Subject: Re: Zhenbing Zeng / zh ch sh in chinput

From: John Delacour <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 Jul 1993 17:10:00 EDT

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with BSMTP id 4125; Tue, 6 Jul 1993 05:31:41 -0400Date:         Tue, 6 Jul
1993 11:30:35 +0200Reply-To:     Zhenbing Zeng
<[email-masked]>Sender:       Chinese Computing Network
<[email-masked]>From:         Zhenbing Zeng
<[email-masked]>Subject:      zh ch sh in chinputComments:
To: [email-masked]:           Multiple recipients of list CCNET-L
<[email-masked]>Apparently-To: jdelacourHi, friends,Shuangpin is
useful for many people. It would be better to map zh, ch and shto some vowel
keys near z, c and s, so people can remember them easier. ForQWERTY keyboard,
it may be better to assign              ch -> v; sh -> a;but there is no vowel
key near z. In German keyboad: qwertyuiopis qwertzuiop,so probably better to
assign              zh -> u.(How about to assign  zh -> <, the non-letter key
in the left of z?).There are two things one need to consider for define
mapping table: linguisticfact and psychological aspect. I remember that the
Stone 2402 keyboard is alsoa shuangpin one, it's quite good.It's also very
important to have a unified shuangpin keyboard.Yishang zhishi wo geren de
yidian kanfa. Wo xiwang nengou qidao pao-zhuan-yin-yude zuoyong. Shijian bu
gou, jiu xie zhexie ba. (Tingshuo zai shanghai you yigebaozhi, jiao "Hanyu
Pinyin Bao", you shui kanguo meiyou?)Zaijian!

Zhenbing,

I wonder if it is really important for there to be any relationship in the
mind between S & SH, Z & ZH, C & CH ?  After all there is no phonetic
similarity between the tow members of each pair and it is purely a convention
established for PINYIN.

One thing I did not mention when I posted my message introducing "Chinput" was
that I have tried to make the method as easy to learn as possible.  Thus each
letter of the "alphabet" is memorized as an existing syllable.  ff is FAN, dd
is DUAN etc.; every duplicated character is actually a possible word.  The
Chinput would be memorized as 26 _words_.  The device of assigning --N finals
to letters with an ascent and --NG finals to letters with descents further
facilitates the learning of the code.

I am thinking all the while of an input method that is suitable for use in the
widest possible sphere and not some obscure system that is accessible only to
academics and computer wizards.  I am thinking of ordinary people working in
offices or leaving school and how to train them as quickly as possible to do
Chinese wordprocessing.

I ought to say that I use a Macintosh and have recently bought the Chinese
system 6.0.3.  This provides a "cihui" and I have converted a duplicate of
this to work with my Chinput method with amazing success.  There are problems
which I have not had time to solve and I really hate working with system 6
after converting to system 7.1.  Besides, the whole thing seems to be 3 years
out of date, which is most annoying (I know many people in the West will know
exactly how frustrated I feel).  Nevertheless it works wonderfully.  In my
original posting I did not mention that in my "cihui" the tones are also
included, but as an option.

To explain briefly the way the Mac system works (this will be old news very
soon I hope!) you can toggle between Latin input and Chinese input by pressing
the spacebar.  You select the input method you want to use, which may be any
of the supplied methods such as bopomofo, zhuyin etc. OR your own method for
which you have created a dictionary (the dictionary is not very impressive,
containing only 165 pages of ZI, CI and CIZU - nevertheless it is useful for
experimentation and can be edited and expanded).

Suppose I want to print PU2TAO1JIU....well let's put that in Chinput first of
all and it is puttjo ( Ithink!! --- trust me to choose a word I haven't
learned yet!).  If I type "p", all the words beginning with "p" are displayed
in a scrollable strip.  If I next type "u", then all the ZI pronounced PU are
displayed. If I next type "2", then it is very likely that "pttt" will be
presented to me as an option.  I can then select the CI, press the enter key
and print the characters. And so it goes on by a process of elimination.  My
chinese is not very good but I guess that an input of "p.t.j <CR>" would print
the wine in Chinese characters.

You mention psychology and this is of course very important.  I am a Macintosh
man ansd I think in a Macintosh way.  I see poor children here in England
taking courses in "WORDPROCESSING" as though it were some sort of obscure
science, when in fact it is just a typewriter that can do what you want it to
do.  I think it is a great shame that people still have to learn arcane and
archaic wordprocessing methods and treat it as a science, when it is merely a
menial task that anyone can do. and that goes for Chinese wordprocessing as
well as for latin wordprocessing.

Before I got my Chinese system I created some Chinese fonts using fontographer
in order to experiment with Chinput.  I use Nisus for wordprocessing and this
has a "glossary" feature.  With this I would type my text in Chinput and then
run the glossary. whFrom @UGA.CC.UGA.EDU:[email-masked] Sun Jul 11 09:29:59 1993
Date:         Sun, 11 Jul 1993 07:26:58 -0700
Reply-To: Ed Lai <[email-masked]>
Sender: Chinese Computing Network <[email-masked]>
From: Ed Lai <[email-masked]>
Subject:      comment on CHINPUT
Comments: To: [email-masked]
To: Multiple recipients of list CCNET-L <[email-masked]>
Status: RO

John just asked me what I think of  *  C H I N P U T  *. I thought
of writing a repsonse  earlier, but any comment would be a
long one and takes time. Since now it is early morning and I cannot
sleep, so I may as well do it now. Since the reply would be of
general interest, I am going to post it rather than mail it to him.

