9 ms·

> Or, they can, simply make both official and let the people decide like we did in Serbia centuries ago. I disagree because current synchronic digraphia in Ser

by Kostic 9y ago

> Or, they can, simply make both official and let the people decide like we did in Serbia centuries ago. I disagree because current synchronic digraphia in Serbia is a mess. You have people using Cyrillic script in Latin documents, Latin script in Cyrillic documents. You have people religiously using Cyrillic and Latin. People who prefer Latin and make fun of people using Cyrillic. You also have a large percentage of uneducated people online who use Latin without diacritics (secer, solja, casa instead of šećer, šolja, čaša). Learning English (and it's alphabet) gives you mush more options in life than being a speaker of a language which uses a Latin based script (or Cyrillic, or any other script).

babuskov 9y ago
> You also have a large percentage of uneducated people online So do all the other countries and they make different kinds of "sins" regarding to proper writing. > who use Latin without diacritics (secer, solja, casa instead of šećer, šolja, čaša). This is mostly because we didn't have proper keyboard support in leading operating systems for a very long time and many people got used to typing like that. Also, a lot of hardware is still sold without proper keyboard layout (you can change it in software, but then you have to remember which of the curly brackets is used for what letter). On mobile devices, typing with diacritics is much slower. These are all problems of Serbia being a small market and software solutions by big western companies for our use cases are often sub-par. It isn't a product of having digraphia.
- foepys 9y ago
  Shouldn't it be the opposite if there is a good dictionary for autocorrect? Or is there just no good dictionary?
  - Asooka 9y ago
    Autocorrect for Slavic languages is a somewhat hard problem due to all the different conjugations (wrong word?) you can impose on a word. In English for instance, a noun can be in singular form, or in plural form. In Slavic languages, it can be in many forms - (singular, plural, dual) * (all the cases) * ("a", "the" -- if the language has the distinction). Adjectives then get all these, but times the three genders they need to agree with. Verbs can be conjugated in many ways, too. So a good autocorrect system needs to be grammar-aware to know that the word you're correcting is e.g. an adjective that's agreeing with a feminine singular noun in the accusative case. None of them do that from what I've seen. It's not all bad, since you mostly know what you're trying to write and just picking the closest word by levenstein distance does the job, but it can definitely be done better. One downside is you need to have every variant of every word in the dictionary which kind of makes it needlessly large in size, and I've sometimes found variants missing and had to add them.
    - foepys 9y ago
      I see, thank you for the insight. It seems to be a similar but much harder problem to the German dictionaries which don't know how to deal with compound words. Android is also missing a lot of forms for verbs in second person singular.
      - dahauns 9y ago
        Bah yes, this drives me nuts. I don't get it, compound words aren't rocket science, and even some level of grammar awareness shouldn't be so hard considering the rather low expectations towards autocorrect when it comes to correctness.
        int_19h 9y ago
        They just want us all to give up and learn English. ~
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - bshimmin 9y ago
      For verbs, it's called conjugation, for nouns declension. Broadly, the system of words having different endings is called inflection.
      - smcl 9y ago
        Nice clarification - I've been using declension/conjugation interchangeably for the last year or so and I'm glad to see it resolved pretty unambiguously!
    - hawski 9y ago
      Polish is the most popular Latin script Slavic language and has quite a nice market. After using Google keyboard for a few years I still daily add new words to it's dictionary. With English it is very rare. Many times autocorrect has word only in present-masculine form. Or it doesn't have subjunctive form. Even for words I consider common. I can only imagine how it can be for less popular Slavic languages.
- Kostic 9y ago
  > This is mostly because we didn't have proper keyboard support in leading operating systems for a very long time and many people got used to typing like that. There was proper support for Cyrillic and Latin basically from Windows XP. Also many other Linux distros supported our scripts from early on. On the mobile front, there was also a support for both scripts relatively early on. I remmember using both Cyrillic and Latin keyboards on Android 2.1, in 2008. > On mobile devices, typing with diacritics is much slower. On the older devices which had physical buttons, sure. But on Android with QWERTZ/ЉЊЕРТЗ software keyboard that simply isn't the case anymore. > These are all problems of Serbia being a small market and software solutions by big western companies for our use cases are often sub-par. It isn't a product of having digraphia. Not directly but indirectly. If we had just one script, there would be more software solutions because it would be easier to develop them. Nowadays you mostly get some kind of support with/for Serbian Latin or no support at all, as you said.
