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Japanese Typewriters
- sohkamyung 5y agoSee also the book, "The Chinese Typewriter: A History" By Thomas S. Mullaney [1] for more on the history of Japanese and Chinese typewriters. [1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/chinese-typewriter https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/chinese-typewriter
- 55555 5y ago"Or visit our sponsor NSFW" Well that's one way to monetize your in-depth blog posts about the history of Japanese typewriters.
- cpach 5y agoಠ_ಠ
- brenainn 5y agoIf you follow the link there's fullscreen hardcore pornography playing behind the transparent age warning. Incredibly not safe for work.
- backspace_ 5y agoSo where is the line for nsfw, visiting a porn site, seeing the actual porn video, or do I need to download the file to my work computer and then watch it?
- azalemeth 5y agoI found it oddly refreshingly honest.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoPretty sure that violates some laws, it should hide content before the age warning.
- Blikkentrekker 5y agoAlmost everything violates some laws in some country.
- unnouinceput 5y agoAnd that's why uBlock Origin is your best friend. No ad for me was shown while uBO count was 20+ for blocked elements.
- zwirbl 5y agoThe link is part of the article, not some ad from an ad-network. And yes, I have uBO active and it shows 20+ blocked for me as well
- unnouinceput 5y agoThis is what it shows for me at the end of the article: https://i.postimg.cc/X7t0JwN7/jap-type.jpg https://i.postimg.cc/X7t0JwN7/jap-type.jpg Maybe because I have NoScript as well, it got cut off? Not that I care anyway.
- cpach 5y agoYup, without JS one will not see the NSFW link.
- qwertox 5y agoYesterday I set up a Pi-Hole container which my internal DNS server now uses as an upstream resolver. As a first time Pi-Hole user I can now confirm that it does its job just fine. For some odd reason uBlock didn't block it for me, after I disabled Pi-Hole to check. It's not a first party ad. Maybe there is a reason why I added amazon-adsytem.com to the uBlock whitelist.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Normille 5y agoInteresting article. There's also one on how typing Japanese is done on modern computers: https://blog.gatunka.com/2009/09/12/using-a-japanese-ime/ https://blog.gatunka.com/2009/09/12/using-a-japanese-ime/ It all sounds horribly complicated, although it may be one of those procedures that's easier to do than to describe. These kind of writing systems really don't seem suited to being input via a conventional keyboard, even with software assistance. I wonder if things will change [or have changed] with the advent of touch screens and styluses? [stylii?] which would allow the characters to be written manually, using finger or stylus and then have the software convert this to the appropriate typed character?
- bluepizza 5y ago> It all sounds horribly complicated, although it may be one of those procedures that's easier to do than to describe. Definitely. It's still annoying when you type half width in a field that requires full width or something like that. But the keyboard changing feels natural - only badly designed UIs feel clunky.
- rtpg 5y agoThere has been the stylus tech for a while to do good input, but typing out phonetically is basically much quicker (and the "flick"-based inputs of touchscreens even faster). Do you want to write out like 7 lines on a screen for a character? or just type its 2-4 letter phonetic? The current input stuff is basically like T9 crossed with gmail's autocomplete: it's really good at predicting what you want for the most part, and lets you type at very fast speeds whne you're good at stuff. Exaggerating a bit with the GMail autocomplete but some very common fragments will pop up almost instantly when you start typing them in. In a sense the input methods are a solved problem.
- Normille 5y ago>Do you want to write out like 7 lines on a screen for a character? or just type its 2-4 letter phonetic?... >The current input stuff is basically like T9 crossed with gmail's autocomplete... DISCLAIMER: I know nothing about writing Japanese characters. But it was the fact that current methods require typing a phonetic equivalent using an alien character set [ie. Latin] which is then translated back to the desired Japanese character set that seemed so clunky to me. But I'm imagining it from the point of view if I had to learn the Greek or Cyrillic alphabets and type phonetically in them to have the computer then try and guess what I wanted to write in the Latin alphabet. But maybe for Japanese people brought up on this method of entering text, the Latin alphabet is completely familiar, so this disconnect doesn't happen?
