[jhanschoo]

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.

[calyth2018]

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.