I don’t know the intricacies of the Chinese languages but typing foreign languages with English keyboard is pretty common worldwide I guess? It certainly is for Indian languages at least.
Duck[1], for example, has different pronounciations (Cantonese has aap3, Mandarin uses ya1). If you read a menu, the character will be the same, but it'll be pronounced differently.
This article is asking why pinyin in supported for writing Cantonese, when Cantonese's romanization is jyutping. I've installed GBoard on my iPhone to have access to a jyutping keyboard.
Note this is from someone who hasn't been learning Cantonese for long, so someone may want to correct any mistakes I've made!
[1] http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/168/
Pinyin is taught in school alongside Mandarin in China [1]. Heck, when I learnt Mandarin as a kid in HK, pinyin was also used
Jyutping was certainly not taught in school, wasn't the case when I was a kid, and didn't seem to be the case when I worked in Hong Kong for a few years and hung out with kid cousins who's got school work.
Pinyin is the romanization of Mandarin. Jyutping is a romanization of Cantonese, one that's not adopted uniformly and consistently.
[1] https://www.quora.com/Is-Pinyin-taught-in-China-or-is-it-jus...
And people "typing non-English languages on a english keyboard" generally use a software layout native to their language on a physical english layout.
Wrt. Europe the differences between languages are sometimes not that big (EDIT: in their alphabet), so it's not uncommon to have some form of "internationalized layout" which contains all english letters + many common non English letters (e.g. äöüß for German and similar). Still it's called an international layout not a english layout with support for English dialects like German...
Flip it on its head then — would you want to type English on a Cyrillic keyboard?
Even just sticking to Latin alphabet keyboard layouts, there's plenty of variations that make different keyboards quite inconvenient for the wrong language — Spanish and Portuguese are very similar languages, yet you wouldn't want to write Spanish using a Portuguese layout (You can probably type ñ, but I don't think there's a way to type ¿ and ¡ directly).
I use the US International layout because it's "good enough" to write Portuguese while being a lot more convenient for programming, but the standard US English layout is completely unusable for me, and for most European languages, which tend to have a variety of diacritics. Even on US International, I can type umlauts (ä) but have no idea how to type Hungarian double acute marks (a̋).
(Also, there is no double acute a in Hungarian, only o and u.)
(a̋ is not hungarian and doesn't work)
German keyboards are just flexible enough for writing the odd french or spanish loanword. Other languages pretty much always require specific keyboard layouts.
Edit: The [Neo2 and Bone](https://neo-layout.org/) layouts make it possible to easily type in most latin-based writing systems.
Physical keyboards don't have the same issues.
I think the more likely explanation is that Apple has a small team supporting all of the world's languages, mostly focusing on widely-spoken ones, while Sogou has a small team focusing on languages widely spoken in China, so their Cantonese support is better.
And somehow Apple Arcade still not available in HK and Mainland China?
Edit: Actually this brings back memory. About twenty+ years ago I made an English to Cantonese Translation with Romanization Input Method on Windows and later on Mac using VanillaInput / OpenVanilla so I could use it for IRC and ICQ. At the time voice recognition of anything was sci-fi stuff. Dragon speech recognition sucks no matter how much training time you give it. Twenty years later we are close to real time on devices speech recognition.
They are doing it. Sources: few HK friends that were really worried about the future of their language and culture. And this was before the security law.
Last time I checked, less than half of the population in Guangzhou knew how to speak Cantonese.
Cantonese at least has a written form, but Shanghainese AFAIK has no written form, so what does "Shanghainese dialectal spelling" even mean? :\
They are not. Written Cantonese, in fact, uses the Mandarin grammar and the Mandarin lexicon and is, essentially, Mandarin, not Cantonese. There are substantial differences in the grammar and in the basic lexicon between the two to make them distinct languages. Written Cantonese that uses the Cantonese lexicon is incomprehensible to a Mandarin speaker, either, just as the spoken Cantonese is.
No they're not. Time to go studying linguistic before writing false statements on the internet. Even if most characters and words are shared in-between Sinitic languages, there are difference in lexicon, grammar, syntax and other subtle grammatical phenomena. Phonology is also distinct. It would be incredibly painful for someone the write its native language using an input method made for another language.
