Re: [9fans] Re: ctrans - Chinese language input for Plan9

["Silvan Jegen" <me@sillymon.ch>]

adr@sdf.org wrote:
> > I stumbled onto an instructive video on youtube not that long ago. I'm
> > sure there are a few you'll be able to search for. If I understand
> > correctly, it's a combination of entering the phoneme by the nearest
> > Latin letter, then select from a diminishing range of suitable options
> > on the screen.
> 
> There are other input methods based on the shape of the
> characters. Some are better with traditional Chinese characters,
> other with simplified characters, it's complicated... Let see if some
> Chinese comrade share with us his daily life experience. The Japanese
> is input writing kana directly with a Japanese keyboard or by romaji
> with roman characters on western keyboards (ka -> か, &c) and then
> transformed to kanji when necessary. There are different IMEs, but the
> principle is the same. I suppose that ktrans is similar, I haven't
> tried jet.

ktrans seems to be quite different actually. According to the
documentation it uses the Cangjie input method [0] which is based on the
so called "radicals". These are some more basic elements that the Chinese
characters are made of (note that the "radicals" chosen for Cangjie are
not identical to the 214 radicals that are commonly used to classify
Chinese characters. For the latter see [1]).

Every one of these 24 Cangjie radicals gets mapped to an ASCII character
and their combinations then uniquely identify a Chinese character (the
wikipage at [0] illustrates the approach very well).

This input method seems to be old and I have never seen a Chinese person
use it. From what I understand, most Chinese people nowadays just write
text in Pinyin (a latin transliteration of the Chinese pronounciation)
and then the IME helps you choose the correct combination of Chinese
characters (potentially taking the context of the text already written
into account).


Cheers,

Silvan

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie_input_method
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_radical

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