Meanwhile, the Wamma language of Benin stands out for getting an unusual amount of value-per-character out of the Latin alphabet. Nuosu, an ancient logographic language used by the Yi ethnic group in southwest China, is Chinese's closest rival in this "fast-texting competition." (Logographic languages are those in which each symbol or letter represents an entire word.) Vowel-eliding Hebrew and Arabic also have below-average character counts. Of those, Chinese seems to be the language to beat (even after accounting for its lack of spaces), according to an informal survey. A comparison of translations of the document based on character count shows that languages with thousands of distinct symbols at their disposal - such as Japanese, Chinese and Korean - have an advantage in compressing their communications. The United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights is available in 475 languages and counting. It raises the question, then, whether there's a written language that's even better suited to digital communication - one whose compactness, or amenability to predictive input software, makes it the internet generation's optimal writing system. Chinese can often convey an idea more concisely and on top of that, the character system offers a natural way to break down words into their component chunks, which is ideal for giving a predictive tool an info-rich outline of a word or phrase.Īs an example, compare the word "beautiful" and its Chinese equivalent, "美丽." The Chinese word can be easily separated into its two component characters, whose initials can then be used to sketch the word for a piece of software, while in English there's no obvious rule for how to reduce words to a few key joints. But even if typists of both languages were using predictive software and hitting keys at the same speed, a Chinese typist might still have an edge. The system does have weak spots, especially when it comes to unusual characters, and there are plenty of predictive input tools available in English as well. So the same tool can be used for chats and professional emails, too. It's sort of like being able to type whole sentences in "ttyl"- or "lol"-style text speak, but the end result is still proper Chinese. The twist: For many phrases, the only information necessary is the initial letter of each character (technically, the initial letter of the character's phonetic spelling), so you can write whole sentences with just a few letters.įor example, if you want to write "Have you eaten yet?" in Chinese, you just key in "nclm," a first-letter-only version of the phrase "Ni chi le ma?" which would be called up as the corresponding characters on your screen.įor "The air pollution is pretty severe today," just hit "jtkqwrhyz," and the characters corresponding to the phrase "Jin-tian kong-qi wu-ran hen yan-zhong" will be the first suggestion. With the most popular Chinese input tool, you write out a word with a phonetic alphabet called pinyin, and then select from a pop-up menu of characters that you're likely looking for. Case in point: On both keyboards and touch screens, Chinese people favor sophisticated predictive input tools, whereas the West mostly falls back on what-you-hit-is-what-you-get typing - a method that does a nice job of simulating a typewriter but doesn't explore any of the more agile solutions that software might open up. And because of the challenges posed by thousands of unique characters, Chinese engineers have been forced to push software to its real potential. It uses a no-frills grammar systemand eschews spacing altogether. In the case of Chinese, the 3,500-year commitment seems to have paid off. Rather, what matters more to a lot of people is how easy it is to type and text. Of course, the other side of the bargain is that, since the Bronze Age, literate Chinese people have had to spend years of their lives memorizing thousands of ornate figures.īut in 2016, you can live most of your life on a screen, so the difficulty of writing a language by hand is losing relevance. If it's tweets, there's still a long way to 140 characters. If it's books you're publishing, you'll be saving trees.
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