I’m talking about language in written form - with computer usage basically a necessity for progress at this point, will the written forms of Chinese, Japanese, etc. die out? They seem too unwieldy when most writing these days is done on keyboards. I understand in the case of Chinese that it hasn’t been seen as beneficial to change the system for thousands of years (and it is definitely a culture resistant to change overall), but the circumstances have never resembled what they are now.
Anybody think they’ll switch to an alphabet? or will they all just learn English for computer use? Mods, if you think this belongs in Great Debates or INHO, please feel free to move.
I doubt it, it’s actually quite easy to write in Japanese on the computer, all you have to do is type the word in romaji (Japanese represented in our alphabet) and when you press f7 or space (sometimes I can’t get the space button to work right, that’s probably just me though), you’ll get a dropdown list of the Kanji that are represented by those characters and it’s usually pretty good at guessing which one you’re going to use and puts that one first.
I know Chinese has a similar system for typing but I’m not sure of the specifics.
My prediction is that things like emoticons and other non-spelled additions to text will actually make “written” language less alphabetical as time goes by. For instance, what if it someday becomes first an internet meme and then an accepted convention that any text highlighted in a certain color is meant to taken sarcastically?
In the grand view of history, I think we’ll find that keyboards were less important than pointed reeds and clay tablets.
Technologies like pens/tablets, touch screens, voice commands and mouse gestures are already in place and getting smarter. I wouldn’t be surprised to see average consumer-level computers within ten to fifteen years that track your eye position instead of your mouse, that use a built-in camera to respond to hand gestures, and that can understand spoken language accurately enough to replace your keyboard. (I’m a little surprised we’re not already there, but some of these things are apparently harder to teach a computer than we thought.)
I was involved in some of the early standards setting abd development efforts for just this problem.
Typing in any Asian language is not as efficient as in English, but then neither is French or German.
The storage of the characters is essentially a non-issue at this point. Anyone not writing software to handle Unicode (the standard for one character set for all languages) is either a fool or has a very specialized application.
Typing or other input methods remains an active area of research, especially as devices get smaller and less keyboard-centric. But systems are not failing for the most part because people can’t enter text - they can and do so just fine on pretty much every platform.
Typing on a computer in Chinese is similar. You type the pinyin romanization of a word and are presented with a list of characters, usually sorted by context and character frequency.
That’s exactly my point, though - if you’re using an alphabet, you don’t have to scroll through a list and select the correct word. You just type the word.
It will be interesting to see if some of dracoi’s predictions come true, but I’m not sure keyboards will end up being less important than pointed reeds and clay tablets - the difference between then and now seems to me to be that it’s a global culture now, and business communications are conducted at light speed to all parts of the world simultaneously. Surely that’s a pretty major change.
not_alice: Interesting. I’d like to hear more. I don’t really understand comparing French or German to Chinese, though - they both utilize alphabets, and (I would assume) require no extra steps (other than shift keys, which English needs as well) to type out words.
The difference with French or German would be the accented characters, like ç or ö. English uses a very unadorned alphabet, so we don’t have to worry about those.
But typing those are simple shift-key functions on French and German keyboards, no? Maybe I’m wrong, but it still doesn’t compare to having to use a scroll menu for every single word.
Come on. In German, it’s four extra characters - ä, ö, ü, ß (seven if you count the capital letters Ä, Ö, Ü). I don’t know how the French do it, but if I have to enter French (Turkish, transcribed Grecian, etc.) characters with accents, I have a special additional program to an old program I use at work, so it’s simply a combination of two keys on my (special German) keyboard.
In most European countries, keyboards are custom-made to the language* - which really isn’t that difficult, you just tell the keyboard driver which key maps to which letter, and print the corresponding letters so you find the correct keys easier. Ebay and other places offer caps for keyboards so you can transform your normal german keyboard to a Russian one (and install the driver) and presto: you type in Kyrillian with some 116 letters, or Hungarian with 40+ letters.
Even if the characters went the way of Gothic Caligraphy (still in use, but now considered a form of art rather than “the way to write”), there’s much more to a language than that.
Languages which weren’t even literate (or barely) have thrived in recent decades; moving to an alphabetic form wouldn’t destroy the non-alphabetic languages.
Anyone who has been to Japan would have a hard time believing that they have any trouble using technology with their writing system. They have a tremendous infrastructure – cell phone texting, PDAs, displays, computers, you name it. All of it uses Japanese writing. Nobody seems to think it’s any bother.
Japanese is **very **easy to type on a computer. Japanese written in romaji (roman alphabet) is much harder to read than Japanese written in kanji and kana, assuming you know all the kanji used in writing it, simply because there are a lot of words in Japanese that are romanized the same way. For example, *kami *could mean hair (髪), paper (紙), or god (神).
The basic gist is that there are three main types of methods: phonetic, encoding, and structure- or stroke-based.
Pinyin and other phonetic systems are already learned and used by many people in China (in addition to, not instead of, Hanzi), so they certainly wouldn’t have to learn English just to use a Roman keyboard. And the encoding and stroke-based systems only require knowledge of what the character looks like.
Once you get used to it, typing in Japanese isn’t that much, if at all, slower. And these days, the computer is your friend. You can write out a full sentence and the computer will translate what makes sense in context, usually correctly, so there isn’t that much scrolling. Also characters that you use more often will pop up higher in the scroll order.
It seems like the real downside is that full literacy isn’t gained until you know about 2,000 characters, after high school. I’m not sure what younger Japanese students do if they need to, say, read a biography for a school report, but they can’t understand half of it. Maybe there’s furigana everywhere?
I imagine they would do what younger English-speaking students do: glean the meaning of new words from context, and if they can’t, look them up in a dictionary.
Nitpick… the kana are syllabaries, not alphabets. But the Roman alphabet is also used quote frequently in Japan.
As for the OP, not likely. There is a considerable advantage, especially for China, in using Chinese Characters-- people speaking different languages* can still read the same script. There is even a lot of mutual intelligibility between written Chinese and written Japanese. I learned a bit of Kanji in my travels to Japan and was pleasantly surprised to see how much of it was useful in China.
*Though often called different dialects, the various forms of the Chinese “language” can easily be as different as distinct European languages.