The Computer Corner
By Charles Miller, Nov 10, 2006

Worldwide QWERTY conquest coming?

Many months ago, I received the following question from an Atención reader: “Them there Chinese and Japanese have hundreds of funny-looking letters in their strange alphabet. They say you must memorize 600 of the pagoda-looking scratchings to be able to write. How do they use a computer keyboard based on a 26-character alphabet?”

You see, I get some really curious questions on this job. I considered the question largely rhetorical rather than practical, and so I let it languish. But I never forgot it, and the more I thought about the question over the last few months, the more I came to realize it holds potentially weighty implications for some of the world’s languages.

The Chinese language uses a logographic script, a form of writing in which one or two characters correspond to one word. There are many more of these characters or glyphs than letters in the Latin alphabet.

During one of my visits to Asia years ago, I recall seeing a Chinese typewriter with what appeared to be hundreds of keys. I have not returned to China since the personal computer became ubiquitous, so I had to do a bit of research on this subject.

What I learned by surfing the internet is that the experiments with computer keyboards having hundreds of keys seem to have gone nowhere. The standard keyboard most of us use, with 101 keys, including 26 to 30 alphabetic keys, seems to be emerging as the world standard.

The problem for Asian languages is how to input written characters using a limited number of keys.

All Chinese characters can be disassembled into component parts. By typing in the individual parts you will get the character. One problem, though, is that there are more than a hundred schemes to dismantle characters—and so far no standard.

There is one method, named “T9 Chinese,” that uses only five keys for the entire Chinese language. It is said to be quite slow, however. In English or Spanish, a good touch typist can type 120 words per minute. The Chinese typist is doing well to type 20. Some emerging technologies are on the horizon and might come into play soon. Some of these are handwriting recognition and voice recognition. At present, these technologies are plagued with unacceptably high error rates.

There is even one method of writing Chinese symbols by typing their equivalent English words, which the computer then translates.

After having spent some time researching this, I cannot help but come to the conclusion that the personal computer and its familiar keyboard might end up precipitating profound changes in some alphabets.

An early 20th-century example of this happened in 1928. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the first president of modern Turkey, saw the need to change the Turkish language as part of his move to westernize his country. The use of the old Arabic script was banned, and the entire country was forcibly switched to a new Latin-based alphabet. One has to remember that in 1928 Atatürk was dealing with a largely illiterate populace, but still the idea of successfully making such a wholesale change in a written language is astounding.

A similar thing may very well be happening around the world thanks to the lowly 101-character keyboard. As more and more languages seek to be supported by the computer, it is possible some of these languages are going to adapt in ways to fit the keyboard.

Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant, a frequent visitor to San Miguel since 1981 and now practically a full-time resident. He may be contacted at 044-415-153-8528, or email FAQ@SMAguru.com