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.
If that were the case, input methods by Chinese companies like Sogou wouldn't support Cantonese either. The opposite is true: here's a description of how to enable Cantonese Jyutping input in Sogou for iOS: https://jingyan.baidu.com/article/60ccbceb100b7c25cab197c4.h...
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.
Probably true. Half of the teens in the region dont speak the language anymore. So CCP is admittedly quite effective at it. Although Cantonese Voice recognition still works.
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.
So basically in 50 years Cantonese will largely live on in its disapora, much like the forms of Sicillian and Napolitano and the hundreds of other endagered languages you can find in NYC
Yes. But there is a different. Between Natural Selection of language where it is gone and a planned deliberate attack to get rid of the language. Correct me if I am wrong I believe Sicillian and Napolitano are the former. Cantonese are the latter.
I mean, Southern Italians from Calabria and Sicily fled Italy precisely to escape what they perceived as an attack on their culture and society by Northern Italy, given the official government told everybody "you and your children will now be speaking Tuscan from now on, oh, and we're gonna fuck you with high taxes" (Tuscan, the regional language of Tuscany, was promoted to Official Italian by the Nationalist government). This schism between north and south still exists to this day in Italy (it even gets mentioned in The Sopranos!).
Perhaps the difference is one of degree rather than an absolute difference
I doubt this is the case here. Cantonese is an official language of Hong Kong and Macau and the mother tongue of tens of millions in Guangdong. Language politics is complicated but I don't think the CCP is so crudely trying to eliminate languages. Apple also has keyboards for Uyghur and Tibetan, which are probably more sensitive languages.
As far as I know, there is a gradual trend to push Mandarin at the expense of Cantonese, and there is reason for concern, but I doubt there's a connection between this and Apple's decision here. (There's a reason I said "crudely".)
> I don't think the CCP is so crudely trying to eliminate languages
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.
Don't read this as me trying to defend CCP's policy to discourage non-Mandarin languages in China: What you wrote is somewhat misleading to readers not familiar with the region. There has been massive internal migration to Guangdong province in the last 30 years. These migrants speak Cantonese at varying levels. It would be more accurate to make a comment about multi-generation Guangdong residents and their knowledge of Cantonese. (If you want to discuss Shenzhen, there is virtually zero Cantonese used there, because it was only a fishing village with ~25k people when it was opened for trade. It is nearly 100% internal migrants -- mostly from outside Guangdong province.)
Yes, one can speak their own first Sinitic language on the mainland (and they do, and many even speak more than 2) and that is not banned.
But they can't buy a textbook on their first language because the official policy is that everything that is not Mandarin is a «dialect», and dialects can't be studied (as in «are impossible to study due to not deserving to be studied»), therefore there is no need for textbooks.
It's not just recent migration to Guangdong province. The eastern half of Guangdong is traditionally Hakka-speaking. Most Hakkas don't speak Cantonese, and that shouldn't be surprising.
I am confused by this comment. Are you talking about Chaozhou (潮州)? That city is on the border between Guangdong and Fujian (but lies in GD), but the locals are overwelming Canto speakers. There are many who have migrated to Hongkong over the last 75 years.
Except they actively discourage the use of cantonese even for those who have cantonese as their mother tongue and their parents who speak cantonese. To the point they communicate with their parents using Mandarin. Why? Because they have been taught at school speaking Cantonese in any circumstances were barbaric.
> Shenzhen
Shenzhen used to speak with Cantonese. All the way back from 70s to 90s after it was a fishing village. Everybody knew / learn how to speak with Cantonese because of Guangdong and Hong Kong.
Like I said above in another comment, most of the teens who were born from a Cantonese language family now dont speak the language anymore.
You wrote: <<most of the teens who were born from a Cantonese language family now dont speak the language anymore.>> Sorry, but I disagree from personal experience. I am not a native level Canto speaker, but I work with many! Chinese families that speak 'minority' languages (including Fujian province) work very hard to transfer this culture to the next generation -- inside or outside East Asia.
If you wish to dispute my comment, please provide anecdata or a peer reviewed study or poll/survey that supports your view.