The confusing part for me as a Shanghainese speaker though is that we don't have a way to write Shanghainese, this "spelling" concept AFAIK simply doesn't exist. So I'm very curious to see who actually designed this functionality and what does it actually do.
The fact you don't know about it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Same goes for Taiwanese Southern Min: a lot of natives think "it's not a written language" where in fact there are both romanizations and a way to write it with Chinese characters.
The central government is actively fighting standardization effort (both romanization and writing in Chinese characters) and push the fiction of Wu and other Sinitic languages (Cantonese, Hakka, Min, etc.) as merely dialects, as a way to destroy them. The method is not new, is has been policy in France, Taiwan and probably other countries. It's a real shame that Apple is validation China's propaganda on that front.
> The fact you don't know about it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
I take your point.
Interestingly, growing up in the late 80s, we were briefly taught Zhuyin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo), but not this. I don't believe my parents (both native Shanghainese) even know how to "spell" Shanghainese.
Ah, the lost art...
The last time Apple added support for a new language was iOS 4 and brought the number of supported languages to about 30. In the meantime Android does more than 180, with all sort of region specific dialects.
Even Windows Phone supported 50 while it was around.
It happens consistently enough that I'm very convinced there's a state machine bug in the UI between the autocomplete and the language picker.
You don't even have to be _that_ language proficient to end up with English/Qwerty + some random other language. So weird that this is so buggy.
Edit: would love to know why I’m downvoted.
I thought that was relatively common, just one of those things people are accustomed to.
Imagine you had no Cyrillic keyboard and had to instead type in transliteration. So that if you want to obtain the following sentence:
Все люди рождаются свободными и равными в своем достоинстве и правах.
You'd have to type this instead:
Vse lyudi rozhdayutsya svobodnymi i ravnymi v svoyem dostoinstve i pravakh.
Not so bad, millions of people do it every day. However, this only works because the transliteration system is based on mapping common values of the Latin alphabet into Russian. So the cognitive distance is not so bad.
Now, let's imagine instead, that you'd be forced to use a transliteration that was originally used based on mapping English language pronounciation values, such that you'd have to type something like:
Vsay lyoodee rogedahyootseea svoughboughdnuhmee ee rahvnuhmee v svohyam doughstougheenstvay ee prahvahch.
That's closer to the idea of what the typing of Cantonese in Pinyin instead of Jyutping would feel like.
Related: I had a Bulgarian co-worker years ago. She said growing up, there was wide-spread use of both Cyrillic and Roman characters for Bulgarian language. She said she was always able to express herself using either character set. However, I don't know anything about the cultural context of Russian. Naively, I assume it is strictly Cyrillic. It would be nice if some native Russian speakers can comment about transliteration systems used on PCs.
Yes, I would, and I have been doing this all my life when no Russian layout is available. This is called transliteration, and I would argue most Russian speaking tech users used it at least once in their life.
Some of the romanization of Cantonese sounds are baffling. It's a bit like watching English speakers struggle to pronounce the Q sound in Qing (e.g. Qing dynasty).
> Pinyin is a romanization system designed for Mandarin. Why type Cantonese and Shanghainese in Mandarin Pinyin?
(Edit: yes it might have to do with political pressure as well) I'm assuming if Apple did this (which is not a feature you can "just do") it was something that people do and there's a logic to it.
Yes, maybe Apple is in the wrong, but this sounds like more an overreaction, since you write Cantonese and Mandarin with the same alphabet.
> Would you type Russian with an American keyboard?
Yes, yes I would? If I needed to type one-off words? Though the comparison would be most like, would you type Icelandic or French with an English keyboard? (think of the missing symbols, etc)
(with no love to Medium messing with cut-paste)
Pinyin is a system designed for Mandarin specifically, while Jyutping[1] is the missing input method for Cantonese.
To put it another way, this is like giving a German person an English keyboard and, when they ask you where the umlauts and eszett are, telling them that they don't need that because the English keyboard now has autocomplete support for German dialectal spellings.
German persons are normally quite accustomed to typing umlauts and eszett as ae/oe/ue/ss. Just think about domain names with German words, let alone pretty much every English-based website form would not accept any umlauts as an input.
By the way, ring me up if you wanna talk in Cantonese with a native speaker :)
For others reading, one of the best resources I've found is InspirLang: https://inspirlang.com/
Hope that keyboard supports this kind of input.
That's what comes to my mind for informal phonetic input of Cantonese.
It uses the British spelling of Cantonese that is still in use in HK for the personal and street name transliteration.
taai duc ming. gao ging hai ng hai jyutping, or ng ji.
This is a big annoyance.
As for Apple, their localization is quite half-hearted for about half the world, so that's just how they roll, unfortunately.
And not just China...in general. Even small companies (<500) often keep track of their employee's nationality and language proficiency.
For example, observe that top-level commenter gaudat is writing in a romanization that is not Jyutping, which the author proposes. The romanizations that the author proposes are really good except for where it matters regarding common usage: it is primarily used by linguists, and most non-Mandarin communities don't have one dominant consistent romanization that everybody understands or learns in school. But everyone learns Mandarin and Pinyin in school in HK and Taiwan.
Most written Cantonese input use some form of stroke order or radical input.
Hence in terms of user-friendliness, the approach that Apple goes with is actually optimal, to the detriment to those with linguistic-nationalist agendas.
Modern Chinese may think that governments are trying to destroy culture by not standardizing written Chinese languages and romanizations and teaching them in a curriculum. But it is more negligence, and a lack of will to pursue a linguistic-nationalist goal than active destruction since it never existed. Rather it is mainland China pursuing (Western) communist ideals that brought writing vernacular Mandarin from a completely low-brow affair to something worthy of educated attention.
It is important to note that the prestige of Mandarin pronunciation pre-dates the CCP and even written Mandarin: it is the spoken language of the Central Plains and was the spoken language of the imperial bureaucracy. It was what anyone who sought advancement in the imperial bureaucracy needed to learn to speak.
And thank you for pointing gaudat's comment. I've had a response, if anything, two version of the same response, which I think a typical Cantonese speaker should know what I'm saying. Back in the day, Google's "Cantonese pinyin" IME should be able to work with the kind of romanization and produce actual words.
The absolute key was a standard that's taught in a cirriculum. Pinyin is a standard that's taught in mainland schools (and arguably in HK schools teaching Mandarin).
Jyutping is not taught in school, and I'd wager that an average Cantonese speaker would find some of jyutping's romanization to be baffling. It wasn't taught when I was in school in Colonial Hong Kong, and I'm pretty sure that's not the case right now with school aged children in SAR Hong Kong.
Cantonese as a form of IME isn't destroyed by Apple or CCP, but rather by a lack of coordination to standardize to a single form taught as a curriculum.
Calm down, Karen. You just showed us how Apple is shipping custom keyboards to regional dialects in China, and adding support for endangered languages, what is the “pretending” part there.
You can be unhappy with changes without taking a crap on the entire thing. The outrage in this post seems a bit unnecessary and not the kind of dialogue that brings actual change. Why not show some examples of the custom keyboard and the diff input method so people can understand what it’s about? Maybe it helps an Apple employee passing by to champion that.
In addition, most of native Russian speakers do use English/American keyboard to write Russian because it is much easier rather than finding one with Cyrillic symbols.
But the reason for that is likely just an ignorance, not political games.
I've actually been using an American keyboard layout to write Japanese because I can't find how to type 「」 with my native Finnish layout.
