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To: carl a. mehr who wrote (42536)	12/17/1997 12:43:00 PM
From: Mary Cluney	Respond to of 186894

Carl, >>>How does a computer handle the Chinese language (or Japanese for that matter)?<<< I have been asking the same question now for a number of years and have never had a clear explanation. The numbering system is easy. Unless you are from Mars or a computer programmer you use the decimal system. But, the word processing part has me confused. It seems as if there are several different methods: There is a simplified version of the Japanese or Chinese language and there is a version that provides a choice list based on some phonetics that you can choose the characters you want. But people have always brushed me off whenever I wanted an explanation. With the names on this thread, it seems like someone should be able to explain it to us. Mary

To: carl a. mehr who wrote (42536)	12/17/1997 1:09:00 PM
From: Barry A. Watzman	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 186894

>re: How does a computer handle the Chinese language (or Japanese for that matter)? Answer: Not very well. The character set is a HUGE problem, it has stunted the growth of computers in those countries. One solution is to use english, obviously this is not an option for everyone although plenty of people in those countries use this solution. In graphical environments such as Windows, there are solutions for dealing with these languages in terms of inputting them and displaying them, but they substantially increase the processor demand, memory requirement and difficulty of use (it often takes more than one keystroke to enter a character). Plus, they tend to not be universal across all programs installed on the computer.

To: carl a. mehr who wrote (42536)	12/17/1997 2:08:00 PM
From: Mohan Marette	Respond to of 186894

Carl: I have to pass your query to better informed techies here on the thread.

To: carl a. mehr who wrote (42536)	12/17/1997 4:11:00 PM
From: Jimbo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

>Possibly a dum question: How does a computer handle the Chinese language >(or Japanese for that matter)? Is the alphabet not huge? I will try and answer your question but it might be a little long. Alphabet. Chinese does not use alphabet but use ideograms. Alphabets use letters to stand for sounds and don't mean anything by themselves but ideograms use unique shapes to represent ideas. Example: 1 unique ideogram or shape represents water. (Schoolchildren need to memorize each and every one. A good vocabulary is said to be 2000 of the most common characters out of 15000.) Japanese also use Chinese characters which they call kanji In addition they use two kinds of alphabets used interchangeably katakana, hiragana. their 'alphabet' however is a little different. For instance: five different shapes for ka, ke, ki,ko,ku another 5 for ba, be, bi, bo, bu and so on. Notice that in enlish, you used just 7 letters to represetn all those sounds but japanese used 10 already Since Japanese sounds are simple compared to English. that is no big problem. the alphabet size is not that big Korean uses alphabet called hanggul (relatively recent invention). They used to use Chinese characters too and still do. (Koreans still know the Chinese version of their names but may not be good readers of Chinese anymore) Chinese uses approximately 13000 unique shapes. Therefore ASCII which uses single byte is not good enough to fit. To represent each character, 2 bytes are used. 2 bytes contain up to 65000 approximately- more than enough to represent each and every character. As yet, there is no universal coding scheme used. A popular one is called BIG5 International bodies have tried to promote a coding scheme (double byte also) called Unicode. Unicode is universal in that it contains all alphabets and ideograms of all the world (yes 65000 fits them all) - Cyrillic, Latin, Greek alphabets plus the ideogram based languages Inputting Characters : again there is no standard. a popular one is called Pingyin. Pingyin is what you see with the word Beijing. v.s. the old spelling of Peking; Maozedung vs. old Maotsetung Communist China wanted to standardized spelling and invented pingyin (and actually contemplated at one time getting rid of Chinese ideograms in favor of Roman alphabet -Pingyin to democratize literacy, The peasants supposedly didn't have time to memorize all those characters. But tradition dies hard, and pingyin did not work) Since a particular sound for example Bei (from Beijing) can result in many different characters. Normally a box will pop out showing different choices. You can then use mouse click, or function keys to select which one you like. The character is then inserted your document, spreadsheet or whatever. As you can imagine, input is a lot slower. Other popular input methods you the shape of the character. Chinese on Windows You can do Chinese processing even in ordinary English Windows 95 by using software such as Twinbridge (downloadable from the net, a demo version features ugly looking chinese characters makes you want to puke and trade up to the full-featured thing) Using Twinbridge, you can use English version of Word to enter chinese (and japanese and korean) and print it. The full featured twinbridge features beautiful looking fonts. plus English Chinese dictionary, plus choice of inputting in english. Example type CAR and the Chinese ideogram for car will appear. And you can print on any ordinary HP laserjet or inkjet printer. Alternatively, you can buy Chinese Windows 95, Chinese Word, Chinese Coreldraw, Chinese Excel. all the popular software seems to have chinese version. Same thing except all the menus are in Chinese too. Chinese on the Internet There are Chinese Websites and using the above mentioned twinbridge, you can view them. You don't need Chinese netscape or Explorer. Without Twinbridge, the website will display letters and symbols in seemingly random form. By just clicking the twinbridge icon, the webpage magically transforms into Chinese characters. Chinese computing, I guess has come a long way. I have just got my Twinbridge and am having fun playing and experimenting on it. I do most of my computing and most everything in English however. I hope the above clear up any lingering mysteries as to how Chinese computing is done. regards & good luck mr humble one jimbo P.S. I have long enjoyed your posts and hope I have been of help.

To: carl a. mehr who wrote (42536)	12/17/1997 10:10:00 PM
From: Gary Ng	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Carl, Re: How does a computer handle the Chinese language (or Japanese for that matter) Instead of the 255 ASCII characters (enough for most Western language), each 'character' is expressed in 2 bytes instead of 1 which gives 60000+ 'character' or words. The OS has the ability to identify if a byte is the lead of Chinese and interpret that accordingly. English alphabets is still single byte. For input, there is a 'filter' where the keystrokes entered would be translated into the above mentioned 2 byte characters. NT support UNICODE system which used 2 byte for every character (ASCII included) but has never been successful. Gary