He was elected a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1980 (two years after publishing his paper about the input method) but he was already almost 70 years old, so he didn't have much of a career afterwards. He died in 1993
He is just one of the early pioneers of Chinese input methods, his particular method is stroke-based and works on 0-9 number pads, went obsolete decades ago, but surely had an influence over later popular ones like Wubi.
Today, input methods were dominated by pronunciation based one like Pinyin. The heuristics based "smart" Pinyin input methods was actually invented by a non-tech folk and eventually hired by a then-large Internet company called Sogou, it was quite novel for the input method to suggest word pairs like a search engine with most frequent used ones readily type-able. Some later versions even include crazy macros like the current timestamp, emojis, or even read your contact list (!!) for quicker name & address suggestions.
Pinyin may dominate in Mainland China, but places like Taiwan and Hong Kong still prefer their own input methods.
Both generally use Traditional instead of Simplified characters and HK's Cantonese has an underused pinyin equivalent, but that isn't a cause. Other systems became prevalent first, and stuck.
Taiwan's Zhuyin is 90+% the same as Pinyin except the input is composed with Chinese script radicals (like hiragana) rather than Latin script.
> Both generally use Traditional instead of Simplified
That doesn't impact the human side of the IME. It's just different output for the same input. And the input (Mandarin pronunciation) is the same for mainland and Taiwan.
There are differences in the Mandarin pronunciations standardized on the Mainland and Taiwan. Most of them involve using the fifth tone or not, but there are a few more noticeable exceptions, like 和 hé ㄏㄢˋ (which would correspond to pinyin hàn) and 崖 yá ㄧㄞˊ (which would correspond to pinyin yái).
Stuff like that occasionally trips me up when switching between pinyin and zhuyin.
Zhuyin was created on the Mainland during the ROC era, and brought to Taiwan after the Japanese surrender, where it is now the most prominent phonetic system. Prior to the KMT retreat to Taiwan, Mandarin was not widely spoken here. Before Japan colonized Taiwan, Taiwanese language (Minnan) was usually written using Latin characters with diacritics. During the Japanese colonial era, they attempted to introduce Taiwanese kana. I don't think usage has survived to present day, but I have met a few old people who can only speak Japanese and Taiwanese, but not Mandarin. Today Taiwanese is mostly a spoken language, but you can find it written. Sometimes it's a mixture of hanzi and Latin characters to supplement missing characters. I've heard that there is also an adapted Zhuyin used to write Taiwanese, but I've never seen an example of it.
tl;dr Zhuyin and and Taiwanese kana were developed during approximately the same time, but separately, and for separate languages.
> Taiwan's Zhuyin is 90+% the same as Pinyin except the input is composed with Chinese script radicals
I wouldn't say that's true. It's phonetic, sure, but it relates much more closely to the syllable structure than Pinyin does.
Simple example: 南,
Pinyin: nán,
Zhuyin: ㄋㄢˊ
In Pinyin, we use the same letter "n" in initial and final position. In Zhuyin, the word is composed of two letters, ㄋ （initial n), and ㄢ (final an). The only time that ㄢ begins a syllable is when it's the whole syllable, e.g. 安, ㄢ, "ān"
It’s also far more consistent. The ü of Pinyin only has umlauts with l because lü and lu are both valid syllables. That the u of qu and ju is actually ü, and the u of chu and zhu is u is confusing, to say nothing of yong/-iong. In Zhuyin you have discrete ㄨ u and ㄩ ü, and yong doesn’t masquerade is a rare vowel, it’s just ㄩㄥ。
Pinyin is popular in the PRC, but not in Taiwan or HK. Taiwan input is dominated by Bopomofo, which is also pronunciation based. Mainland China is the largest country that uses Chinese input methods, however.
I still remember entering Chinese using a pinyin T9 method on my Nokia handset in 2002. Pinyin on a 0-9 number pad, fun times.
Contact list has become the standard - You've probably not even noticed it, but Android's "Gboard" has contacts permissions, and will use your contact's names and nicknames as well as e-mail addresses as suggestions.
