a reason, but it’s appropriate here too.
–John
John:
Here’s probably more info on the SKIP dictionary than you ever wanted: http://kanji.org .
This, of course, is all based on computers.
In the old days, Chinese “typewriters” were essentially ink-stamp systems, not unlike a sort of children’s toy I remember (it’s probably vanished nowadays), except that it included a pantograph mechanism to smooth alignment. You grabbed a character, inked it, stamped it, and returned it.
Chinese typesetters used to wear roller skates.
John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams