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by crooked-v 1832 days ago
> 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.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyutping

2 comments

> 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.

Yes, so my analogy makes sense (see the before the last paragraph in my comment)
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?
But you can still type German or Cantonese with a specific keyboard/phonetic system right?

This is on top of what exists.

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.

Yes, if the the tone was the same as this post.