I noticed this (albeit with a different keyboard app) as soon as I switched from Windows Phone to Android. Couldn't stand it really, it would auto-suggest random email addresses and even numbers when I was just trying to type words.
The least-bad Android keyboard I've ever used is the HTC keyboard, since it had a setting to only learn words I explicitly told it to remember.
The problem with pinyin is that it's phonetic based and it's based on Mandarin. For large sub-populations of Chinese speakers who primarily use other dialects, it's not as intuitive -- although this is changing overtime as Mandarin becomes more dominant across China. A stroke/character based system preserves a key characteristic of Chinese, which is that speakers of different Chinese dialects can all use the same writing system. However, I think Pinyin is easier for Mandarin speakers (in PRC at least) and also non-native Chinese speakers who likely come from a phonetic based writing system and have learned Mandarin using Pinyin.
> For large sub-populations of Chinese speakers who primarily use other dialects, it's not as intuitive
It's very different than alphabetical languages. Chinese texts (Han scripts) were much different than the the spoken language, it's like a bytecode or some serialization format. There are cases where verbal vocabulary not "serializable" in Chinese characters (not orthographically at least)
Pinyin is really peculiar. It makes it so much easier to learn to outsiders.
I know some overseas Chinese people who (not being raised in China) never learned pinyin and prefer the stroke method. Some of the even prefer drawing the strokes by hand (instead of choosing from the keyboard).
Any Chinese word, I've ever learned, I can only input using pinyin. The stroke method adds so much more mental overhead.
> I know some overseas Chinese people who (not being raised in China) never learned pinyin and prefer the stroke method.
I knew someone who used wubi in preference to pinyin input. She grew up in Guangzhou until age 16, so it wasn't an issue of not learning pinyin. The problem, for her, was that she had no way to know the correct pinyin for a character, since she didn't distinguish between a bunch of sounds that are distinct in pinyin.
> Any Chinese word, I've ever learned, I can only input using pinyin. The stroke method adds so much more mental overhead.
If you were capable of writing by hand, this wouldn't be true.
It's a death spiral though: Computer/mobile input has long since displaced writing by hand for many people, so many of them are no longer fully capable of writing by hand, particularly when it comes to complex and/or rare characters.
Pinyin is the romanization method for Mandarin (aka Putonghua). From your description it sounds like your friend being more comfortable in Cantonese than Mandarin. (Is there really a difference between not fully understanding pinyin and not distinguishing the different sounds?) Anyway these days Cantonese input methods are getting better (or so I heard, my fingers have muscle memory of Changjie by now). See https://jyutping.org/en/keyboard/
> (Is there really a difference between not fully understanding pinyin and not distinguishing the different sounds?)
Yes. They aren't even related ideas. You can easily understand that a distinction exists despite the fact that you, personally, can't hear it. Is there a distinction between not understanding the RGB model and being colorblind?
> From your description it sounds like your friend being more comfortable in Cantonese than Mandarin.
She was fully fluent in Mandarin. Just Cantonese-accented Mandarin. Mandarin is the language of instruction everywhere in China; it isn't possible not to speak it.
As a non-chinese pinyin input is so much easier. One of the cool things about it is you can type a whole sentence just using the first letter of each character. Eg “wxzdnwsmbq” on my phone is sufficient to produce “我想知道你为什么不去”. In English I’d have to type the whole sentence “I want to know why you didn’t go”.
The other great thing about it is if you remember the pronunciation of a word but forget the tone and/or character, it’s usually automatically corrected.
Isn’t that sort of like letting auto correct pick the sentences you are texting? One can definitely do that, it’s a cool novelty for Reddit posts, but it isn’t useful.
The nicer thing is they you can type timeless pinyin and then pick the characters you actually meant, useful if you can sort of recognize what you want to say.
Not really. It’s better than English word prediction, because you’re providing some info about what you want to say meaning it’s correct more of the time. You can also type additional pinyin characters in the middle to help the algorithm, eg typing “adly” gives “阿的理由” (wrong), but “aodly” is enough to get “澳大利亚”.
I tried writing a sentence (我想去買東西) with iOS pinyin keyboard traditional and while I had some luck with the first two letters, it breaks on "wxq" to work again with "wxqm" and then break again. So it's definitely not as good as you market it.