For me, as someone who don't type Chinese enough that I'd struggle badly to use an IME based on strokes, I actually use a pinyin keyboard, because: a) pinyin can be found as first class citizen on any OS; b) for someone like me, who speaks Cantonese, and could butcher Mandarin enough to order food, and have no formal education in either pinyin or jyutping, I find it a lot easier for me to guess in pinyin than in jyutping. Most of the Cantonese jyutping (or "cantonese pinyin" keyboards) have a specific transliteration of Cantonese sounds to the English alphabet in a way that I can't grasp easily. The only exception was the Google Cantonese Pinyin IME, which was decently good at taking various transliteration that someone might try, and return a list of reasonable words. But it has since been discontinued, I couldn't find install it. To expand to why there's an inconsistency with transliterating Cantonese sounds... It's not taught in a standardize, formal manner in school, and you can see that with the author's name here, 阿擇. He has Chaaak, which to me is a transliteration pretty far off from the actual pronunciation. http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/scripts/wordsearch.php?leve... suggests "zaak", while I might have attempted "zhak", or "zhaak", or "jak" with the Google Cantonese pinyin IME, with the latter a closer map to the actual sound of the word IMO. I wouldn't associate z with the start of the sound. I've seen some older methods uses "ts" instead. c) for someone like me who struggles with writing / typing the word based on strokes, and find that IMEs like jyutping is not a great choice either, a last resort is for me to look up a word from English, and lo and behold, pinyin is most likely to show along side with a Chinese word when you try to translate from English to Chinese. This provides a convenient way for me to mentally retain a pinyin mapping to the word. Given pinyin is standardized a lot better than jyutping ever has, and the sound to letter mapping is definitely more understood to me, it's far more convenient.
I type Chinese, to my family, in pinyin. It would actually be quite nice have Cantonese word that's accessible via pinyin. It's a fucking mess to try to look up a primarily Cantonese word for someone like me, because again, there wasn't a standardized version taught consistently. And I don't find jyutping taught now.
All this just seems to me a tempest in a fucking teacup. As a matter of practicality, I'd welcome it.
Some Cantonese dictionaries still translate the «Yale romanisation system of Cantonese» as 「耶魯拼音」 («yèh lóuh ping yām» – lit. «Yale pinyin»), but Jyutping is translated as simply Jyutping. When the keyboard becomes available, it will be either Jyutping or Yale. Google Gboard keyboard, for instance, supports the Yale Canonese romanisation system, which is titled simply as 「中文（香港）」. If Apple comes out with a Jyutping keyboard for iOS, that will make me very happy, and if Apple adds the Jyutping keyboard to macOS, that will make me personally even more happy.
RE: language vs dialect. Western linguistics considers Mandarin, Yue, Wu, Gan-Hakka, Min etc to be distinct Sinitic languages since all of them demonstrate a sufficient number of characteristical features to be classified as separate languages. All of them have the same superstrate language (Middle Chinese), apart from Min that had branched off somewhere between Old (Ancient) Chinese and Middle Chinese and, thus, has a different «parent» language. Linguistics slightly more than entirely did not exist in ancient China as a science, and the word that has been frequently used throughout centuries in China to describe varieties of Chinese translates into English as «dialect». This view has even influenced the Japanese lingustics.
Historically, China had not had an single official state language since the end of the Tang dynasty, which was the last time in the Chinese history when all people spoke more or less the same language (Middle Chinese), and by 1930s China had been facing the problem of the lack of the official national language that Germany was facing in the 19th century when Hoch Deutsch was finally standardised and promulgated as the country's state language to unite the nation. National Languages Committee of the Republic of China settled on Mandarin as the uniting language in 1932.
The issue of «language» vs «dialect» has also become heavily politicised, especially in recent years due to the undue CCP interference that is now seeping into Hong Kong. Using the CCP supported official definition, Mandarin is also another dialect. Just like any other Sinitic ahem language is anyway. It is a shame that the official multilingual education where kids in schools could teach Mandarin and their first family language(s) (due to the intermarriage, Chinese parents oftentimes speak profoundly distinct Sinitic languages) is not an option on the mainland. The increasing interference of the CCP in Hong Kong has also concerned the role of Cantonese as the primary local language with CCP sponsored «professors» of lingustics making wild claims, which, coupled with other extensive factors, rightfully and expectedly has given rise to the development of a dictinct Hong Kong identity with the Cantonese language being a major part of it, therefore the wrath in the article. 加油呀.
/me opens up Medium page: "Read this story with a free account." closes tab
Sorry, but Medium is restricting your reach.