  - jumasheff 9y ago
    Kyrgyz here. For an average PC user it was/is really hard to find option in the system settings where you could choose another keyboard layout. Especially when OS is in Russian and Russian alphabet lacks "only" 3 Kyrgyz-specific symbols: "ө", "ү", "ң". Many of the users don't even suspect that there is a support for Kyrgyz in Windows, Ubuntu and later versions of Android.
- codedokode 9y ago
  I don't understand why virtual keyboards (e.g. on Android) cannot have letters with diacritic along with normal letters (not hidden behind long tap popup). That should not be difficult to do.
  - yorwba 9y ago
    They can and do (maybe not standard on Serbian phones, though). My German Android keyboard has extra keys for äöüß. They make typing somewhat harder, because all the keys have to be smaller to fit
    - Kostic 9y ago
      Usually carrier provided phones come preconfigured with the Serbian Latin as the base language and come with a fully-fledged Latin keyboard with all of the extra letters visible. Some phones from the carriers (LG phones notably) come with the default Android Serbian Cyrillic localization and Cyrillic keyboard. If you buy a mobile phone without a contract, you will go to the first time setup wizard which will ask you what language you want to use. You will, among other languages, have Српски (Serbian) and Srpski (Serbian Latin). Depending on what you choose, you will get the appropriate keyboard. There are also other keyboards which provide an easy way to input both Latin and Cyrillic characters from one keyboard application. Also, every key is large enough because we don't have a lot of letters in contrast to English (30 letters). The biggest alternative keyboard application is the Google's GBoard application[1][2]. [1] http://i.imgur.com/s7kNaBZ.png http://i.imgur.com/s7kNaBZ.png [2] http://i.imgur.com/9OrAItF.png http://i.imgur.com/9OrAItF.png
    - dahauns 9y ago
      As an Austrian I'd like to know what keyboard app this is - I wasn't aware of any that did this on Android (with Umlauts in my case). Nokia were actually the only company I know of consistently providing extra keys for umlauts since the dawn of smartphones...
dragandj 9y ago
Or, you know, people do a lot of typing in English or on English keyboard (when programming), and don't care or even want to switch keyboards to type something with diacritics.
rubber_duck 9y ago
Is your name Kostic or Kostić ? There's one reason. The other is that typing out diacritics is a chore and people get what you mean without them anyway. Especially for programmers - we do most typing in English which doesn't use them, it's not in my "muscle memory". I am talking about casual messaging - for formal writing you probably do come off as illiterate if you don't bother to use them.
- pawelmi 9y ago
  For Polish (on computers) we have a keyboard layout called "polish programmer" widely adopted many years ago affectively making the original "polish typewriter" layout (that mapped diacritics to separate keys) almost extinct. For typing diacritics AltGr is used (eg. ą = AltGr+a). Typing without diacritics is considered clumsy at least within the groups of people I interact with. On mobile it is a bit more relaxed, but the dictionary autocorrection is sort of OK. Conjugation, declension etc. complicates things, but you have the stem + most common suffix autocorrected, so usually it is a matter of erasing last 1-2 letters and changing them if needed. Also the Markov chain alike logic of autosuggestion quite often is right with the inflection.
- Kostic 9y ago
  Kostić but I use Kostic when I write English. If I use Serbian Latin (when I communicate with Croatians, for example) I would write down Kostić. The problem with not writing out diacritics is that Serbian is a language with a fully phonetic alphabets. You don't need to ever guess how words are written or read. You lose greatest feature of the Serbian language if you don't use diacritics, when using the Latin keyboard. I shouldn't, ever, guess how a Serbian word is read when I see it.
  - kwhitefoot 9y ago
    > a language with a fully phonetic alphabet So there are no dialects or regional accents? My Norwegian teacher tried to tell me the same thing thirty years ago. For Norwegian it is manifestly untrue because pronunciation varies from valley to valley.
vsl 9y ago
This is not "uneducated" people, this is people getting used to type in like that in the 90s and not loosing the habit - or possibly simply perfecting the speed. It's not about keyboards only, but about software simply not having support for non-ASCII characters. Even in 2017, there's too many American companies that won't accept non-ASCII names (even like mine, which fits into Latin1). It's the same with Czechs: 15-20 years ago, typing without diacritics was perfectly normal. Some people still do. So ,no. Not uneducated.

