Quote:
Originally Posted by LDBoblo
 Keyboards are not innately ENGLISH, but based on the Roman alphabet, which is shared by many languages. In the 20th Century (and in some places much earlier!), many non-Roman languages developed "Romanization" systems that would allow rendering in foreign languages more readily. Japanese have various incarnations of Romaji, and Chinese have various incarnations of Luoma Pinyin. In the former's case, there are also phonetic alphabet systems (katakana and hiragana), and the latter developed a system that wasn't very dissimilar (zhuyin fuhao).
However, remember that keyboards can be mapped to a variety of different modes of input. In English, I sometimes swap between the classic QWERTY arrangement and a more efficient Dvorak layout. The keyboard press is simply an electronic pulse, with its value interpreted by the computer software.
Anyway, the Chinese have a couple other systems that are a bit more formal, involving the components that make each Chinese character (called radicals). Chinese characters generally aren't really pictures...they're just combinations of radicals written with a stroke order. You can take parts of those radicals and map them to a keyboard and "assemble" characters in Chinese input systems without having to even be able to pronounce the word you're typing. That's what is done in Chinese, in a nutshell. Handy since the characters themselves don't present a clear pronunciation, and it would be hard to phonetically type a character you don't know the sound of. Trying to do so would be almost as futile as understanding YouTube video comments.
Not so much a matter of "smart" as it is a natural use of the technology. Cyrillic, Arabic, all sorts of languages have keyboard mappings and software to help input their language with reasonable efficiency.
"Smart" would be managing a way to hack an old 1920s English typewriter to handle thousands of Chinese characters.  |
Duh, I know that the keyboard is not "English" however, the QWERTY keyboard was developed based on typing English (to slow the typist down actually) and therefore I call it an English keyboard.
It certainly wasn't developed with Chinese in mind.
And, yes, having built several computers, I understand that they keyboard is simply something which provides an electronic pulse. The QWERTY keyboard was specifically developed for the manual typewriter in order to slow the typist down so that they would not jam the keys.
And, much of the alphabet actually comes from the Greek - not the Roman, who took much of their alphabet from the Greek. That's why they call it an alphabet (alpha, beta ....).
Further, having lived in China, I do know that Chinese is not merely pictograms. Neither was ancient Egyptian, which is why the Rosetta Stone came in so handy.
However, from my point of view, it would be a bitch to have to learn Chinese Characters and then also learn several other forms of characters, as well as the Greco-Roman alphabet so that you could use a QWERTY keyboard.
I still think that is pretty damn remarkable. I certainly wouldn't want to have to learn to use a keyboard that had foreign symbols on it .... even understanding that I no longer look at my keyboard while I type, and as long as my fingers start out at the right place, the silly thing could be entirely blank and it wouldn't make any difference to me.
It would if I was a hunt and peck typist, but I'm not.
I said it was a stupid question, I didn't say that I was as stupid as you seem to think I am.
Oh, and
right back at you. Now, where did I leave my ignore list??