5 ms·

> 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 writin

> 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 10y ago
Shouldn't it be the opposite if there is a good dictionary for autocorrect? Or is there just no good dictionary?
- Asooka 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y ago
        They just want us all to give up and learn English. ~
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - bshimmin 10y ago
    For verbs, it's called conjugation, for nouns declension. Broadly, the system of words having different endings is called inflection.
    - smcl 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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...

foepys 10y ago

Shouldn't it be the opposite if there is a good dictionary for autocorrect? Or is there just no good dictionary?

Asooka 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y ago
      They just want us all to give up and learn English. ~
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- bshimmin 10y ago
  For verbs, it's called conjugation, for nouns declension. Broadly, the system of words having different endings is called inflection.
  - smcl 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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...