Also, you wrote <<All the way back from 70s to 90s after it was a fishing village>> This statement makes no sense. Deng Xiaopeng did not 'open' Shenzhen until 1979. It was still a small, regional city well into the 1980s. It wasn't a multi-million person metropolis until the mid-1990s.
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!
> Why would I type my native language with a foreign language keyboard? Would you type Russian with an American keyboard?
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.
This is probably a bad example. The problem with typing pinyin instead of jyutping is that you must type a very different set of latin characters to get the result you want.
And the problem with jyutping is that it's not a standard romanization taught to Hong Kongers. Wasn't the case for sure when I was in school in Colonial Hong Kong. Pretty sure not the case in SAR Hong Kong.
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).
Then they should use a different one. There are at least half a dozen of these, and most of them do not require any symbols not found on most keyboards. Jyutping is actually an outlier among them for how it uses j and z. These are truly not intuitive for people used to the english, french or spanish alphabets.
The key thing, IMO, isn't whether they should use a different one.
The key thing is to pick one that will be taught to all student, so that it becomes a standard.
Good luck to anyone in the HKSAR government trying to propose that though - it would just be politicized like what the author of the article tried.
> Why would I type my native language with a foreign language keyboard? Would you type Russian with an American keyboard?
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.
Chinese is different from every other language I've seen. The written language shares meaning, but with different pronunciation. Mandarin uses pinyin as its romanisation, where Cantonese uses jyutping.
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!
Cantonese do not use jyutping per se. Let me qualify that statement.
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.
The article is about the software layout, not the physical layout as far as I can tell.
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...
English keyboards (especially ANSI-style US English keyboards) are very popular, but that's largely a matter of historical availability and (in hacker circles) bad support for the sort of punctuation you use for programming.
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).
There is no way to type Hungarian double acute accents on US International or UK Extended keyboards. You have to use workarounds like copy/paste, Alt-codes, or substitution macros.
(Also, there is no double acute a in Hungarian, only o and u.)
Portuguese seems to have held onto a lot of medieval spellings and pronounciations as I notice Spanish and Portuguese use to pronounce Juan/João similiarly at some point in the middle ages, is this accurate?
I'm not super familiar with that particular bit of language history, but AIUI nasal vowels/diphthongs are just weird. The way we both pronounce and spell them seems to have evolved a fair bit. Joam and Joaõ are both obsolete spellings of the name, so I can only imagine that the spelling was closer to Spanish before and we've diverged more than they have.
I never thought it was something special to type English on a Swiss keyboard. Do people switch keyboards when they switch languages? To me it seems an unnecessary hassle, to remember where's the Z or why aren't there umlauts or or or, whenever I send an email to another person in a different language.
German is so similar to english that switching is not really a thing. It's mostly programmers that do it to have easier access to punctuation and brackets. Frankly, I cannot understand why the Z and Y were swapped in the first place.
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.
As a native Portuguese speaker, I don't have a need for umlauts, but do need easy access to the tilde, acute, grave, and circumflex. English is the odd one out, because it's the least common denominator in terms of the characters you need.
Even though the characters are mostly the same for most European languages, the mobile keyboard is often tightly connected to spell checking and auto correct for a specific language. It can be a struggle to "fight" the autocorrect when using the wrong keyboard.
I never found autocorrect reliable - at least in Android keyboards (both Gboard and Samsung) - so I learned to always keep that deactivated. Swiping is the only place where keyboard layout would matter to me, so indeed virtual keyboards make sense to match the input. Physical don't have swiping (yet?) so I'll stick with the one with umlauts and never bother to change the input keyboard - although Windows keeps insisting after updates.
This article definitely has a political subtext. Spoken Cantonese and mandarin are mutually unintelligible, but in written form, at least without colloquialisms, they are basically the same language. I'm a non-chinese that studied Chinese, so I have no horse in this race. I do think they should support the Cantonese input method, but there's no reason the pinyin method wouldn't work just as well, other than lack of familiarity. I'm sure Apple is excluding it at the behest of the mainland government, which sucks, but just this isn't as cut and dried as the article makes it.
