3 ms·

You could use pinyin or bopomofo as a base. Written Chinese can be thought of as a syllable alphabet with 100s of ways to write each syllable. For a fluent rea

You could use pinyin or bopomofo as a base. Written Chinese can be thought of as a syllable alphabet with 100s of ways to write each syllable. For a fluent reader it is easier to read with those contextual hints, but strictly speaking it is not necessary. Spoken Chinese works just fine without them. Morse code usually has its own vernacular so it is easy to get around the lack of characters.

arp242 3y ago
> You could use pinyin or bopomofo as a base. Ah yeah, that would be the obvious solution today, but neither were invented yet in the 1880s – I was kind of thinking from that viewpoint: "how could they have done better in 1880?", rather than "how could we do better today?" The best I could think of is a UTF-8 like scheme, where a prefix selects the number of digits where less digits represent more common characters. I'm not entirely sure how well that would work in practice as I operated a telegraph exactly once in my life (as a child). I know figure/letter/Cyrillic shifts in telegraphs could cause some problems if the shift got lost or was garbled, but I suppose by prefixing every character solves this – but then again, why didn't they do this for Baudot code/ITA?
- wodenokoto 3y ago
  I hadn’t considered late 18-hundreds as a context, but I’m gonna stick to my guns and say wade-Giles. Wades incarnation goes back to the 1860s. Since you don’t need the alphabet as an intermediate you can can encode each initial and final from the table[1] as an individual character to balance the number of encodings per symbol with the number of symbols per word. Since Morse typically encodes simple messages with its own vernacular I think you can safely drop encoding the tones. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wade–Giles_table https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wade–Giles_table

3 ms·

You could use pinyin or bopomofo as a base. Written Chinese can be thought of as a syllable alphabet with 100s of ways to write each syllable. For a fluent rea

by wodenokoto 3y ago

arp242 3y ago
> You could use pinyin or bopomofo as a base. Ah yeah, that would be the obvious solution today, but neither were invented yet in the 1880s – I was kind of thinking from that viewpoint: "how could they have done better in 1880?", rather than "how could we do better today?" The best I could think of is a UTF-8 like scheme, where a prefix selects the number of digits where less digits represent more common characters. I'm not entirely sure how well that would work in practice as I operated a telegraph exactly once in my life (as a child). I know figure/letter/Cyrillic shifts in telegraphs could cause some problems if the shift got lost or was garbled, but I suppose by prefixing every character solves this – but then again, why didn't they do this for Baudot code/ITA?
- wodenokoto 3y ago
  I hadn’t considered late 18-hundreds as a context, but I’m gonna stick to my guns and say wade-Giles. Wades incarnation goes back to the 1860s. Since you don’t need the alphabet as an intermediate you can can encode each initial and final from the table[1] as an individual character to balance the number of encodings per symbol with the number of symbols per word. Since Morse typically encodes simple messages with its own vernacular I think you can safely drop encoding the tones. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wade–Giles_table https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wade–Giles_table