However it could be explained by the fact predictive typing on iOS is quite poor. Often a wrong letter in a word need to be corrected and the next predicted word (and it's conjugation; I'm speaking of French and English input) is often wrong. It may not be noticeable for someone who never used another keyboard, but as a former Windows Phone user the difference is very easy to see. The WP prediction was mind blowing and I could indeed write long sentences in French just by typing a few letter and using one of the prediction candidates.
Ok but you can type wxq<space>mdx which works! Maybe "whole sentence" is overselling it but it definitely works for some pretty long stretches of characters.
But why not just type "aodaliya"? If you have the muscle memory for it already, it seems like abbreviating and still getting the right result would take more time than it was worth. Even on a phone I'm not seeing a win.
This was a highly educated pioneer who studied in the West and was recruited in the West but chose to go help his country and was initially rewarded with a very prestigious and secure job and also deserved --to then get caught up in the hong weibing purges. This is the lesson of ideology -it goes astray fast. Lukily for him, he didn't end up beaten to a pulp and dead in a semi anonymous lynching[1] in a no-name square.
Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. All that does is replace an interesting, specific, fresh topic with a shallow, predictable and boring one.
I don't mean that it isn't exciting, but something can be both exciting, in the sense that it excites strong feelings, and boring, in the sense that it doesn't contain any new information. Rhetoric like "beaten to a pulp and dead in a semi anonymous lynching in a no-name square" is an excellent example of what I mean: it's highly exciting and at the same time not intellectually interesting.
The larger generic topics are like black holes that suck in inquisitive spaceships (us!) that happen to veer nearby (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). It takes a certain awareness to remember this, so that we can stick to more interesting conversation. Certainly the discovery of how to mechanize the processing of Chinese characters is much more interesting than "the lesson of ideology"—at least in HN's sense of the word "interesting".
I understand, but I will respectfully disagree. These events occurred during the Cultural Revolution and the article prefaces it with such. It's inextricable. It is true he was an innovator, no doubt, but for the politics at the time, many other minds would have been able to contribute to the progress of the country but were not "as lucky".
mc32's comment was informational and worth reading and the reference to the cultural revolution was IMHO very relevant because the guy lactually ived through it when he might very well not have. It comes across as a statement of fact to me, not at all a generic ideological tangent.
The cultural revolution is a mystery to me just as much as anything else on HN, perhaps more so because it was about people, which are more complex and interesting than tech. The link to the article was useful.
Agree with other dissenters here that this was not a "generic ideological tangent", it was specific and relevant to the OP. And i found it interesting.
I also understand it's difficult to keep a comment on politics, even when it's not a "generic ideological tangent", from prompting a mess, and respect your inteventions to avoid the messes.
Now watch it turn into a political flamewar and prove you right haha. I mean, you do generally know what you're doing. It was just the template "generic ideological tangent" that got me going, it wasn't at all generic or a tangent... it still might result in a mess though! We'll see!
I guess I get why he persisted while imprisoned -- anything to do to keep the mind busy. But why would he continue to work afterwards, and benefit the regime that betrayed him? I'd want to watch it burn and then sink, be left as far behind as possible, not enable them to keep up with technological advancements.
This is an interesting question that shouldn't be down voted like it's being.
From how the article is written (although admittedly I only skimmed it), it seems imprisonment didn't have a huge effect on his motivation to solve the problem.
While I can't say I'd be as chipper after being jailed for a year, I can certainly understand the allure of attacking a hard problem with tenacity.
He may have also separated the party from the people he interacted with everyday. In fact, I'd imagine being imprisoned built a lot of comradory with his fellow inmates.
(Would love for someone else more knowledgeable to chime in, I just wanted to start the conversation)
is Mandarin the govt's language or his and the people's language? "benefiting the regime" was a mere side effect of his work (in fact the Maoists that persecuted him crumbled in the 70s, so ultimately they did not benefit at all! karmic)
or maybe he just had an intellectual interest in the problem and wanted to solve it no matter what. who knows, but the world is better off for it
The regime after the Cultural Revolution and the regime during the revolution were totally different people.