by Kostic 9y ago

babuskov 9y ago

> You also have a large percentage of uneducated people online So do all the other countries and they make different kinds of "sins" regarding to proper writing. > who use Latin without diacritics (secer, solja, casa instead of šećer, šolja, čaša). This is mostly because we didn't have proper keyboard support in leading operating systems for a very long time and many people got used to typing like that. Also, a lot of hardware is still sold without proper keyboard layout (you can change it in software, but then you have to remember which of the curly brackets is used for what letter). On mobile devices, typing with diacritics is much slower. These are all problems of Serbia being a small market and software solutions by big western companies for our use cases are often sub-par. It isn't a product of having digraphia.

foepys 9y ago
Shouldn't it be the opposite if there is a good dictionary for autocorrect? Or is there just no good dictionary?
- Asooka 9y ago
  Autocorrect for Slavic languages is a somewhat hard problem due to all the different conjugations (wrong word?) you can impose on a word. In English for instance, a noun can be in singular form, or in plural form. In Slavic languages, it can be in many forms - (singular, plural, dual) * (all the cases) * ("a", "the" -- if the language has the distinction). Adjectives then get all these, but times the three genders they need to agree with. Verbs can be conjugated in many ways, too. So a good autocorrect system needs to be grammar-aware to know that the word you're correcting is e.g. an adjective that's agreeing with a feminine singular noun in the accusative case. None of them do that from what I've seen. It's not all bad, since you mostly know what you're trying to write and just picking the closest word by levenstein distance does the job, but it can definitely be done better. One downside is you need to have every variant of every word in the dictionary which kind of makes it needlessly large in size, and I've sometimes found variants missing and had to add them.
  - foepys 9y ago
    I see, thank you for the insight. It seems to be a similar but much harder problem to the German dictionaries which don't know how to deal with compound words. Android is also missing a lot of forms for verbs in second person singular.
    - dahauns 9y ago
      Bah yes, this drives me nuts. I don't get it, compound words aren't rocket science, and even some level of grammar awareness shouldn't be so hard considering the rather low expectations towards autocorrect when it comes to correctness.
      - int_19h 9y ago
        They just want us all to give up and learn English. ~
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - bshimmin 9y ago
    For verbs, it's called conjugation, for nouns declension. Broadly, the system of words having different endings is called inflection.
    - smcl 9y ago
      Nice clarification - I've been using declension/conjugation interchangeably for the last year or so and I'm glad to see it resolved pretty unambiguously!
  - hawski 9y ago
    Polish is the most popular Latin script Slavic language and has quite a nice market. After using Google keyboard for a few years I still daily add new words to it's dictionary. With English it is very rare. Many times autocorrect has word only in present-masculine form. Or it doesn't have subjunctive form. Even for words I consider common. I can only imagine how it can be for less popular Slavic languages.
Kostic 9y ago
> This is mostly because we didn't have proper keyboard support in leading operating systems for a very long time and many people got used to typing like that. There was proper support for Cyrillic and Latin basically from Windows XP. Also many other Linux distros supported our scripts from early on. On the mobile front, there was also a support for both scripts relatively early on. I remmember using both Cyrillic and Latin keyboards on Android 2.1, in 2008. > On mobile devices, typing with diacritics is much slower. On the older devices which had physical buttons, sure. But on Android with QWERTZ/ЉЊЕРТЗ software keyboard that simply isn't the case anymore. > These are all problems of Serbia being a small market and software solutions by big western companies for our use cases are often sub-par. It isn't a product of having digraphia. Not directly but indirectly. If we had just one script, there would be more software solutions because it would be easier to develop them. Nowadays you mostly get some kind of support with/for Serbian Latin or no support at all, as you said.
- jumasheff 9y ago
  Kyrgyz here. For an average PC user it was/is really hard to find option in the system settings where you could choose another keyboard layout. Especially when OS is in Russian and Russian alphabet lacks "only" 3 Kyrgyz-specific symbols: "ө", "ү", "ң". Many of the users don't even suspect that there is a support for Kyrgyz in Windows, Ubuntu and later versions of Android.
codedokode 9y ago
I don't understand why virtual keyboards (e.g. on Android) cannot have letters with diacritic along with normal letters (not hidden behind long tap popup). That should not be difficult to do.
- yorwba 9y ago
  They can and do (maybe not standard on Serbian phones, though). My German Android keyboard has extra keys for äöüß. They make typing somewhat harder, because all the keys have to be smaller to fit
  - Kostic 9y ago
    Usually carrier provided phones come preconfigured with the Serbian Latin as the base language and come with a fully-fledged Latin keyboard with all of the extra letters visible. Some phones from the carriers (LG phones notably) come with the default Android Serbian Cyrillic localization and Cyrillic keyboard. If you buy a mobile phone without a contract, you will go to the first time setup wizard which will ask you what language you want to use. You will, among other languages, have Српски (Serbian) and Srpski (Serbian Latin). Depending on what you choose, you will get the appropriate keyboard. There are also other keyboards which provide an easy way to input both Latin and Cyrillic characters from one keyboard application. Also, every key is large enough because we don't have a lot of letters in contrast to English (30 letters). The biggest alternative keyboard application is the Google's GBoard application[1][2]. [1] http://i.imgur.com/s7kNaBZ.png http://i.imgur.com/s7kNaBZ.png [2] http://i.imgur.com/9OrAItF.png http://i.imgur.com/9OrAItF.png
  - dahauns 9y ago
    As an Austrian I'd like to know what keyboard app this is - I wasn't aware of any that did this on Android (with Umlauts in my case). Nokia were actually the only company I know of consistently providing extra keys for umlauts since the dawn of smartphones...

