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From: Tilde <invalide@invalid.invalid>
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Subject: Re: Chinese Language Day (20 April)
Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2024 22:59:02 -0600
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Ross Clark wrote:
> 中文日快樂！
> Zhōngwén rì kuàilè!
> Happy Chinese Language Day!  (thanks,GT)
> 
> "...established by the UN in 2010 (on 12 November)...moved to this day 
> in April the following year..."
> No explanation of the "why" of either date. But:
> 
> "The date was chosen to honour Cangjie, a legendary figure who is said 
> to have invented Chinese characters 5,000 years ago."
> 
> and
> 
> "The day is the beginning of a period in the Chinese calendar called 
> _Guyu_, the sixth of the twenty-four terms that make up the calendar. 
> The name means "rain of millet", as, according to legend, when Cangjie 
> invented the characters, the gods wept tears of joy and the sky rained 
> millet."
> 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie

I've always considered this mindboggling, here is
something meant to facilitate communication etc
but to me seems to be itself a hindrance to
communication. I've read estimates of over 50K
characters. Yikes.

The computer age must have required some degree
of cleverness!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie_input_method

"The Cangjie input method (Tsang-chieh input
method, sometimes called Changjie, Cang Jie,
Changjei or Chongkit) is a system for entering
Chinese characters into a computer using a
standard computer keyboard. In filenames and
elsewhere, the name Cangjie is sometimes
abbreviated as cj.

"The input method was invented in 1976 by
Chu Bong-Foo, and named after Cangjie
(Tsang-chieh), the mythological inventor of
the Chinese writing system, at the suggestion
of Chiang Wei-kuo, the former Defense Minister
of Taiwan. Chu Bong-Foo released the patent for
Cangjie in 1982, as he thought that the method
should belong to Chinese cultural heritage.
Therefore, Cangjie has become open-source
software and is on every computer system that
supports traditional Chinese characters, and
it has been extended so that Cangjie is
compatible with the simplified Chinese
character set.

"Cangjie is the first Chinese input method to
use the QWERTY keyboard. Chu saw that the
QWERTY keyboard had become an international
standard, and therefore believed that
Chinese-language input had to be based on it.
Other, earlier methods use large keyboards
with 40 to 2400 keys, except the Four-Corner
Method, which uses only number keys."

2400 keys? koff koff  how does a Chinese
hacker operate?  ;)



See also

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin_input_method


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-corner_method