> Spoken Cantonese and mandarin are mutually unintelligible, but in written form, at least without colloquialisms, they are basically the same language.
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.
> but in written form, at least without colloquialisms, they are basically the same language.
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.
My assumption is that Apple _is_ referring to the colloquialisms.
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.
Yeah, Apple is the worst at supporting things outside of California and especially localization.
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.
The thing I miss most from Android after moving to iOS is how well auto completion worked when mixing multiple languages. On iOS I so often start typing, notice that the keyboard is set to the wrong language, then when I change language the half typed word (that didn't autocomplete and made me realize I had the wrong language set) is then autocompleted in the language I'm switching FROM so I have to erase it and start over. Sigh, I'd think that enough apple developers were bilingual so they'd notice the problem. On Android I could just use swiftkey and type away without switching language in advance.
I would say Microsoft is worst. It doesn’t support Zhuyin on screen keyboard. So my wife can’t type Chinese when she uses a laptop without a Zhuyin keyboard.
I think the comparison made by the author is unfortunate because of their lack of context of Russian transliteration. I speak Chinese and have some Russian language understanding so I feel I can give a better explanation:
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.
yeah but I’d imagine it’s not a Russian keyboard. Russian characters look like йуукенгшщзхфывапролджэячсмитьбю. You’d have a hard time writing in English using them
I had a Russian housemate in London who exclusively used an English keyboard because he liked that model and it wasn't available in Cyrillic. He gave me the impression that a lot of people in Russia used English keyboards. But then he was an English-speaking programmer, and not representative of the "average Russian".
The impression i get is that you can write Russian in Roman text, and most Russians will understand you, but if you write English with Russian characters, very few people will understand you
In the 90s, before wide adoption of Unicode, there were several competing encodings for Russian in ASCII, such as KOI-8, Windows and others. In some cases, it was just easier to type Russian in English language as it was spoken, which was called "translit", from transliteration: naprimer, vot tak. Later, as first mobile phones got wide adoption in late 90s and early 00s, they, too, didn't yet have russian keyboards, and translit was once again used, although in modified form, with wider use of digits in place of letters.
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
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...
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.
Pretty bizarre that stuff like this happens. I'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.
And not just China...in general. Even small companies (<500) often keep track of their employee's nationality and language proficiency.
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.
But the reason for that is likely just an ignorance, not political games.
There are important nuances that make Apple's decision less radical, and make the author'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.
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.
Thank you. It's actually a sane take on the issue that isn't more about politics than the actual matter of a Cantonese speaker trying to type Chinese on a computer.
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.
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.
I think that's because Cantonese does not have an objective way (as I know) to gauge speaker proficiency. And mainly because it is a mostly spoken language.
By the way, ring me up if you wanna talk in Cantonese with a native speaker :)
Jyutping was not taught in school, most definitely not the case when I studied primary school in Colonial HK. Wasn'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'm not even sure how much uptake a jyutping keyboard there would be.
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.
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.
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.
> Is this it? Is Apple done pretending to support linguistic diversity?
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.
I know it feels like too much, you just feel like being outraged sometimes, don't you? But trust me, we gotta try it for a few centuries and see how it works out. You'll be surprised by our progress.
There are times when outrage is entirely the right emotion to feel. The problem is when we live in a permanent state of outrage, or when we pretend to be outraged to get what we want.
If we "ban outrage", then somebody needs to be the outrage police and decide when it's acceptable.
Edit 2: ok apparently iOS doesn't support Jyutping out of the box, which seems to be the whole issue here, and with this detail I agree that one shouldn't be more prioritary than having Jyutping first.
> 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)
> since you write Cantonese and Mandarin with the same alphabet
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.
> 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.
Sure, so now imagine Apple actually doing that in regards to German people. Would the many angry German consumers who had paid quite a bit for Apple phones be 'overreacting' to publicly complain about it?
The Jyutping method, which is the proper way to input Cantonese, isn't available.
Instead, Apple looked at people using the Pinyin keyboard to awkwardly input Cantonese (because Jyutping wasn't available) and decided to enhance that instead of just giving a Jyutping keyboard.