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Apple’s new keyboard feature in iOS 15 is insult to Cantonese speaking community
- amanbolat 5y agoAs I know there are more people in the south part of China Mainland, who speak and write Cantonese and they have always been using pinyin or keyboard. So if you already can use one type of input why bother and create one more for a smaller group? Nobody in government cares about what type of keyboard you use... In addition, most of native Russian speakers do use English/American keyboard to write Russian because it is much easier rather than finding one with Cyrillic symbols.
- wruza 5y agoApple also translated “hey siri” into “privet siri” in russian. “Hey” means both greeting and exclamation (like oy) in english, but “privet” is just a greeting that is used only once a day. It’s like you have a coworker Alice and when you ask her something instead of saying “hey Alice could you please …” you say “greetings Alice …” every single time, sometimes few times in a row. It’s sounds so creepy. But the reason for that is likely just an ignorance, not political games.
- akmarinov 5y agoYeah, Apple is the worst at supporting things outside of California and especially localization. The last time Apple added support for a new language was iOS 4 and brought the number of supported languages to about 30. In the meantime Android does more than 180, with all sort of region specific dialects. Even Windows Phone supported 50 while it was around.
- austinshea 5y agoThe worst? The hyperbole undercuts any more subtle point you’re trying to make.
- akmarinov 5y agoIt is the worst among the big tech giants, no hyperbole there.
- philliphaydon 5y agoI would say Microsoft is worst. It doesn’t support Zhuyin on screen keyboard. So my wife can’t type Chinese when she uses a laptop without a Zhuyin keyboard. Edit: would love to know why I’m downvoted.
- BoardsOfCanada 5y agoThe thing I miss most from Android after moving to iOS is how well auto completion worked when mixing multiple languages. On iOS I so often start typing, notice that the keyboard is set to the wrong language, then when I change language the half typed word (that didn't autocomplete and made me realize I had the wrong language set) is then autocompleted in the language I'm switching FROM so I have to erase it and start over. Sigh, I'd think that enough apple developers were bilingual so they'd notice the problem. On Android I could just use swiftkey and type away without switching language in advance.
- rtpg 5y agoFor me it's even weirder cuz I feel like I get (for example) English autocomplete with a french keyboard and French with English. It happens consistently enough that I'm very convinced there's a state machine bug in the UI between the autocomplete and the language picker. You don't even have to be _that_ language proficient to end up with English/Qwerty + some random other language. So weird that this is so buggy.
- bsaul 5y agoThe hypothesis never mentioned in the post, is i think that apple fears being kicked out of China for promoting cantonese or regional languages, going against the will of the CCP to make Mandarin the only official chineese language.
- 07d046 5y agoI doubt this is the case here. Cantonese is an official language of Hong Kong and Macau and the mother tongue of tens of millions in Guangdong. Language politics is complicated but I don't think the CCP is so crudely trying to eliminate languages. Apple also has keyboards for Uyghur and Tibetan, which are probably more sensitive languages.
- chemmail 5y agoDo you live in Hong Kong? They are slowly but systematically and surely doing that to Cantonese.
- 07d046 5y agoAs far as I know, there is a gradual trend to push Mandarin at the expense of Cantonese, and there is reason for concern, but I doubt there's a connection between this and Apple's decision here. (There's a reason I said "crudely".)
- tasogare 5y ago> I don't think the CCP is so crudely trying to eliminate languages They are doing it. Sources: few HK friends that were really worried about the future of their language and culture. And this was before the security law.
- The_suffocated 5y ago> "...but I don't think the CCP is so crudely trying to eliminate languages." Last time I checked, less than half of the population in Guangzhou knew how to speak Cantonese.
- Havoc 5y agoPretty bizarre that stuff like this happens. I'd have thought that Apple would have a native focus group of sorts to check this out. Or failing that just scrape together a couple actual chinese among their 150k employees to get some relevant eyeballs on it. And not just China...in general. Even small companies (<500) often keep track of their employee's nationality and language proficiency.
