Actually, Cecil, not to be an annoyance, but your answer is fairly obsolete. Back in the days of typewriters, Orientals had to do all that, and possibly ten years ago, but these days there’s a much better way.
I admit that I’m MOST familiar with Japanese, but I’m sure Chinese works in a similar fashion.
At any rate. Japanese has four different written alphabets. The one everyone knows with complex symbolics and 50,000 characters is called kanji. There are two phonetic alphabets, called katakana and hirigana (one developed in china and on on the southern island of Japan, but I don’t recall which is which). The fourth is romaji, romanized letters that are used to spell words phonetically.
Any word can be written in katakana, which simply has one character for each of the common sounds. Modern keyboards have two symbols on each key – a roman letter and a kana (the unit of katakana). There’s a key over by the CAPS LOCK that switches between roman and kana mode. I’m not sure how many kanas they use, or exactly how it’s laid out, but that’s what they do. Modern word processors are also able to read a series of kanas and convert it to kanji (though not all words translate, especially ones that were originally english).
Japanese has long had the two syllabaries you mentioned (katakana and hiragana), of only 46 symbols each. But Chinese did not have the advantage of such a simple system until the pinyin system (based on the Roman alphabet) was adopted in 1958. Communists may be good for something after all.
My understanding was that while katakana was popular with US companies intent on the Japanese market, it was about as popular in a computer as a Dvorak keyboard here.
Welcome to the SDMB, and thank you for posting your comment.
Please include a link to Cecil’s column if it’s on the straight dope web site.
To include a link, it can be as simple as including the web page location in your post (make sure there is a space before and after the text of the URL).
Fortunately, valued and dedicated member bibliophage has provided a link for us.
The more recent column mentioned by bibliophage (including Slug Signorino’s illustration) can also be found on pages 177-180 of Cecil Adams’ book «Triumph of the Straight Dope».
(posted edited to remove mentions of inappropriate columns as mentioned by bibliophage in following post)
That microchip Ed Zotti implanted in your brain has finally blown out, Arnold. :eek:
I’m not sure what relevance the microchip column has to this thread (or any other active today), but that link actually goes to the talking-drum column (again, not obviously relevant). (Switch 4 for 5 in the URL and links to the microchip column). Page 49-50 of The Straight Dope is the one-hand-clapping column, which obviously goes with another thread active today.
I agree with Keenath, it IS obsolete. I don’t use pinyin to type Chinese (what a mess I’d make! I’m Taiwanese, not Chinese, and the school I go to doesn’t teach us pinyin… DO YOU HEAR THAT NEHS?! anyway). Instead, there are little Chinese phonetic thingies, one for every key. That way, we “spell” out the Chinese with CHINESE phonetics. Also, as an alternative, there’s bits and pieces of Chinese characters, two for every key. You have to press ctrl+shift to switch between all three types of typing. I only use the phonetics, so I can’t tell you much about the piecemeal Chinese characters… anyway, I don’t know a thing about Japanese so this isn’t really following the thread but so what?
P.S. this is completely unrelated but go to http://www.neopets.com it’s a great site but definitely not as informative as this one. It’s a virtual community of virtual pets and their owners. If you play Neopets already look me up my username is cougarfang.
