This is an excerpt at MIT Technology Review from The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age by Thomas S. Mullaney, and it's at the intersection of tech and linguistics, two things I love. Definitely going to check out the book.
21 sats \ 3 replies \ @k00b 9 Jun
All this time I assumed their characters are written like ours, but I also didn't realize they had >70k characters! This makes me wonder about the origins of Latin and if it was common in early popular written texts for the same reason it works well on computers.
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @StillStackinAfterAllTheseYears OP 10 Jun
From what I understand, the alphabets evolved from Greek to Etruscan to Latin, but I'm not sure if those later shifts impacted how successful Latin was, or if Latin (and Rome)'s success helped spread the alphabet and language.
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7 sats \ 1 reply \ @0xIlmari 10 Jun
Aren't though Chinese characters composed of smaller primitive elements that give basic meaning? Like a symbol for "tree" combines with symbol for "many" to produce a character meaning "forest"? I think they can encode entire English phrasals with a single character.
Making the 70k simply a combinatorial explosion of a much smaller set.
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121 sats \ 0 replies \ @zx 10 Jun
True. The Chinese English dictionary I use covers modern vernacular and ancient idiomatic language, there are 122,000+ entries. Many characters have an equivalent full form. So, this number would be greater, taking that into account. It is the equivalent of a full dictionary of English words and phrases and includes particles (the components of characters) which can also be typed, have unicode.
Characters are essentially idiogram similar to (but not the same as) looking at words, so characters and there constituent parts are not really anything like a one to one with an alphabet. Each word (generally) is disyllabic, or bound in two character groups and is additive, equivalent to compound words in English.
water particle 氵
water 水
wood 木
tree 树
forest 森林
toothpaste 刷牙高
football 足球
landscape design 园林设计
landscape design 園林設計 (full form)
So, my point being, character input is more like having a dictionary through predictive input (pinyin.)
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @zx 10 Jun
Interesting article. Trying to get my head around Japanese input when I have free time but just can't work it out!
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