The majority of China's post-Cultural Revolution leaders had themselves been at least purged, but often also imprisoned and even tortured during that period. For example Deng Xiaoping had been purged and his son left permanently paralyzed (after a failed suicide attempt due to persecution) after the two became targets during the Cultural Revolution.
Basically anyone who had any sort of political power, educational attainment, or wealth was a target during the Cultural Revolution (a mildly difficult challenge is to find any Chinese figure of note who wasn't Mao who came of age before the Cultural Revolution and wasn't at least denounced. It's possible, but not as trivial as one might think).
The persecution was also often bottom-up, rather than top-down. If you had any attainment or pre-Cultural Revolution power at all, you were much more likely to be beaten, strung up, and imprisoned by local teenage Red Guards often acting of their own accord than the central government.
And so as a result there wasn't as much enmity towards the post-Cultural Revolution government by people who had suffered during the Cultural Revolution because often they had suffered together.
It seems like the Hangul[0]/Korean writing system was retrofitted into Chinese with the challenge being to make the imprecise precise. Hangul was designed with the purpose of solving illiteracy and so the character forms were built simply from sound components. Doing it in reverse with a larger unstructured set of symbols is quite the feat.
Thai spoken language is the opposite extreme of German, vowels are the salient parts and consonants are often barely present and highly interchangeable. I don't know how the Thai written language works or how complex it is in comparison but I imagine it also wouldn't be a straightforward mapping. Quick lookup says it's tonal and analytic [idk what this is] like Chinese and Vietnamese.
Analytic languages tend to spread complex meaning across multiple words (e.g. stuff like when an action happened or the ordering of actions, etc.). Its opposite is synthetic languages, that tend to group complex meaning into a single word, such as via inflections (e.g. different tenses, prefixes, suffixes, etc.) or agglutination (glomming multiple words into a single word).
So for example analytic languages tend to lack things like complex verb conjugation systems and instead use context or additional words to mark information about the time, subject, object, etc. of a verb.
English for example is usually considered fairly analytic. While there are inflections, they tend to be a lot simpler than many other languages.
> But Hangul is great, I wish Thailand would adopt it.
What a weird wish. Does Hangul even have ways to write the in-between consonants in Thai like dt or bp? Does Hangul even have the Thai vowel sound ื (which certainly has no unambiguous way to be written in English)? And then what about tones? Tones in Thai are not written explicitly, but computed based on a number of factors including character classes, length of vowel sound (does Hangul have a way to indicate short or long vowels?), end-of-syllable sound, and tone mark. If you wrote Thai in Hangul, how would you pay homage to loan words from Pali/Sanskrit? Again, just... what a weird wish!
But why? Vietnamese are doing just find with Latin alphabet with few extra characters (same as many Slavic languages). You don't need any special writing system to have tones in regular alphabet.
I was wondering how he ended up and the biography on Wikipedia is unclear on how his life may have improved after publishing his results. He published in 1978 and passed away fifteen years later. Other than a note that he joined The Party in 1991 there is no information on his last years.
I am not sure what to make of the information that is given. Does it imply he was treated poorly, even tortured, until 1991 when he relented?
From the Baike page https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E6%94%AF%E7%A7%89%E5%BD%9D you can see he got a lot of reward during the year 1978-1993, including 院士 (member of CAS) which is almost the highest praise of a scientist. Also he is the leader of many official organizations during those years.
> Because the code took only the first letter, rather than the complete sound of the character, most regional speech variations did not matter.
This bit is really interesting. This is one of the motivations for an open source Chinese IME framework called RIME: https://rime.im There are configurations available for a number of dialects like Suzhou or Shanghai dialects so that users who prefer those languages don’t have to use Mandarin/putonghua pinyin.
This man’s biography would make an epic movie. From China, how did he manage to attend and graduate from Leipzig University in Germany during the height of WW2?
This is a good story for the modern age. Not so much because of the technical achievements of the protagonist, but more as a warning for the perpetrators/victims of class warfare in the world today.