- diveanon 5y agoThey do have a native focus group in China, composed entirely of senior party officials.
- blowski 5y ago> Would you type Russian with an American keyboard? I thought that was relatively common, just one of those things people are accustomed to.
- golergka 5y agoIn the 90s, before wide adoption of Unicode, there were several competing encodings for Russian in ASCII, such as KOI-8, Windows and others. In some cases, it was just easier to type Russian in English language as it was spoken, which was called "translit", from transliteration: naprimer, vot tak. Later, as first mobile phones got wide adoption in late 90s and early 00s, they, too, didn't yet have russian keyboards, and translit was once again used, although in modified form, with wider use of digits in place of letters.
- elros 5y agoI think the comparison made by the author is unfortunate because of their lack of context of Russian transliteration. I speak Chinese and have some Russian language understanding so I feel I can give a better explanation: Imagine you had no Cyrillic keyboard and had to instead type in transliteration. So that if you want to obtain the following sentence: Все люди рождаются свободными и равными в своем достоинстве и правах. You'd have to type this instead: Vse lyudi rozhdayutsya svobodnymi i ravnymi v svoyem dostoinstve i pravakh. Not so bad, millions of people do it every day. However, this only works because the transliteration system is based on mapping common values of the Latin alphabet into Russian. So the cognitive distance is not so bad. Now, let's imagine instead, that you'd be forced to use a transliteration that was originally used based on mapping English language pronounciation values, such that you'd have to type something like: Vsay lyoodee rogedahyootseea svoughboughdnuhmee ee rahvnuhmee v svohyam doughstougheenstvay ee prahvahch. That's closer to the idea of what the typing of Cantonese in Pinyin instead of Jyutping would feel like.
- throwaway2037 5y agoThis is a very good post! Related: I had a Bulgarian co-worker years ago. She said growing up, there was wide-spread use of both Cyrillic and Roman characters for Bulgarian language. She said she was always able to express herself using either character set. However, I don't know anything about the cultural context of Russian. Naively, I assume it is strictly Cyrillic. It would be nice if some native Russian speakers can comment about transliteration systems used on PCs.
- i5heu 5y agoIs there a way to bypass the medium loginwall? This is a big annoyance.
- joeberon 5y agoThis might sound super inflammatory but I honestly believe that Apple scores more social leverage by supporting unused and endangered languages than mainstream Asian languages
- insensible 5y agoHopefully people speaking up will change that equation so that everyone is served.
- raverbashing 5y agoEdit 2: ok apparently iOS doesn't support Jyutping out of the box, which seems to be the whole issue here, and with this detail I agree that one shouldn't be more prioritary than having Jyutping first. > Pinyin is a romanization system designed for Mandarin. Why type Cantonese and Shanghainese in Mandarin Pinyin? (Edit: yes it might have to do with political pressure as well) I'm assuming if Apple did this (which is not a feature you can "just do") it was something that people do and there's a logic to it. Yes, maybe Apple is in the wrong, but this sounds like more an overreaction, since you write Cantonese and Mandarin with the same alphabet. > Would you type Russian with an American keyboard? Yes, yes I would? If I needed to type one-off words? Though the comparison would be most like, would you type Icelandic or French with an English keyboard? (think of the missing symbols, etc) (with no love to Medium messing with cut-paste)
- crooked-v 5y ago> since you write Cantonese and Mandarin with the same alphabet Pinyin is a system designed for Mandarin specifically, while Jyutping[1] is the missing input method for Cantonese. To put it another way, this is like giving a German person an English keyboard and, when they ask you where the umlauts and eszett are, telling them that they don't need that because the English keyboard now has autocomplete support for German dialectal spellings. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyutping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyutping
- metgen 5y ago> To put it another way, this is like giving a German person an English keyboard and, when they ask you where the umlauts and eszett are, telling them that they don't need that because the English keyboard now has autocomplete support for German dialectal spellings. German persons are normally quite accustomed to typing umlauts and eszett as ae/oe/ue/ss. Just think about domain names with German words, let alone pretty much every English-based website form would not accept any umlauts as an input.
