News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards by wolfgangbabad on Saturday June 01, 2024 @05:46PM (#40549331)
Vietnamese is relatively OK.
Re:The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards by acwan93 on Saturday June 01, 2024 @05:56PM (#40549392)
Relatively. The amount of diacritics on Vietnamese surpasses European languages so text rendering becomes a challenge if a naive developer doesn't test with Vietnamese.
Re:The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards by numpad0 on Saturday June 01, 2024 @08:59PM (#40550504)
Is bringing back Chu Nom script going to simplify Vietnamese support on computers by a lot? It's unintelligible to CJK users, but as far as text rendering goes, it seems just simple Kanji/Hanzi.
Re:The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards by alexlur on Saturday June 01, 2024 @05:56PM (#40549393)
Chữ Nôm is a borrowed writing system and not native to Vietnamese, which isn’t even a Sino-Tibetan language to begin with.
Re:The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards by gumby on Saturday June 01, 2024 @10:37PM (#40550895)
Latin is a borrowed writing system not native to English, German, Polish and many others which aren’t even Romance languages to begin with and must resort to di- and trigraphs plus non-Latin characters like J, V, ß, ł or å, among others (not to mention diacritics).
Re:The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards by DiogenesKynikos on Sunday June 02, 2024 @04:00PM (#40556825)
Alphabets are much more flexible than the Chinese characters.

An alphabet can be adapted to basically any language. You just have to map the letters to the sounds, and you're pretty much done.

By contrast, the Chinese writing system is adapted very specifically to the properties of Chinese language. Every syllable in Chinese has a meaning (or set of meanings), so every character represents one meaning (or a few). English does not have that structure: words can have very arbitrary syllables that don't have any meaning on their own. Chinese characters encode a meaning plus a sound, which is often reflected in how they're composed (i.e., a character will often be composed of two simpler characters, one of which has the correct meaning and one of which has the correct sound). Chinese words do not change form: there's no conjugation, no plural form, etc. As a consequence, the writing system has no way to deal with things like conjugation.

I have no idea how one would even begin trying to adapt Chinese characters to write English. On the other hand, it's relatively easy to come up with a way to write Chinese in any alphabet.

Re:The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards by int_19h on Sunday June 02, 2024 @04:02PM (#40556833)
"Å" is just "O" stacked on top of "A" though. And "V" is in fact the OG Latin form ("U" is the newly introduced one).

But yeah, the whole notion is kinda silly. Most writing systems in the world are developed from very few originals. E.g. for most of Eurasia, the source is either Egyptian hieroglyphs or the Shang Oracle bone script.