If this was going to happen, it would have been 30 years ago when computers first became widespread and the number of memory requirements for thousands of characters was an actual issue. Or prior to the introduction of computers, when businesses were stuck using things like this. The spread of computers has actually been accompanied by an increase in the number of characters in common usage.
not_alice’s original point was just that typing in German or French were less efficient than English, not that the difference was particularly significant.
It’s quite easy to type in Korean. Same goes for Vietnamese. Feel free to peruse the languages represented on www.omniglot.com to see how many Asian languages do not have ideographic writing systems.
By the way, a case can be made for Korean typing being more efficient than the standard Qwerty keyboard for English. The consonants in Hangeul are typed with the left hand while the majority of the vowels are typed with the right hand. Since the writing system requires every syllable to begin with a consonant (Korean therefore has a “Silent NG” for syllables that actually begin with a vowel), the division of labor between the hands seems to be pretty even.
Yeah, Korean is an alphabetic system, albeit a slightly confusing one, but it doesn’t take very long at all to be able to get the system down and once you do it’s just a matter of memorizing what letter is what.
Of course not! It’s what they are used to; people hardly ever see that as a bother. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t one, objectively.
Most Americans don’t see our archaic measurements system as a bother compared to the metric system, either. But it actually is.
You can easily input just about any kind of writing with a keyboard. Actually, keyboards make some aspects easier and more accessible. At the same time, the longhand written forms are probably never going to go away, and computers are continuing to make those writing skills useful too. The next version of OS X will let you input or look up characters by drawing them on your trackpad. (search for “Innovative Chinese character input,” on that page to jump to the spot). A friend of mine had a great little PDA-like character dictionary that would let you input characters for look up by drawing them with a stylus. Very useful when you don’t know the reading, but given the relatively standardized way of writing characters you can guess how to write just about anything properly.
You might make the case that this newfangled alphabet stuff is a passing fad and we’ll eventually go back to logographs for the heavy lifting. Chinese writing, for example, has been around longer than any alphabet, though it has changed over time.
One advantage of logographic forms of writing is that the ideas remain relatively easy to decipher over a long period of time, whereas alphabetic systems quickly run into problems where the spoken language changes and the written representation doesn’t. A modern Japanese speaker could read some of the earliest written documents in Japanese history for meaning, even if he or she didn’t know how the words were pronounced at that time.
Eventually, unless reforms are undertaken to resolve ambiguities in spelling, you get something that is so far out of sync with modern speech that it’s only vaguely recognizable. English has been through a couple of reforms, and I guarantee that anything older than about 400 years, when spelling started to stabilize, is just about unreadable by an average high school graduate without having been re-written with modernized and standardized spelling, along with a lexicon for archaic words. And that’s what you have to deal with before you can even try to get to the meaning of the work.
It’s interesting that we don’t have any kind of predictive text systems on PCs yet. It sounds like that kind of thing is common in Japanese/Chinese. Maybe because it would be slower for people who already touch type?
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There were some minor efforts to use Pinyin as the official written language of China, but they never got going.
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Well, they did totally change the system, right? I mean, China did simplify the written language significantly around 1956. Have you seen the difference between the written language in Taiwan and China?
Is this a woosh? Both text editors and translation software include predictive text (“auto completion” in MSWord) and have done so for years.
I imagine that the work done to have predictive text for SMSs was a matter of porting what existed for Japanese in PCs to SMSs, and then getting it to work with other languages. Now, whether that was in turn reused for Word or Trados, or these guys did their own logic and code from scratch, no idea; the basic logic still has to be the same.
But you have to remember that it has its advantages too - basically it’s quicker to read a document in formal Japanese than it is in English.
And by thorough memorization, the Chinese students I’ve taught can read fluently and quickly better than many American kids.
Macs didn’t have an option for inputting characters by drawing them with the mouse? I’m surprised because it’s been around in Windows since at least XP. Apple, IME, has usually been better with that kind of thing.
This is a bit of an exaggeration. A modern speaker would have serious difficulty with texts written 150 years ago, let alone 1000 years ago. The Canterbury Tales is more comprehensible to a modern English speaker than a contemporary Japanese text would be to a modern Japanese speaker.
Why?
Chinese is a challenging language.
First, the chacter roots at least are based on pictograms that are generally still recognizeable today. Or stated a different way, chinese characters contain cluess as to the root meaning of the word.
take away the pictogram and you take away this aspect of the language. the level of language would be dumbed down (many scholars credibly claim it has been when comparing taiwan and china). Maybe thuis is akin to someone that understands latin supposedly has a ‘deeper’ or better grasp of english.
the usefulness of chinese pictograms goes up with compound or di-syallabic words. picture A + piture B equals meaning Y…and can often be inferred.
second, chinese is a tonal language. typing in tones in romanization is awkward.
as noted, native chinese speakers have no problem text messaging on a standard phone keyboard. it may be much slower than romanization but works well enough for a few hundred million users
I don’t think it’s a matter of “do-ability” (to make up a word), it’s a matter of is it the best method. Or does this method hinder them?
For instance, I can drive a stick shift and it’s fun, but it’s a lot more work to drive one, and driving a stick in heavy traffic like NYC, Chicago or DC is very annoying. I don’t know anything about cars, so I don’t know if a stick is better or worse than automatic, but it is more work.
But . . . but . . . though I don’t know the slightest damn thing about Chinese, at first glance it seems so complicated and daunting to me personally! Therefore it must be backward and stupid for other people to use it! What is their problem, anyway, and when will they stop it? It’s starting to get on my nerves.
I can touch type in Chinese at a somewhat decent pace using the Cangjie input method, and I have to say that the analogy with driving a car with standard transmission in heavy traffic is partially accurate. Sure, it is possible to type in Chinese/Japanese, but typing in an alphabet based language is still much faster and easier.
Having said that though, the analogy is flawed in the sense that for most people, it will still be much easier to just learn to type in their own language, which isn’t really too difficult, especially if you don’t care too much about the speed, rather than trying to change the language itself, which is a non-trivial undertaking, to say the least.
There are some efforts around here to teach Chinese using Hanyu PinYin. hte challenge with typing is the tonal part - there are four basic tones in Mandarin, and sometimes a fifth is added - this makes typing in PinYin a chore.
But using the predictive function for Characters it is quite easy.
Also, being a pictographic language, although you might get the correct sound using romanised language, you probably won’t get the full meaning.
For example - my daughter’s name is Jia Ying (in pinyin). There are a number of different characters that we could have used for Jia - each character has a different meaning (and if you are superstitious you select for the number of strokes). And don’t even start on our John-San, the Chinese representation of her surname. (it has something like 13 strokes, I still can’t write it myself, but to me eternal shame my almost 5 year old knows it)
[nitpick]Chinese isn’t a pictographic language[/nitpick]
Absolutely!
Written language sucks balls in various ways we here know all too well. Yet in the future it will not only match the richness of speech, it will fully surpass it. Expect all sorts of meaning to be expressed as peripheral visual information, much more than can be expressed with tone.
And as China Guy pointed out, a visual system can make use of repeating paterns, permutating motifs, etc. to actually have sense to it instead of being full-on memorization.