- raverbashing 5y agoYes, so my analogy makes sense (see the before the last paragraph in my comment)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- slver 5y agoNew rule, we ban the concepts of being "insulted" and "outraged" and we focus on constructive discussion from now on as a species. As for Apple, their localization is quite half-hearted for about half the world, so that's just how they roll, unfortunately.
- blowski 5y agoAre there any times when it is acceptable to be insulted or outraged?
- slver 5y agoI know it feels like too much, you just feel like being outraged sometimes, don't you? But trust me, we gotta try it for a few centuries and see how it works out. You'll be surprised by our progress.
- blowski 5y agoThere are times when outrage is entirely the right emotion to feel. The problem is when we live in a permanent state of outrage, or when we pretend to be outraged to get what we want. If we "ban outrage", then somebody needs to be the outrage police and decide when it's acceptable.
- slver 5y agoLet’s ban emotions entirely.
- blntechie 5y ago> Why would I type my native language with a foreign language keyboard? Would you type Russian with an American keyboard? I don’t know the intricacies of the Chinese languages but typing foreign languages with English keyboard is pretty common worldwide I guess? It certainly is for Indian languages at least.
- pdpi 5y agoEnglish keyboards (especially ANSI-style US English keyboards) are very popular, but that's largely a matter of historical availability and (in hacker circles) bad support for the sort of punctuation you use for programming. Flip it on its head then — would you want to type English on a Cyrillic keyboard? Even just sticking to Latin alphabet keyboard layouts, there's plenty of variations that make different keyboards quite inconvenient for the wrong language — Spanish and Portuguese are very similar languages, yet you wouldn't want to write Spanish using a Portuguese layout (You can probably type ñ, but I don't think there's a way to type ¿ and ¡ directly). I use the US International layout because it's "good enough" to write Portuguese while being a lot more convenient for programming, but the standard US English layout is completely unusable for me, and for most European languages, which tend to have a variety of diacritics. Even on US International, I can type umlauts (ä) but have no idea how to type Hungarian double acute marks (a̋).
- MagnumOpus 5y agoThere is no way to type Hungarian double acute accents on US International or UK Extended keyboards. You have to use workarounds like copy/paste, Alt-codes, or substitution macros. (Also, there is no double acute a in Hungarian, only o and u.)
- pdpi 5y agoThanks for the correction. I knew Hungarian used double acutes in some vowels, and should've looked up which ones instead of picking one at random.
- em-bee 5y ago
- LeffeBrune 5y ago> Why would I type my native language with a foreign language keyboard? Would you type Russian with an American keyboard? Yes, I would, and I have been doing this all my life when no Russian layout is available. This is called transliteration, and I would argue most Russian speaking tech users used it at least once in their life.
- Quiark 5y agoThis is probably a bad example. The problem with typing pinyin instead of jyutping is that you must type a very different set of latin characters to get the result you want.
- calyth2018 5y agoAnd the problem with jyutping is that it's not a standard romanization taught to Hong Kongers. Wasn't the case for sure when I was in school in Colonial Hong Kong. Pretty sure not the case in SAR Hong Kong. Some of the romanization of Cantonese sounds are baffling. It's a bit like watching English speakers struggle to pronounce the Q sound in Qing (e.g. Qing dynasty).
- samus 5y agoThen they should use a different one. There are at least half a dozen of these, and most of them do not require any symbols not found on most keyboards. Jyutping is actually an outlier among them for how it uses j and z. These are truly not intuitive for people used to the english, french or spanish alphabets.
- calyth2018 5y agoThe key thing, IMO, isn't whether they should use a different one. The key thing is to pick one that will be taught to all student, so that it becomes a standard. Good luck to anyone in the HKSAR government trying to propose that though - it would just be politicized like what the author of the article tried.
