Subject: Thoughts

From: John Delacour <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 4 Sep 1993 23:04:00 GMT0BST-1

A few weeks frequenting this list have made some things very clear to me, and -
in the whole discussion of Chinese computing, certain things seem to stand out-
 and be worthy of discussion.

In recent weeks I consider the contributions of Christian Wittern, Ng Liangshi-
ng and of Edmund Lai to be of most significance, but I feel there is a long wa-
y to go and that at the moment "Chinese Computing" is rather a hobby than a se-
rious pursuit.

To begin with, I quote a posting from Wang Jianxiong of 25 August:

"Dear ccnetters who are not from mainland China:
"     I have a general question for all of you who are not from mainland
"China. Among about 30 Chinese character input methods, which one
"do you use most frequently?...... Chinese from mainland China use the "PinYin-
+LianXian.....Is it worth for us do to a internal survey of this "topic....I t-
hink it's worth to know what method we, ccnetters, use."

Wang's message raises an important question.  It is quite clearly absurd that -
there should exist 30 Chinese input methods and it is very important that as s-
oon as possible this number should be reduced to a minimum - otherwise creator-
s of software for Chinese will be lost in a wilderness.

I have already proposed my *chinput* (two Roman characters per Hanzi) system, -
but I do not pretend that that is the only way.  From the point of view of pho-
netic input it is unarguably the most efficient for Mandarin, but it does not -
solve all the problems; for one thing not everyone is a Peking mandarin and th-
ere are many people who can picture a character very well without knowing exac-
tly how it is pronounced in Peking.  Some reference to the shape (xing2) of th-
e character should therefore be available, in my opinion, in any computer "dic-
tionary", especially if we are to include characters that are not in common us-
age and which have no fixed pronunciation in the Peking dialect.

These are just thoughts, so please don't think that I am advocating one thing -
or another - I'm just trying to sort things out in my own mind while, perhaps,-
 sowing seeds in the minds of people more competent than I.

>From the point of view of input, it is obvious that two things are of prime im-
portance: 1) fewest keystrokes  2) Least reliance on the user's memory.  If th-
e user wants to write "window" it is obviously better that he should type xy1 -
than type chuang1, and it is even less convenient if he as to learn by memory -
that chuang1 is E4A2, or whatever, in hexadecimal.  The primary pointer to a c-
haracter _must_ be phonetic and the shorter that pointer is the better.

But there are going to be characters that we can see and not pronounce and we -
are going to have to find the character by its shape.  In my experience the be-
st system for this is the "four corner" system.  This system has had a long li-
fe and is still alive today; it is easy to learn and would be very adaptable t-
o computer input systems.  To me it is absurd to think of continuing with any -
radical/phonetic searching method in these days.

The point that Ed Lai made a few weeks ago was that Chinese Computing should n-
ot be equated with Chinese word-processing, and I am sure this is a very impor-
tant statement.  Whatever standard is finally arrived at in terms of codificat-
ion etc.  must have a long future.  The fact that we can now correspond in Chi-
nese via Internet does not mean that a solution has been found for Chinese com-
puting.  There is a lot of work yet to be done and a lot of questions yet to b-
e asked and answered about the codification of Chinese and all sorts of things-

One thing that does seem clear to me is that a great deal more discussion need-
s to take place with a view to establishing the best possible standard within -
the shortest possible time and that whatever standard is eventually establishe-
d should not be at all esoteric but easily used by ordinary people.

                    John