- wodenokoto 5y agoThe “related posts” section has some incredible interesting headlines, one of which is already also on the front page of HN right now. Seems like the whole blog is worth looking through
- unnouinceput 5y agoAnyone has a link for some trivia info about speed, in words per minute, for a 1915 / ~1930 Japanese writer using such typewriter vs. an English one?
- jillesvangurp 5y agoKanji, like many Asian scripts, has no word spacing. So what is and is not a word is a bit of a hard problem. Implementing word count for kanji is a non trivial problem. There's a Norwegian that did a machine learned stemmer for Kanji for Elasticsearch at some point to group characters in meaningful groups. Probably characters per minute is a better comparison but it's still apples and oranges as you typically need less characters in kanji to spell out the same thing.
- Blikkentrekker 5y agoWhere to put spaces in Japanese if Japanese should be written with spaces is a trivial and solved problem. Texts intended for children in full hiragana or old video game texts in full hiragana typically include spaces for ease of reading and they agree on where to put them. I don't understand the common argument that Japanese has no concept of “words”; it is true that Japanese orthography lacks them, but Japanese speakers intuitively agree on where spaces should be put. I think the real cause of this might simply be that in romanization, it is common to see spaces put where they shouldn't, and that on one end a common way to romanize contrasts with what feels intuitive makes people think that it's a difficult issue with no easy answer, but there is a very easy and solved answer, one that's simply different from the most common form of romanizing outside of linguistic textbooks. Having said hat, they are no indication for typing speed, but neither are words in English since there can be long and short words too but probably more extreme in Japanese as a sentence that merely consists of a single very long verb would be considered “one word” under this scheme, as that's how it is pronounced prosodically.
- unnouinceput 5y agoYup, I understand that. But a fair comparison would be "here is a novel, in both Japanese and English. Now who will type it faster? The Japanese writer using a Japanese typewriter or the English writer using English typewriter?"
- zackkatz 5y agoThe title should be updated to reflect that it was written in 2009.
- ChrisArchitect 5y ago(2009) please
- ChrisArchitect 5y agoAnother article with some pics from 2016 about early Japanese typewriters https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23898649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23898649
- programmer_dude 5y agoIt appears the Koreans were the smart bunch among east Asians. They ditched the tiresome Chinese writing system and moved on to something much more elegant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul.
- least 5y agoThere is certain advantages certainly of being able to design and impose a new writing system as opposed to one that developed organically. Hangul is an elegantly designed writing system for sure. But to suggest that makes them the "smart bunch" of east Asians comes off as pretty derisive. Hangul has had its own unique issues with regards to typewriter design which has also been alleviated thanks to IME.
- TazeTSchnitzel 5y agoThe Japanese also have a phonetic writing system, kana, which is at least as old as Hangul. But so much useful context is lost when writing in pure kana rather than the standard writing system (a mix of kana, Chinese characters and, occasionally, Latin text) that it's not really used exclusively unless context requires it (children's books, old video games, etc).
- knolax 5y agoIgnoring the fact that Koreans still have to use Chinese characters in technical snd academic contexts and the fact that the unstoppable change of language means that certain spellings are already becoming non-phonetic, from a technical point of view it's the same issue. If you look at Unicode Korean still has to use thousands of characters for precomposed Hangul blocks. Koreans also have to use input methods to convert from keystrokes representing individual Hangul letters to one of the thousands of precomposed Hangul codepoints. In fact the fact that Korean input methods like to change the precomposed characters in the text field as you type makes it more likely to break than Chinese and Japanese input methods.
- programmer_dude 5y agoIt appears the Koreans did not go far enough / did not try hard enough. The better course of action would have been to replace the incompatible bits of their language with things more manageable with IME-less hangul.