Re: intrinsic advantage of Latin alphabet over bopomofo (for Chinese)??

"Oliver" == Oliver Cromm <lispamateur@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

>>>> With the advent of computers, typing Chinese is no longer a
>>>> difficulty.

Oliver> Or Japanese. Actually, it has been argued that while
Oliver> handwriting skills are declining in Japan, some characters
Oliver> have come back into general use because people are
Oliver> confident enough using them on the computer where they
Oliver> weren't writing them by hand.

Oh! I wasn't even aware of that effect.

But sometimes, I do use an IME to find out the Kanji's of some
Japanese words. It's quite useful, because some words that are no
longer written in Kanji's do show up using the IME. Something like 有
り (now commonly written in Hiraganas: あり), 出来 (now: でき). It's
amazing to find out that the stock expression for "thank you" can be
Kanjinized as: 有り難う御座居ます.


Oliver> Has anyone reliable information why input via Latin
Oliver> alphabet is so dominant in Japan?

Yeah. I also want to know if they'd benefit from shape-based methods
such as Cangjie.

But there is a cultural difference. Many Japanese know the standard
dialect (Tokyo) pretty well. This is not the case for Chinese. Most
speak another language natively, and have a hard time figuring out the
Mandarin sounds of characters. Can't they use an phonetic IME for
their own language? Well... due to politics, market size as well as
lack of standardization, it's not easy to find such input methods,
with the exception for Cantonese and Minnan.


Oliver> A computer will do what you tell it to do, but that may be
Oliver> much different from what you had in mind.

Another difference is that the unit of "word" in Japanese is quite
standardized. More standardized than Chinese. In the more
monosyllabic languages like Cantonese, every syllable is a word and
hence there are lots of homonyms. Some syllable sequences do occur
more frequently as a unit, but they're not unmodifiable. We may
substitute certain characters with others to modify the meaning. And
there is no easy way to tell whether and where to break a sequence
into smaller units (other than individual syllables).


--
Lee Sau Dan 李守敦 ~{@nJX6X~}

E-mail: danlee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee
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