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Apple’s new keyboard feature in iOS 15 is insult to Cantonese speaking community

61 pointsby taxyovioalmost 4 years ago

22 comments

bsaulalmost 4 years ago
The hypothesis never mentioned in the post, is i think that apple fears being kicked out of China for promoting cantonese or regional languages, going against the will of the CCP to make Mandarin the only official chineese language.
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mlang23almost 4 years ago
Apple has a ton of internationalisation bugs. I am a VoiceOver user, so some of the things I "see" might not be obvious to other users. When I started with iOS 2012, umlauts in PDF documents were not pronounced correctly. This basically made PDF reading unusable for documents in my native language, because umlauts are quite prominent in german. When I entered my date of birth into the contact app, I immediately found out someone at Apple had placed an exception for "1979" into the pronounciation database. All other 4 digit numbers are spoken correctly in German, except for 1979 and 1234. These are being spoken in english, 1979 as "Nineteenseventynine" and 1234 as "one two three four". Thats not the only weird exception. I could go on and write a full list. And all of the bugs (except for the umlauts in PDF thing) have never been fixed since I first noticed them. Some do exist since 9 years!
LeffeBrunealmost 4 years ago
&gt; Why would I type my native language with a foreign language keyboard? Would you type Russian with an American keyboard?<p>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.
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blntechiealmost 4 years ago
&gt; Why would I type my native language with a foreign language keyboard? Would you type Russian with an American keyboard?<p>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.
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fredwualmost 4 years ago
As a native Shanghainese speaker I am extremely confused (and curious!).<p>Cantonese at least has a written form, but Shanghainese AFAIK has no written form, so what does &quot;Shanghainese dialectal spelling&quot; even mean? :\
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akmarinovalmost 4 years ago
Yeah, Apple is the worst at supporting things outside of California and especially localization.<p>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.<p>Even Windows Phone supported 50 while it was around.
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blowskialmost 4 years ago
&gt; Would you type Russian with an American keyboard?<p>I thought that was relatively common, just one of those things people are accustomed to.
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joeberonalmost 4 years ago
This might sound super inflammatory but I honestly believe that Apple scores more social leverage by supporting unused and endangered languages than mainstream Asian languages
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amanbolatalmost 4 years ago
As I know there are more people in the south part of China Mainland, who speak and write Cantonese and they have always been using pinyin or keyboard. So if you already can use one type of input why bother and create one more for a smaller group? Nobody in government cares about what type of keyboard you use...<p>In addition, most of native Russian speakers do use English&#x2F;American keyboard to write Russian because it is much easier rather than finding one with Cyrillic symbols.
Havocalmost 4 years ago
Pretty bizarre that stuff like this happens. I&#x27;d have thought that Apple would have a native focus group of sorts to check this out. Or failing that just scrape together a couple actual chinese among their 150k employees to get some relevant eyeballs on it.<p>And not just China...in general. Even small companies (&lt;500) often keep track of their employee&#x27;s nationality and language proficiency.
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wruzaalmost 4 years ago
Apple also translated “hey siri” into “privet siri” in russian. “Hey” means both greeting and exclamation (like oy) in english, but “privet” is just a greeting that is used only once a day. It’s like you have a coworker Alice and when you ask her something instead of saying “hey Alice could you please …” you say “greetings Alice …” every single time, sometimes few times in a row. It’s sounds so creepy.<p>But the reason for that is likely just an ignorance, not political games.
jhanschooalmost 4 years ago
There are important nuances that make Apple&#x27;s decision less radical, and make the author&#x27;s decision more radical than what the average Westerner and young Chinese will perceive, whose notion of language and society is greatly influenced by European linguistic nationalism.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>Most written Cantonese input use some form of stroke order or radical input.<p>Hence in terms of user-friendliness, the approach that Apple goes with is actually optimal, to the detriment to those with linguistic-nationalist agendas.<p>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.<p>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.
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tikkabhunaalmost 4 years ago
