[blntechie]

> 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.

[tikkabhuna]

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!

[1] http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/168/

[calyth2018]

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.

[1] https://www.quora.com/Is-Pinyin-taught-in-China-or-is-it-jus...

[dathinab]

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...

[pdpi]

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).

[MagnumOpus]

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.)

[pdpi]

Thanks for the correction. I knew Hungarian used double acutes in some vowels, and should've looked up which ones instead of picking one at random.

[imbnwa]

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?

[pdpi]

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.

[em-bee]

on linux compose = o and compose = u do the trick: őű

(a̋ is not hungarian and doesn't work)

[soco]

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.

[samus]

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.

[pdpi]

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.

[qw]

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.

Physical keyboards don't have the same issues.

[soco]

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.