2 ms·
> 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 th
by 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 agoI 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