I’ve been learning Cantonese and trying to find resources or support for it is so difficult. It’s easy to take for granted how easy it is to start learning French, German, or Spanish.
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Hamukoalmost 4 years ago
&gt;<i>Why would I type my native language with a foreign language keyboard? Would you type Russian with an American keyboard?</i><p>I&#x27;ve actually been using an American keyboard layout to write Japanese because I can&#x27;t find how to type 「」 with my native Finnish layout.
gaudatalmost 4 years ago
yau mou yan taai dak ming lei duen yeh<p>Hope that keyboard supports this kind of input.<p>That&#x27;s what comes to my mind for informal phonetic input of Cantonese.
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calyth2018almost 4 years ago
Jyutping was not taught in school, most definitely not the case when I studied primary school in Colonial HK. Wasn&#x27;t the case when I went back and worked a few years, watching little cousins type their school work with something other than Jyutping. So I&#x27;m not even sure how much uptake a jyutping keyboard there would be.<p>For me, as someone who don&#x27;t type Chinese enough that I&#x27;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 &quot;cantonese pinyin&quot; keyboards) have a specific transliteration of Cantonese sounds to the English alphabet in a way that I can&#x27;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&#x27;t find install it. To expand to why there&#x27;s an inconsistency with transliterating Cantonese sounds... It&#x27;s not taught in a standardize, formal manner in school, and you can see that with the author&#x27;s name here, 阿擇. He has Chaaak, which to me is a transliteration pretty far off from the actual pronunciation. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk&#x2F;scripts&#x2F;wordsearch.php?level=0" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk&#x2F;scripts&#x2F;wordsearch.php?leve...</a> suggests &quot;zaak&quot;, while I might have attempted &quot;zhak&quot;, or &quot;zhaak&quot;, or &quot;jak&quot; with the Google Cantonese pinyin IME, with the latter a closer map to the actual sound of the word IMO. I wouldn&#x27;t associate z with the start of the sound. I&#x27;ve seen some older methods uses &quot;ts&quot; instead. c) for someone like me who struggles with writing &#x2F; 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&#x27;s far more convenient.<p>I type Chinese, to my family, in pinyin. It would actually be quite nice have Cantonese word that&#x27;s accessible via pinyin. It&#x27;s a fucking mess to try to look up a primarily Cantonese word for someone like me, because again, there wasn&#x27;t a standardized version taught consistently. And I don&#x27;t find jyutping taught now.<p>All this just seems to me a tempest in a fucking teacup. As a matter of practicality, I&#x27;d welcome it.
i5heualmost 4 years ago
Is there a way to bypass the medium loginwall?<p>This is a big annoyance.
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inkyotoalmost 4 years ago
It is likely that «pinyin» was either used as a generic word to reference a romanisation system specific each of the Cantonese and Shanghainese languages, or it was a blunder on behalf of Apple due to a poorly prepared communiqué. Also likely, it was a bit of both.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;s state language to unite the nation. National Languages Committee of the Republic of China settled on Mandarin as the uniting language in 1932.<p>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 <i>ahem</i> 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.
pgtalmost 4 years ago
&quot;I&#x27;m posting this on Medium for a wider reach.&quot;<p>&#x2F;me opens up Medium page: &quot;Read this story with a free account.&quot; <i>closes tab</i><p>Sorry, but Medium is restricting your reach.
jiofihalmost 4 years ago
&gt; Is this it? Is Apple done pretending to support linguistic diversity?<p>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.<p>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.
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slveralmost 4 years ago
New rule, we ban the concepts of being &quot;insulted&quot; and &quot;outraged&quot; and we focus on constructive discussion from now on as a species.<p>As for Apple, their localization is quite half-hearted for about half the world, so that&#x27;s just how they roll, unfortunately.
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raverbashingalmost 4 years ago
Edit 2: ok apparently iOS doesn&#x27;t support Jyutping out of the box, which seems to be the whole issue here, and with this detail I agree that one shouldn&#x27;t be more prioritary than having Jyutping first.<p>&gt; Pinyin is a romanization system designed for Mandarin. Why type Cantonese and Shanghainese in Mandarin Pinyin?<p>(Edit: yes it might have to do with political pressure as well) I&#x27;m assuming if Apple did this (which is not a feature you can &quot;just do&quot;) it was something that people do and there&#x27;s a logic to it.<p>Yes, maybe Apple is in the wrong, but this sounds like more an overreaction, since you write Cantonese and Mandarin with the same alphabet.<p>&gt; Would you type Russian with an American keyboard?<p>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)<p>(with no love to Medium messing with cut-paste)
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