My father-in-law (now deceased) was similarly branded and nearly died while spending several years in a labor camp. He was forbidden to work upon his release, and banished to the countryside along with his family. Decades later, he received a formal apology from the CCP, but no compensation.
Trading class war on the educated rich for class war on the less educated poor (gains have generally gone to the very rich for ~40 years) is not any better.
The honest truth is that despite trying to read up on the topic, I still don't understand how Chinese is used on a daily basis. Even the most basic "alphabetization" is based on strokes of the characters I guess? And Pinyin is mind boggling to me. I guess I'll just have to actually sit down and learn some Chinese - like a course or something so I can work it out in my head.
I have this sense that touch screens and the smartphones must have had an outsized impact on societies with character based languages, with prediction making it orders of magnitude easier to enter text. Additionally, the compact nature of Chinese means you can fit a ton more info onto a screen AND there's no need for icons, as the entire written language is basically icons. That means learning how to use apps and menus is marginally easier.
> Even the most basic "alphabetization" is based on strokes of the characters I guess?
That is one way characters and words can be ordered. Another is pinyin order.
> And Pinyin is mind boggling to me.
It’s the English alphabet without “v”. What’s mind boggling about it?
> I have this sense that touch screens and the smartphones must have had an outsized impact on societies with character based languages, with prediction making it orders of magnitude easier to enter text.
IMHO, computers had the outsized impact on printing and publishing in general.
I think smartphones and touch screens just built on that.
The prediction stuff is nice, but I don’t think it had as big of an impact as computer text in general. Big for sure, but not as big. I guess it depends on the evaluation heuristics.
> Chinese means you can fit a ton more info onto a screen
Yes. Chinese can be very information dense. It feels faster to read than English, and I’m a fast reader in English.
> AND there's no need for icons, as the entire written language is basically icons.
Hmmm… I’m not sure I would frame it that way. The characters are logograms. Icons are ideograms. They are different.
> That means learning how to use apps and menus is marginally easier.
Just to be clear, the concept of Pinyin isn't bewildering, it's the daily use of it. Imagine the reverse, having to type in a completely different character set in order to produce Latin characters. It's amazing that it works.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadShortly afterwards, Just began selling the Japanese word processor, Ichitaro. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichitaro_(word_processor)
Of course, not everyone agrees with these details;-)
Today, input methods were dominated by pronunciation based one like Pinyin. The heuristics based "smart" Pinyin input methods was actually invented by a non-tech folk and eventually hired by a then-large Internet company called Sogou, it was quite novel for the input method to suggest word pairs like a search engine with most frequent used ones readily type-able. Some later versions even include crazy macros like the current timestamp, emojis, or even read your contact list (!!) for quicker name & address suggestions.
Both generally use Traditional instead of Simplified characters and HK's Cantonese has an underused pinyin equivalent, but that isn't a cause. Other systems became prevalent first, and stuck.
> Both generally use Traditional instead of Simplified
That doesn't impact the human side of the IME. It's just different output for the same input. And the input (Mandarin pronunciation) is the same for mainland and Taiwan.
Stuff like that occasionally trips me up when switching between pinyin and zhuyin.
tl;dr Zhuyin and and Taiwanese kana were developed during approximately the same time, but separately, and for separate languages.
I wouldn't say that's true. It's phonetic, sure, but it relates much more closely to the syllable structure than Pinyin does.
Simple example: 南, Pinyin: nán, Zhuyin: ㄋㄢˊ
In Pinyin, we use the same letter "n" in initial and final position. In Zhuyin, the word is composed of two letters, ㄋ （initial n), and ㄢ (final an). The only time that ㄢ begins a syllable is when it's the whole syllable, e.g. 安, ㄢ, "ān"
I still remember entering Chinese using a pinyin T9 method on my Nokia handset in 2002. Pinyin on a 0-9 number pad, fun times.
The least-bad Android keyboard I've ever used is the HTC keyboard, since it had a setting to only learn words I explicitly told it to remember.
It's very different than alphabetical languages. Chinese texts (Han scripts) were much different than the the spoken language, it's like a bytecode or some serialization format. There are cases where verbal vocabulary not "serializable" in Chinese characters (not orthographically at least)
I know some overseas Chinese people who (not being raised in China) never learned pinyin and prefer the stroke method. Some of the even prefer drawing the strokes by hand (instead of choosing from the keyboard).
