There ain’t no…….. Chinese keyboards
I’ve been told there are over 4000 Chinese characters in the Chinese language. You ever wondered how they get all those keys on a keyboard. I remember on a visit to Japan in the 80’s that I saw a typewriter that looked like it belonged in a typesetting room of a newspaper. It was huge. The keys were on row after row. The operator looked like she was playing some huge pipe organ. The Japanese, you see, use very similar characters to the Chinese.I’ve been told there are 23 or more dialects in China. Whatever the number it is huge. And I do mean dialects, not just accents. I often hear others speak of the difficulty they have in understanding different employees from different regions. The government has mandated Mandarin as the official language, and it is probably getting better than in the past.
I’ve also told many of you the difficulty I have in the fact that I work with Hong Kong management that frequently speaks their native Cantonese, but in day to day business in the factory they speak the official language of Mandarin. I get confused all the time by which I’m hearing, and have on more than one occasion used the wrong translation of one of the few words I know in the wrong place – speaking Mandarin, when I was in a group speaking Cantonese, and vice versa. I say “maywenti” (no problem), but get reprimanded that “no… it’s momenti here”!
But back to the keyboard…… Now this is really cool! The other day I was wondering how they were getting the characters on the keyboard, when it didn’t look any different than mine or yours. So I sat down for a demonstration.
First you have to then know that in 1958, pinyin became officially recognized as the phonetic translation of the Mandarin language. Up until then everyone had to learn all those funny characters, and speaking the language was not necessarily related. But pinyin is phonetic – albeit rather confusing for an American since it is Roman based. This did link all the country into a similar concept and in time, allowed for a unique feature with a computer.
Today, to write in Chinese, all you do is type in pinyin!! It is sooo cool. Okay, you must also use transcription software on your computer to convert from pinyin to Chinese. So type in the pinyin words like: ni hao ma? (How are you?) And you get: 你好吗？
Now isn’t that really cool? And simple! 享用 (Enjoy!)
posted by A Bryson (formerly) in China @ 5:31 PM
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