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> Chinese gets even more complicated being a language without an alphabet. If I could be very pedantic for a moment... Mandarin can be written in many alphabe
by HumanDrivenDev 9y ago
> Chinese gets even more complicated being a language without an alphabet.
If I could be very pedantic for a moment...
Mandarin can be written in many alphabets. Almost every single native speaker one earth uses an alphabet to input chinese characters on computers and phones. And almost every native speaker learns their language using an alphabet - at least initially.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanyu_pinyin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanyu_pinyin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo
- peterburkimsher 9y agoThe alphabets are phonetic representations, and require reading in order to type. I've made Pingtype, which lets you decompose a character into the parts, and rebuild another similar character if your handwriting recognition isn't perfect. https://pingtype.github.io https://pingtype.github.io
- Manishearth 9y agoTo get even more pedantic: I wouldn't say Cangjie or Dayi inputs are an "alphabet", and a sizeable number of users use those. They're certainly a way of inputting characters; and a method of looking at how glyphs can be broken down (one by stroke order, one by shape), but for it to be an alphabet there must be a rough phoneme mapping AFAICT; which there isn't. (but yes, the majority seems to use phonetic/alphabetic input methods, i.e. pinyin or zhuyin.)
- HumanDrivenDev 9y agoAs a fellow pedant I made sure to use words like "almost" (:
- Manishearth 9y agoRight, it's not even "almost"; I'm saying a significant number of folks use Cangjie -- not a majority; but still a large number.