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hm, seems the terminology has changed since i was trying to invent the chinese keyboard in childhood. we used to call the chinese characters hieroglyphs (charac
by fedd 16y ago
hm, seems the terminology has changed since i was trying to invent the chinese keyboard in childhood. we used to call the chinese characters hieroglyphs (characters that represent the bigger notions like words or parts of the word), as opposed to letters (characters that represent the sounds). now i see in wikipedia that they are called sinographs and contain of ideograms.
my idea was to split the chinese character to the most primitive strokes like horizontal, vertical, diagonal strokes, squares, commas etc.
i dont know, they have keyboards in china, and they are not that big. do they let to input sounds and then choose from several chars that sound like the input, or implement my childish idea?
- chc 16y agoBoth systems are used, though the shape-based methods use a more sophisticated granularity than simple strokes (for example, there is one component consisting of a diagonal stroke, three horizontal strokes and a square). Relevant Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_computers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_compu...
- andos 16y agoOn western keyboards, Japanese is typed using an input method. Basically, you spell the words using a phonetic convention and the computer guesses what sinograph you meant: you type zitensha, press space, and it hopefully becomes 自転車 (bicycle). Because each of zi, ten, and sha could be the reading of any of multiple characters the computer might guess wrongly. It works pretty much all the time, though. There are also Japanese keyboard layouts featuring all the 51 syllables (besides the latin alphabet). You just type the syllables, there's no phonetic convention, just the guessing game. I don't know how it works for Chinese, though. It's probably the same, I guess. I know that on Mac OS X one can draw the characters with the finger on the touchpad.
- fedd 16y agothanks, i meant something like this from chc link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_computers#Shape-based http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_compu... except the phonetic method you describe, you may enter graphical parts of symbols. so i thought unicode should encode these parts. but there are more than one shape-based method, along with several phonetic methods, so they encode all the possible ideograms, making the unicode chart that big