Any Chinese word, I've ever learned, I can only input using pinyin. The stroke method adds so much more mental overhead.
I knew someone who used wubi in preference to pinyin input. She grew up in Guangzhou until age 16, so it wasn't an issue of not learning pinyin. The problem, for her, was that she had no way to know the correct pinyin for a character, since she didn't distinguish between a bunch of sounds that are distinct in pinyin.
> Any Chinese word, I've ever learned, I can only input using pinyin. The stroke method adds so much more mental overhead.
If you were capable of writing by hand, this wouldn't be true.
Yes. They aren't even related ideas. You can easily understand that a distinction exists despite the fact that you, personally, can't hear it. Is there a distinction between not understanding the RGB model and being colorblind?
> From your description it sounds like your friend being more comfortable in Cantonese than Mandarin.
She was fully fluent in Mandarin. Just Cantonese-accented Mandarin. Mandarin is the language of instruction everywhere in China; it isn't possible not to speak it.
The other great thing about it is if you remember the pronunciation of a word but forget the tone and/or character, it’s usually automatically corrected.
The nicer thing is they you can type timeless pinyin and then pick the characters you actually meant, useful if you can sort of recognize what you want to say.
However it could be explained by the fact predictive typing on iOS is quite poor. Often a wrong letter in a word need to be corrected and the next predicted word (and it's conjugation; I'm speaking of French and English input) is often wrong. It may not be noticeable for someone who never used another keyboard, but as a former Windows Phone user the difference is very easy to see. The WP prediction was mind blowing and I could indeed write long sentences in French just by typing a few letter and using one of the prediction candidates.
Cangjie is at least still used a little bit.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie_input_method
This was a highly educated pioneer who studied in the West and was recruited in the West but chose to go help his country and was initially rewarded with a very prestigious and secure job and also deserved --to then get caught up in the hong weibing purges. This is the lesson of ideology -it goes astray fast. Lukily for him, he didn't end up beaten to a pulp and dead in a semi anonymous lynching[1] in a no-name square.
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/07/mao-little-gen...
I don't mean that it isn't exciting, but something can be both exciting, in the sense that it excites strong feelings, and boring, in the sense that it doesn't contain any new information. Rhetoric like "beaten to a pulp and dead in a semi anonymous lynching in a no-name square" is an excellent example of what I mean: it's highly exciting and at the same time not intellectually interesting.
The larger generic topics are like black holes that suck in inquisitive spaceships (us!) that happen to veer nearby (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). It takes a certain awareness to remember this, so that we can stick to more interesting conversation. Certainly the discovery of how to mechanize the processing of Chinese characters is much more interesting than "the lesson of ideology"—at least in HN's sense of the word "interesting".
That's why we have this rule in the site guidelines. If you'd please review them, we'd appreciate it: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Past explanations: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
The cultural revolution is a mystery to me just as much as anything else on HN, perhaps more so because it was about people, which are more complex and interesting than tech. The link to the article was useful.
I also understand it's difficult to keep a comment on politics, even when it's not a "generic ideological tangent", from prompting a mess, and respect your inteventions to avoid the messes.
But this was not a generic tangent.
Now watch it turn into a political flamewar and prove you right haha. I mean, you do generally know what you're doing. It was just the template "generic ideological tangent" that got me going, it wasn't at all generic or a tangent... it still might result in a mess though! We'll see!
From how the article is written (although admittedly I only skimmed it), it seems imprisonment didn't have a huge effect on his motivation to solve the problem.
While I can't say I'd be as chipper after being jailed for a year, I can certainly understand the allure of attacking a hard problem with tenacity.
He may have also separated the party from the people he interacted with everyday. In fact, I'd imagine being imprisoned built a lot of comradory with his fellow inmates.
(Would love for someone else more knowledgeable to chime in, I just wanted to start the conversation)
or maybe he just had an intellectual interest in the problem and wanted to solve it no matter what. who knows, but the world is better off for it
The majority of China's post-Cultural Revolution leaders had themselves been at least purged, but often also imprisoned and even tortured during that period. For example Deng Xiaoping had been purged and his son left permanently paralyzed (after a failed suicide attempt due to persecution) after the two became targets during the Cultural Revolution.
