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The AI community would be taken more seriously if they didn't over-exaggerate or even straight up lie about their achievements like it is done in that article t
by tokinonagare 4y ago
The AI community would be taken more seriously if they didn't over-exaggerate or even straight up lie about their achievements like it is done in that article title.
Hokkien, specifically the version mentioned in the article (Taiwanese Southern Min) has two main writing systems: Chinese characters and Latin letters based romanization. Heck, that's actually more than most languages in the world! The Tâi-lô[1] system, a slight modification of Pe̍h-ōe-jī was recently standardized by the government. On the other hand, Chinese characters can be used to write Taiwanese, not just Classical Chinese or Standard Chinese (Mandarin), save for a few words that are often written using Latin or bopomofo letters. It's true that a large number of speakers have not been taught either of those writing systems, but it does not mean they don't exist. I've already met someone which taught me few words in Hokkien (the infamous chia̍h-pá--bōe 食飽未) and write it in Chinese characters for me.
I'm working with various Sinitic languages, and Taiwanese is far from being the worst when it comes to available resources in written form (for my use cases dictionnaries).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%A2i-u%C3%A2n_L%C3%B4-m%C3%A1-j%C4%AB_Phing-im_Hong-%C3%A0n https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%A2i-u%C3%A2n_L%C3%B4-m%C3...
- vore 4y agoIf most people aren't able to use those systems, I think it's about as good as unwritten, especially if the target audience is your everyday speaker who wouldn't be familiar.
- tokinonagare 4y agoI disagree. It makes a big difference: creating a writing system is not a simple as it seems and it's a task that require quite a lot of work, especially when there is huge dialectal variations in-between dialects. When a system already exist it means there is already a bunch of tools available such as dictionaries, input method[1], a corpus of texts even if small or medium, including text books. That can be used both for AI and teaching. This make the task way less daunting than doing everything from scratch. In case of Taiwanese, there is a small but existing corpus of literature, as a 5 seconds Google/Wikipedia search shows[2][3]. [1] https://aclanthology.org/O16-1026.pdf https://aclanthology.org/O16-1026.pdf [2] https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%87%BA%E8%AA%9E%E7%99%BD%E8%A9%B1%E6%96%87#%E4%BB%A3%E8%A1%A8%E4%BD%9C%E5%93%81 https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%87%BA%E8%AA%9E%E7%99%BD%E8... [3] https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%8F%B0%E6%96%87%E5%B0%8F%E8%AA%AA https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%8F%B0%E6%96%87%E5%B0%8F%E8...
- Apocryphon 4y agoMost people are able to use those systems, it’s just the demand to learn Hokkien/Min Nan/Taigi is fairly low and thus there’s nothing like Duolingo or Rosetta Stone support for the dialect, or many tutors nor language books for them.
- samus 4y agoThe problem is that most speakers were never taught how to use these systems. Most people only learn Pinyin and written and spoken Standard Chinese in school. Cantonese survives and is thriving because it dominates as a spoken language in education and in public. Even so, only few people are familiar with any of the romanization systems for Cantonese. In Taiwan, Hokkien and other languages are not so established, and were even suppressed for some time. Therefore, it's not so surprising that even fewer people know about writing systems for these.