Roger Nyström (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} aadroma) wrote,@ 2006-01-30 20:05:00 |
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| Current mood: |  sleepy |
| Current music: | Malu - Duele |
| Entry tags: | multilingual monday |
[Multilingual Monday] Means of Communication
A typewriter for typing the Cherokee language. Today the Cherokee keyboard layout for computers has the same layout.
Today's post is about something that I've always had a fascination about -- how one sends a message in a language that's not Latin-based using some sort of machine, be it a typewriter, a computer, or a cell phone. Nowadays it's easier than ever to display a myriad of characters in a given language using a computer, but of course it's not always been that easy. Below the cut is a brief look at languages adapting with existing technology in order to communicate using their own language.
Chinese and Japanese have always had the short end of the stick because of the use of kanji/hanzi, requiring the creation of the above -- a Chinese typewriter. They were slow, expensive, and clunky -- to see one in action, click here. Several typewriters in Japan started to feature hiragana and katakana only, and this trend continued into the computer age, where it was common for computers in Japan to feature uppercase English characters and hiragana (with dakuten and other marks as a separate character). Early NES games had only hiragana or katakana -- if they TRIED to feature kanji, the use of kanji was usually sporadic or hard to read (smashing 23 strokes in an 8x8 square will do that ^^;;;). However, reading all kana isn't exactly fun either, especially with the number of words that are written identically in kana in Japanese...
(Of course, Chinese didn't have this luxury, causing programmers here to become more crafty, relying on drawing right to graphics registers or changing font tiles on the fly as new text was required.)
These days, Japanese is spelled out in kana on both keyboards and cell phones, and then is dependent upon an IME to suggest possible kanji alternatives, if there are any. I'm amazed that this is nowhere near as clunky as I originally would have thought, particularly on a cell phone. Chinese has a number of possible inputs depending upon the device you're using these days, as several inputs are popular depending on a user -- pinyin, bopomofo (the Chinese phonetic system that every Chinese American seems to loathe more than an STD ^^;;;), and cell phones now use a 5-key "stroke system" that allows you to start doing various strokes to "write out" a character, and then the phone starts to suggest possible characters -- it's described here. It sounds cool and all, but the system's not usable if you can't remember how to write something at all -- something I find happening to myself rather frequently, with embarrassingly simple characters. ^^;;;;
Korean, being a syllabic language, could at least have some attempts to reproduce it on a standard keyboard, using the shift key and multiple versions of each character to try to reproduce syllabic blocks. Of course this would require one to back up and write another character. It's obviously not for beginners, as it's easy to hit the wrong key and end up with the wrong variant of the wrong syllabic element. Still, it worked better than the Chinese and Japanese counterparts. I'm pretty sure that dependence upon these things did its part to curb the already-dying habit of using Chinese characters in Korean text (which is now gaining popularity once again -- because of computers and the ability and simplicity to enter Chinese characters into text?).
This page here is a wonderful explanation of how to enter various elements of Korean into the likes of keyboards and cell phones -- I find the "add stroke" button that's now on LG phones to be damned ingenious, myself, though I haven't actually used a phone with Korean input, so who am I to say?
Hindi is a language that frequently uses consonant conjuncts in its script. Though it's possible to write two different consonants and just mark them with a virama to indicate that there's no inherent vowel between them, most people don't do this unless a) there's too little space to make the conjunct in question, or b) one simply can't with a given medium, like old Hindi typewriters. More complex or unique conjunct forms simply weren't possible using this typewriter, resulting in the plainer (and some would argue uglier) virama form. Nowadays people can form a wide variety of conjuncts and using an IME, they'll (usually) show up correctly (there are, of course, still exceptions -- ट्ट almost never shows up in conjunct form (and probably won't on your computer if you can read this). Other aggravations of the old keyboard shown below include : one needs to go BACK to add the appropriate vowels, nasal marks. The Hindi "i" is on the LEFT side of the consonant it follows, and one needs to keep this in mind while typing.
Keep in mind -- even these days Hindi SMSing can still be a hassle -- just look at the keypad on that cell phone! It can take an average of 100 strokes on a normal SMS mobile pad to type out a message with this layout, and various manufacturers are working on software prediction software to lessen this. It, however, should be kept in mind that there are many Hindi words that have more than one spelling, so creating a prediction dictionary isn't as simple as it is in English (where few words have more than one spelling).
The Arabic keyboard's been incredibly simplified thanks to the advent of computers -- compare the two below. In the old days one would have to be acutely aware what form of what letter was being used, requiring separate keystrokes for various beginning and medial forms), whereas nowadays most Arabic typing can be done without ever touching shift, unless one wants to add vowel marks or a maddas. Another drawback of the old typewriters : since you were going right to left, numbers would also have to be entered backwards ...
And finally, from the creators of the cool-ass Optimus keyboard is a fascinating blog, and this entry seems to fit well -- it concerns the evolution of the Russian keyboard as a few letters dropped out and then, in this era of computerdom, everyone tried to smash everyone's writing system onto a standard QWERTY keyboard. It's a good read ^_^