Basically anyone who had any sort of political power, educational attainment, or wealth was a target during the Cultural Revolution (a mildly difficult challenge is to find any Chinese figure of note who wasn't Mao who came of age before the Cultural Revolution and wasn't at least denounced. It's possible, but not as trivial as one might think).
The persecution was also often bottom-up, rather than top-down. If you had any attainment or pre-Cultural Revolution power at all, you were much more likely to be beaten, strung up, and imprisoned by local teenage Red Guards often acting of their own accord than the central government.
And so as a result there wasn't as much enmity towards the post-Cultural Revolution government by people who had suffered during the Cultural Revolution because often they had suffered together.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul
Apparently some dialects of Korean are still tonal.
https://autolingual.com/korean-tones/
So for example analytic languages tend to lack things like complex verb conjugation systems and instead use context or additional words to mark information about the time, subject, object, etc. of a verb.
English for example is usually considered fairly analytic. While there are inflections, they tend to be a lot simpler than many other languages.
What a weird wish. Does Hangul even have ways to write the in-between consonants in Thai like dt or bp? Does Hangul even have the Thai vowel sound ื (which certainly has no unambiguous way to be written in English)? And then what about tones? Tones in Thai are not written explicitly, but computed based on a number of factors including character classes, length of vowel sound (does Hangul have a way to indicate short or long vowels?), end-of-syllable sound, and tone mark. If you wrote Thai in Hangul, how would you pay homage to loan words from Pali/Sanskrit? Again, just... what a weird wish!
I am not sure what to make of the information that is given. Does it imply he was treated poorly, even tortured, until 1991 when he relented?
This bit is really interesting. This is one of the motivations for an open source Chinese IME framework called RIME: https://rime.im There are configurations available for a number of dialects like Suzhou or Shanghai dialects so that users who prefer those languages don’t have to use Mandarin/putonghua pinyin.
My father-in-law (now deceased) was similarly branded and nearly died while spending several years in a labor camp. He was forbidden to work upon his release, and banished to the countryside along with his family. Decades later, he received a formal apology from the CCP, but no compensation.
I have this sense that touch screens and the smartphones must have had an outsized impact on societies with character based languages, with prediction making it orders of magnitude easier to enter text. Additionally, the compact nature of Chinese means you can fit a ton more info onto a screen AND there's no need for icons, as the entire written language is basically icons. That means learning how to use apps and menus is marginally easier.
Please correct me if this is a wrong assumption.
That is one way characters and words can be ordered. Another is pinyin order.
> And Pinyin is mind boggling to me.
It’s the English alphabet without “v”. What’s mind boggling about it?
> I have this sense that touch screens and the smartphones must have had an outsized impact on societies with character based languages, with prediction making it orders of magnitude easier to enter text.
IMHO, computers had the outsized impact on printing and publishing in general.
I think smartphones and touch screens just built on that.
The prediction stuff is nice, but I don’t think it had as big of an impact as computer text in general. Big for sure, but not as big. I guess it depends on the evaluation heuristics.
> Chinese means you can fit a ton more info onto a screen
Yes. Chinese can be very information dense. It feels faster to read than English, and I’m a fast reader in English.
> AND there's no need for icons, as the entire written language is basically icons.
Hmmm… I’m not sure I would frame it that way. The characters are logograms. Icons are ideograms. They are different.
> That means learning how to use apps and menus is marginally easier.
Definitely not the case at all in my experience.
Just to be clear, the concept of Pinyin isn't bewildering, it's the daily use of it. Imagine the reverse, having to type in a completely different character set in order to produce Latin characters. It's amazing that it works.
Like using 0s and 1s?
It’s not really that tough.
PRC kids learn pinyin before characters. It’s just easier that way for a number of reasons.
Also, PRC kids study English. Iirc, public education starts English in 3rd grade. Parents often start their kids earlier.
Pinyin is not particularly “foreign” in China.