dragandj 9y ago

Or, you know, people do a lot of typing in English or on English keyboard (when programming), and don't care or even want to switch keyboards to type something with diacritics.

rubber_duck 9y ago

Is your name Kostic or Kostić ? There's one reason. The other is that typing out diacritics is a chore and people get what you mean without them anyway. Especially for programmers - we do most typing in English which doesn't use them, it's not in my "muscle memory". I am talking about casual messaging - for formal writing you probably do come off as illiterate if you don't bother to use them.

pawelmi 9y ago
For Polish (on computers) we have a keyboard layout called "polish programmer" widely adopted many years ago affectively making the original "polish typewriter" layout (that mapped diacritics to separate keys) almost extinct. For typing diacritics AltGr is used (eg. ą = AltGr+a). Typing without diacritics is considered clumsy at least within the groups of people I interact with. On mobile it is a bit more relaxed, but the dictionary autocorrection is sort of OK. Conjugation, declension etc. complicates things, but you have the stem + most common suffix autocorrected, so usually it is a matter of erasing last 1-2 letters and changing them if needed. Also the Markov chain alike logic of autosuggestion quite often is right with the inflection.
Kostic 9y ago
Kostić but I use Kostic when I write English. If I use Serbian Latin (when I communicate with Croatians, for example) I would write down Kostić. The problem with not writing out diacritics is that Serbian is a language with a fully phonetic alphabets. You don't need to ever guess how words are written or read. You lose greatest feature of the Serbian language if you don't use diacritics, when using the Latin keyboard. I shouldn't, ever, guess how a Serbian word is read when I see it.
- kwhitefoot 9y ago
  > a language with a fully phonetic alphabet So there are no dialects or regional accents? My Norwegian teacher tried to tell me the same thing thirty years ago. For Norwegian it is manifestly untrue because pronunciation varies from valley to valley.

vsl 9y ago

This is not "uneducated" people, this is people getting used to type in like that in the 90s and not loosing the habit - or possibly simply perfecting the speed. It's not about keyboards only, but about software simply not having support for non-ASCII characters. Even in 2017, there's too many American companies that won't accept non-ASCII names (even like mine, which fits into Latin1). It's the same with Czechs: 15-20 years ago, typing without diacritics was perfectly normal. Some people still do. So ,no. Not uneducated.