- 5y ago
- mlang23 5y agoApple has a ton of internationalisation bugs. I am a VoiceOver user, so some of the things I "see" might not be obvious to other users. When I started with iOS 2012, umlauts in PDF documents were not pronounced correctly. This basically made PDF reading unusable for documents in my native language, because umlauts are quite prominent in german. When I entered my date of birth into the contact app, I immediately found out someone at Apple had placed an exception for "1979" into the pronounciation database. All other 4 digit numbers are spoken correctly in German, except for 1979 and 1234. These are being spoken in english, 1979 as "Nineteenseventynine" and 1234 as "one two three four". Thats not the only weird exception. I could go on and write a full list. And all of the bugs (except for the umlauts in PDF thing) have never been fixed since I first noticed them. Some do exist since 9 years!
- tikkabhuna 5y agoI’ve been learning Cantonese and trying to find resources or support for it is so difficult. It’s easy to take for granted how easy it is to start learning French, German, or Spanish.
- gaudat 5y agoI think that's because Cantonese does not have an objective way (as I know) to gauge speaker proficiency. And mainly because it is a mostly spoken language. By the way, ring me up if you wanna talk in Cantonese with a native speaker :)
- tikkabhuna 5y agoThanks, I appreciate that! For others reading, one of the best resources I've found is InspirLang: https://inspirlang.com/ https://inspirlang.com/
- fredwu 5y agoAs a native Shanghainese speaker I am extremely confused (and curious!). Cantonese at least has a written form, but Shanghainese AFAIK has no written form, so what does "Shanghainese dialectal spelling" even mean? :\
- tasogare 5y agoWu language has a written form: Chinese characters. You can check reading of characters on this website: http://wu-chinese.com/minidict/ http://wu-chinese.com/minidict/ or this one https://www.wugniu.com https://www.wugniu.com The fact you don't know about it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Same goes for Taiwanese Southern Min: a lot of natives think "it's not a written language" where in fact there are both romanizations and a way to write it with Chinese characters. The central government is actively fighting standardization effort (both romanization and writing in Chinese characters) and push the fiction of Wu and other Sinitic languages (Cantonese, Hakka, Min, etc.) as merely dialects, as a way to destroy them. The method is not new, is has been policy in France, Taiwan and probably other countries. It's a real shame that Apple is validation China's propaganda on that front.
- fredwu 5y agoThanks for the info, that's very interesting. > The fact you don't know about it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I take your point. Interestingly, growing up in the late 80s, we were briefly taught Zhuyin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo), but not this. I don't believe my parents (both native Shanghainese) even know how to "spell" Shanghainese. Ah, the lost art...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- colordrops 5y agoThis article definitely has a political subtext. Spoken Cantonese and mandarin are mutually unintelligible, but in written form, at least without colloquialisms, they are basically the same language. I'm a non-chinese that studied Chinese, so I have no horse in this race. I do think they should support the Cantonese input method, but there's no reason the pinyin method wouldn't work just as well, other than lack of familiarity. I'm sure Apple is excluding it at the behest of the mainland government, which sucks, but just this isn't as cut and dried as the article makes it.
- pgt 5y ago"I'm posting this on Medium for a wider reach." /me opens up Medium page: "Read this story with a free account." closes tab Sorry, but Medium is restricting your reach.
- Hamuko 5y ago>Why would I type my native language with a foreign language keyboard? Would you type Russian with an American keyboard? I've actually been using an American keyboard layout to write Japanese because I can't find how to type 「」 with my native Finnish layout.
- jiofih 5y ago> Is this it? Is Apple done pretending to support linguistic diversity? Calm down, Karen. You just showed us how Apple is shipping custom keyboards to regional dialects in China, and adding support for endangered languages, what is the “pretending” part there. You can be unhappy with changes without taking a crap on the entire thing. The outrage in this post seems a bit unnecessary and not the kind of dialogue that brings actual change. Why not show some examples of the custom keyboard and the diff input method so people can understand what it’s about? Maybe it helps an Apple employee passing by to champion that.
- blowski 5y agoI think you could express your point better if you didn't start with "Calm down, Karen.".
