Part of this message has been mailed to Cecil
(just for the heck of it).
In regards to:
1995-12-08, “How can the Chinese use computers,
since their language contains so many characters?”
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a5_177.html
Basically, the article says that to type a Chinese character
one has to do this:
(1) Work out the Pinyin (Roman letter) representation, including
the number that corresponds to the tone. This could be
as short as “ci1”, or as long as “chuang4”.
(2) Type it, then pick the character you want to use from a list
of homophones.
Conclusion: Typing a Chinese character requires at least four
keystrokes, and as many as eight. Man, Chinese people must find
it hell to type. That and people who read the characters differently
are screwed.
Which this is partially true, it ignores one really big component of
the whole Chinese typing history: Chinese typing was heavily
influenced by Taiwan, who used computers first and – guess what?
They don’t use Pinyin. Not at all, not even outside of computers.
In fact, as of now, there are a heck of different competing methods
for inputting Chinese characters. Take a look at this link:
http://chinese.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Software/System_Utilities/Chinese_Input/
Okay, I know it’s all in Chinese, but almost every hyperlink there
points to a page that touts its own method of inputting Chinese.
This list isn’t even comprehensive; many other methods have existed
and have fallen by the wayside.
“Okay,” you’re saying, “but these methods could’ve all surfaced
in the last five years since the article was written.” True, maybe.
But not all of them. I was using computers in Taiwan around 1987 or
so (this was on a brand-spanking new IBM AT), and at the time the
Chinese inputting software allowed me to choose between five different
ways of typing Chinese. Two of those are still common today:
(a) ChangJie
(b) ZhuYin
[Note that I use Pinyin to write those names – pinyin is the
most common way to convert Chinese to Roman letters these days,
for better or for worse.]
Why do I know these are common? Eh, because Microsoft implies it:
http://www.microsoft.com/Windows/ie/Features/ime.asp
If you want to type Chinese into Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, you
have to download from this page. The software supports three input
methods, which are the two I just mentioned and Pinyin. I conclude that
these three are the most common methods of Chinese input. (That and
the trend that the first methods to take hold are usually the ones
that survive in the computer industry.)
Okay, if I haven’t completely bored you yet, I’ll describe how the
ChangJie and ZhuYin systems work, since obviously they don’t work
by converting the characters to Roman letters.
(a) ChangJie [named after a possibly-mythical Chinese reformer who
lived 5000 years ago]
This system is based completely on the shape of the character.
Basically, each letter on the keyboard is mapped to a “shape”, or
possible arrangement of strokes. To make things easier to
remember, the alphabetical order is used as a mnemonic; for
instance, A is “Sun”, B is “Moon”, C D E F G are the ancient
five elements (Metal, Wood, Water, Fire, Earth). Note that A
doesn’t actually mean Sun, but rather it means “part of the
character I want to type is shaped like the character for Sun”.
(If you go watch that 007 James Bond movie “Tomorrow Never Dies”
you’ll see Pierce Brosnan confounded by a ChangJie keyboard, by
the way.)
General rule: to type a character, type the individual pieces that
make up the letter, hit space, and voila, your character appears.
So, say you wanted to type the character for “Bright”, which looks
like a Sun next to a Moon. You type “AB<space>”, and the word appears!
You didn’t even have to know how to read it, just what it looks like!
Awfully nice, especially if you don’t speak Mandarin. (FYI, in
Mandarin it’s read “Ming”, as in “Ming Vase.”) If the character
is complicated, you don’t need all the parts. Every character
fits in under 5 keystrokes, and most are 3 or 4 keystrokes.
Occasionally, you’ll get ambiguities, but there are rules to resolve
them and I don’t want this explanation to get too complicated.
(b) Zhuyin [“annotated sound”]
The Zhuyin Fuhao [Fuhao means “symbols”] is an alphabet, of sorts,
invented in the 20th century for the purpose of writing down Mandarin
Chinese pronunciation in a straightforward way. (What did they do
before the 20th century? They used a pretty crappy system that wasn’t
very precise. Where do you think all these unintelligible dialects
came from?) This alphabet uses strange, non-Roman symbols, but it
was pretty well organized. The order goes like this (if it were pinyin):
b p m f d t n l
g k h j q x
zh ch sh r z c s
i u :u a o e -e
ai ei au ou an en ang ong er
Note the 20th-century organization. All the consonants are
first, arranged in approximate order from front-of-mouth to
back-of-mouth, then all the vowels. Much better than this
arbitrary ABCDEFG stuff, and definitely saner than this
QWERTY junk.
These symbols were then mapped onto a Western keyboard in an
organized way. For instance, the first four, b p m f, were
mapped onto 1 Q A Z. The whole alphabet was mapped as:
1 Q A Z 2 W S X
E D C R F V
5 T G B Y H N
U J M 8 I K ,
9 O L . 0 P ; / -
I know this looks messy, but try typing this “alphabet” on
a normal American keyboard and watch your fingers closely.
The unused keys, 3 4 6 7, were used for the tone markers.
Typing is pretty simple, just like pinyin. Figure out how to
read it, then type the reading, then pick from a list. The
difference is that something like “chuang” only needs three
keystrokes (“ch”, “u”, and “ang”), so it’s much more efficient
than Pinyin.
And don’t forget all those other systems, which all claim to
be a better system for some reason or another. Some claim they
can get the average keystroke per character down to two. Some
claim they’re really easy to learn. Whatever.
The point is, typing in Chinese really isn’t that horribly
inefficient (or at least it wasn’t in 1987, and it probably
didn’t get worse in 1995). With an average of 5 keystrokes
per “word”, sure, typing “I love you” would be really inefficient
compared to English. But then again, “I love you” in Chinese
is about as easy as “Quantum Electro-Dynamics.” QED.
– Wei-Hwa Huang
P.S. Back in 1983, I got to try out a Chinese “typewriter”. Now
that was pretty monstrous. You had to first find your character
among a grid of 5000 or so characters. Then you aimed a crosshair
on it, pressed a button, and the machine would grab a slab of lead
from a giant pool of little lead pieces, slam it on a piece of paper,
and you got your character. Heaven forbid someone accidentally
turning over the typewriter and have all 5000 pieces fall out.
Or, needing to type a character that wasn’t among the 5000 common
ones and having to search through 30000 tiny little lead slabs in
the “auxiliary” boxes.