This is an insightful article. I am particular impressed by his insight
that two stroke phonentic input is related to the QIE of traditional
Chinese phonetics.

John listed the same word under the various romanization. It is
a useful execercise. When I was working on the HyperCard dictionary
I have to write program to transform them into each other. It gives
you a very clear idea how systematic a particular transcription is.
After all every irreguality requires you to write an exception. I
especially recommanded the excercise to those who think PRC's pinyin
is the perfect transcription. My conclusion is the PinYin is probably
one of the better ones, but it certainly can be improved. However,
I don't even try to come out with a better one.

Recently I spend quite a bit of time teaching my 3 year old son the
alphabet, some of which he keep confusing and I can understand why.
I am quite sure we can come up with better letter shapes, but I am
not trying to.

Cang jie undoubtedly is the most popular input method in Taiwan. It
tries to map the symbols to the alphabets in a logical way, so ABCDE
are the stars, another group are parts of the body etc. The problem is
that when these keys are mapped into the keyboard, it is scattered
all over the place, and the positioning of the keys are not necessary
optimal for typing. Professor Chen, who heads the one of the three
colleages of Chinese University of Hong Kong and is one of the founder
on the Chinese Language computer society, did some research on
this problem. He came up with a keyboard mapping so that the Cang
jie symbols groups nicely on the keyboard, the more frequenctly used
symbols are in the middle row etc so that it is optimal for typing.
However, when I very occasionally use Cang jie, I still use the standard
mapping.

Professor Chen's work was inspired by the DWVOK(?) keyboard. Needless
to say I am now using a QWERTY keyboard.

It is unfortunate that human nature is that it is difficult for a lot of
people to agree on the same thing, people fight over minor differences.
So my philosohy now, not because I like it but I have learned after many
hard lession, is that if there is a standard that is at least semi-reasonable
and is widely accepted.

John thinks that ShuangPin has some special importance in the Macintosh
community. Ha, Ha, actually by my estimation he is the only one in the
world who use ShuangPin or its variation on the Macintosh. (Well maybe
the second one, I think someone in QingHua did some Chinese work on the
128K Mac, remember those?, using MacBasic, and being from QingHua means
it uses ShuangPin). I was so happy to hear John is using it so that after all
my efforts, at least one person is using it. None the less, ShuangPin is a
standard, more on the PC than on the Macintosh.

So I think we should stick with ShuangPin.

However I have no objection for John or anyone to use Chinput. There
are some people who thinks the ShuangPin like scheme remind them
too much of BoPoMoFo, and it is a evil reactionary plot to subvert
the world's most perfect language system, PinYin. The truth is that ShuangPin
is highly related to PinYin, and it is no more than a short hand notation
for PinYin. For computer input, it can be think of as a keyboard macro
arrangement. Everybody can have their own keyboard macro arrangment.
Any who like the DWVOK keyboard is free to do so. This is especially true
of the Macintosh. It tends to be a much more personal and individualistic
machine than the PC. Sharing a Macintosh with someone else is like sharing
your house with someone else, you would rather not or you have to
learn to live with the other party. In your own house you certainly
should do what is most comfortable for you.

When I wrote Cihui, I could have made the decision that it is strictly
for PinYin, as just about every other Pinyin program is. Then I can make
my data structure more compact, the program will be much easier to write,
and it will be in many way a better program. I decide to do it in this general
way, and the effort is wasted on most people. Still I am glad I do it this way,
John can use it for Chinput and ChaoChowese, Fung Fung Lee can use it for
Cantonese and I know someone is using it with Yale.

If one day ShuangPin becomes popular, I may write a special ShuangPin
version, I would be able to doing something that is hard for me to do now.

As a side note, John mentioned that there are sound combination that can
be made in theory but are "not be allowed under the laws of the language".
Actually that is not a law but a fact. I had a friend who died at a young
age. I always feel sad that such a talented indidual and friend can died
so young. He once wrote an article saying that Beijingese is the "National
Language" or "Common Language", but actually it does not quite live up
to the billing. It is a better choice than other dialects but it is rather
deficient in sounds and which is more prolific in other dialects. To be
a truly Natioal or Common language it should try to absorb some of
the sounds and vocabuary from the other dialects so it can really become
a language of all the people rather than imposed on all people. Actually
this is happening naturely to some extent. In recent years because of the
importance of the Hong Kong and overseas Chinese economy, Cantonese
starts to be affecting the langauge, just like Shanghaiese has been.
Purist may be horrified but this is how language evolve, and Beijingese
is a better dialect because it gone through such evolution more than
Cantonese.