- inkyoto 5y agoIt is likely that «pinyin» was either used as a generic word to reference a romanisation system specific each of the Cantonese and Shanghainese languages, or it was a blunder on behalf of Apple due to a poorly prepared communiqué. Also likely, it was a bit of both. Some Cantonese dictionaries still translate the «Yale romanisation system of Cantonese» as 「耶魯拼音」 («yèh lóuh ping yām» – lit. «Yale pinyin»), but Jyutping is translated as simply Jyutping. When the keyboard becomes available, it will be either Jyutping or Yale. Google Gboard keyboard, for instance, supports the Yale Canonese romanisation system, which is titled simply as 「中文（香港）」. If Apple comes out with a Jyutping keyboard for iOS, that will make me very happy, and if Apple adds the Jyutping keyboard to macOS, that will make me personally even more happy. RE: language vs dialect. Western linguistics considers Mandarin, Yue, Wu, Gan-Hakka, Min etc to be distinct Sinitic languages since all of them demonstrate a sufficient number of characteristical features to be classified as separate languages. All of them have the same superstrate language (Middle Chinese), apart from Min that had branched off somewhere between Old (Ancient) Chinese and Middle Chinese and, thus, has a different «parent» language. Linguistics slightly more than entirely did not exist in ancient China as a science, and the word that has been frequently used throughout centuries in China to describe varieties of Chinese translates into English as «dialect». This view has even influenced the Japanese lingustics. Historically, China had not had an single official state language since the end of the Tang dynasty, which was the last time in the Chinese history when all people spoke more or less the same language (Middle Chinese), and by 1930s China had been facing the problem of the lack of the official national language that Germany was facing in the 19th century when Hoch Deutsch was finally standardised and promulgated as the country's state language to unite the nation. National Languages Committee of the Republic of China settled on Mandarin as the uniting language in 1932. The issue of «language» vs «dialect» has also become heavily politicised, especially in recent years due to the undue CCP interference that is now seeping into Hong Kong. Using the CCP supported official definition, Mandarin is also another dialect. Just like any other Sinitic ahem language is anyway. It is a shame that the official multilingual education where kids in schools could teach Mandarin and their first family language(s) (due to the intermarriage, Chinese parents oftentimes speak profoundly distinct Sinitic languages) is not an option on the mainland. The increasing interference of the CCP in Hong Kong has also concerned the role of Cantonese as the primary local language with CCP sponsored «professors» of lingustics making wild claims, which, coupled with other extensive factors, rightfully and expectedly has given rise to the development of a dictinct Hong Kong identity with the Cantonese language being a major part of it, therefore the wrath in the article. 加油呀.
- gaudat 5y agoyau mou yan taai dak ming lei duen yeh Hope that keyboard supports this kind of input. That's what comes to my mind for informal phonetic input of Cantonese.
- inkyoto 5y agoYes, there is one for iOS: https://apps.apple.com/au/app/%E5%BB%A3%E6%9D%B1%E8%A9%B1%E8%BC%B8%E5%85%A5%E6%B3%95/id918088646 https://apps.apple.com/au/app/%E5%BB%A3%E6%9D%B1%E8%A9%B1%E8... It uses the British spelling of Cantonese that is still in use in HK for the personal and street name transliteration.
- calyth2018 5y agotai dak ming. gau ging hai ng hai jyutping, or ng ji. taai duc ming. gao ging hai ng hai jyutping, or ng ji.
- jhanschoo 5y agoThere are important nuances that make Apple's decision less radical, and make the author's decision more radical than what the average Westerner and young Chinese will perceive, whose notion of language and society is greatly influenced by European linguistic nationalism. For example, observe that top-level commenter gaudat is writing in a romanization that is not Jyutping, which the author proposes. The romanizations that the author proposes are really good except for where it matters regarding common usage: it is primarily used by linguists, and most non-Mandarin communities don't have one dominant consistent romanization that everybody understands or learns in school. But everyone learns Mandarin and Pinyin in school in HK and Taiwan. Most written Cantonese input use some form of stroke order or radical input. Hence in terms of user-friendliness, the approach that Apple goes with is actually optimal, to the detriment to those with linguistic-nationalist agendas. Modern Chinese may think that governments are trying to destroy culture by not standardizing written Chinese languages and romanizations and teaching them in a curriculum. But it is more negligence, and a lack of will to pursue a linguistic-nationalist goal than active destruction since it never existed. Rather it is mainland China pursuing (Western) communist ideals that brought writing vernacular Mandarin from a completely low-brow affair to something worthy of educated attention. It is important to note that the prestige of Mandarin pronunciation pre-dates the CCP and even written Mandarin: it is the spoken language of the Central Plains and was the spoken language of the imperial bureaucracy. It was what anyone who sought advancement in the imperial bureaucracy needed to learn to speak.
