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Ask HN: Is there any input method which can guess language

4 points by franzwong ↗ HN
I often need to switch typing between English, Japanese (Romanji) and Traditional Chinese (Changjie). Is there any input method which can guess the language by keystroke?

For example, "apple" (English), "ringo" (Japanese), "tyhc wd" (Chinese).

Thanks.

6 comments

[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 25.8 ms ] thread
umlautae
It would be great to have an adaptive engine that would guess what language you type in from first letters or words . But what to do with Apple and Ringo, both are legit words in English (Ringo Star)
franzwong
Yeah. I just thought if anything similar to this exists. Actually there are no space separators in Japanese sentence, e.g. "Konoringohaakaidesu" (This apple is red).
brudgers
This is a use case for a programmable editor. Emacs might be the easiest to program for this type of task. Whether or not learning Emacs is justified is an orthogonal issue.

A programmable keyboard is another, but less universal option.

If you're willing to give up WYSIWYG, then parsing the input is an option. Near real time (for some definition of "near") is probably possible in Emacs.

rijoja
I just so happen to be working on a universal input method that covers different languages.

All the letters are divided into trees. One thought that I've had but haven't gotten around to implement as of yet is to merge different languages, along with their statistical attributes into one tree.

This is in a prototype stage but if you feel like this might be something go and subscribe and I'll let you know when there are new updates.

I'm having a new version that'll come out soon, that's rewritten and in a more serious manner.

http://sigma.eruditenow.com/theory.html