- calyth2018 5y agoThank you. It's actually a sane take on the issue that isn't more about politics than the actual matter of a Cantonese speaker trying to type Chinese on a computer. And thank you for pointing gaudat's comment. I've had a response, if anything, two version of the same response, which I think a typical Cantonese speaker should know what I'm saying. Back in the day, Google's "Cantonese pinyin" IME should be able to work with the kind of romanization and produce actual words. The absolute key was a standard that's taught in a cirriculum. Pinyin is a standard that's taught in mainland schools (and arguably in HK schools teaching Mandarin). Jyutping is not taught in school, and I'd wager that an average Cantonese speaker would find some of jyutping's romanization to be baffling. It wasn't taught when I was in school in Colonial Hong Kong, and I'm pretty sure that's not the case right now with school aged children in SAR Hong Kong. Cantonese as a form of IME isn't destroyed by Apple or CCP, but rather by a lack of coordination to standardize to a single form taught as a curriculum.
- calyth2018 5y agoJyutping was not taught in school, most definitely not the case when I studied primary school in Colonial HK. Wasn't the case when I went back and worked a few years, watching little cousins type their school work with something other than Jyutping. So I'm not even sure how much uptake a jyutping keyboard there would be. For me, as someone who don't type Chinese enough that I'd struggle badly to use an IME based on strokes, I actually use a pinyin keyboard, because: a) pinyin can be found as first class citizen on any OS; b) for someone like me, who speaks Cantonese, and could butcher Mandarin enough to order food, and have no formal education in either pinyin or jyutping, I find it a lot easier for me to guess in pinyin than in jyutping. Most of the Cantonese jyutping (or "cantonese pinyin" keyboards) have a specific transliteration of Cantonese sounds to the English alphabet in a way that I can't grasp easily. The only exception was the Google Cantonese Pinyin IME, which was decently good at taking various transliteration that someone might try, and return a list of reasonable words. But it has since been discontinued, I couldn't find install it. To expand to why there's an inconsistency with transliterating Cantonese sounds... It's not taught in a standardize, formal manner in school, and you can see that with the author's name here, 阿擇. He has Chaaak, which to me is a transliteration pretty far off from the actual pronunciation. http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/scripts/wordsearch.php?level=0 http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/scripts/wordsearch.php?leve... suggests "zaak", while I might have attempted "zhak", or "zhaak", or "jak" with the Google Cantonese pinyin IME, with the latter a closer map to the actual sound of the word IMO. I wouldn't associate z with the start of the sound. I've seen some older methods uses "ts" instead. c) for someone like me who struggles with writing / typing the word based on strokes, and find that IMEs like jyutping is not a great choice either, a last resort is for me to look up a word from English, and lo and behold, pinyin is most likely to show along side with a Chinese word when you try to translate from English to Chinese. This provides a convenient way for me to mentally retain a pinyin mapping to the word. Given pinyin is standardized a lot better than jyutping ever has, and the sound to letter mapping is definitely more understood to me, it's far more convenient. I type Chinese, to my family, in pinyin. It would actually be quite nice have Cantonese word that's accessible via pinyin. It's a fucking mess to try to look up a primarily Cantonese word for someone like me, because again, there wasn't a standardized version taught consistently. And I don't find jyutping taught now. All this just seems to me a tempest in a fucking teacup. As a matter of practicality, I'd welcome it.