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Wilmington, North Carolina once had a thriving Black middle class and an elected interracial government. In 1898 white supremacists used violence to overthrow that government, kill Black residents and drive many others from the city.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
 | The factual accuracy of parts of this article (those related to handwriting, OCR, and voice recognition) may be compromised due to out-of-date information. The reason given is: Tech advances have vastly improved these input methods. (June 2021) |
Several input methods allow the use of Chinese characters with computers. Most allow selection of characters based either on their pronunciation or their graphical shape. Phonetic input methods are easier to learn but are less efficient, while graphical methods allow faster input, but have a steep learning curve.
Other methods allow users to write characters directly via touchscreens, such as those found on mobile phones and tablet computers.
Chinese input methods predate the computer. One of the early attempts was an electro-mechanical Chinese typewriter Mingkwai (Chinese: 明快; pinyin: míngkuài; Wade–Giles: ming-k'uai) which was invented by Lin Yutang, a prominent Chinese writer, in the 1940s. It assigned thirty base shapes or strokes to different keys and adopted a new way of categorizing Chinese characters. But the typewriter was not produced commercially and Lin soon found himself deeply in debt.[2]
Before the 1980s, Chinese publishers hired teams of workers and selected a few thousand type pieces from an enormous Chinese character set. Chinese government agencies entered characters using a long, complicated list of Chinese telegraph codes, which assigned different numbers to each character. During the early computer era, Chinese characters were categorized by their radicals or Pinyin romanization, but results were less than satisfactory.
In the 1970s to 1980s, large keyboards with thousands of keys were used to input Chinese. Each key was mapped to several Chinese characters. To type a character, one pressed the character key and then a selection key.[3] There were also experimental "radical keyboards" with dozens to several hundreds of keys. Chinese characters were decomposed into "radicals", each of which was represented by a key.[1][4][5] Unwieldy and difficult to use, these keyboards became obsolete after the introduction of Cangjie input method, the first method to use only the standard QWERTY keyboard and make Chinese touch typing possible.[5]
Chu Bong-Foo invented a common input method in 1976 with his Cangjie input method, which assigns different "roots" to each key on a standard computer keyboard. With this method, for example, the character 日 is assigned to the A key, and 月 is assigned to B. Typing them together will result in the character 明 ("bright").
Despite its steeper learning curve, this method remains popular in Chinese communities that use traditional Chinese characters, such as Hong Kong and Taiwan; the method allows very precise input, thus allowing users to type more efficiently and quickly, provided they are familiar with the fairly complicated rules of the method. It was the first method that allowed users to enter more than a hundred Chinese characters per minute. Its popularity is also helped by its omnipresence on traditional Chinese computer systems, since Chu gave up his patent in 1982, stating that it should be part of the cultural asset. Developers of Chinese systems can adopt it freely, and users do not have the hassle of it being absent on devices with Chinese support.[6][7] Cangjie input programs supporting a large CJK character set have been developed.[8][9][10]
All methods have their strengths and weaknesses. The pinyin method can be learned rapidly but its maximum input rate is limited. The Wubi method takes longer to learn, but expert typists can enter text much more rapidly with it than with phonetic methods. However, Wubi is proprietary, and a version of it has become freely available only after its inventor lost a patent lawsuit in 1997.[11]
Due to these complexities, there is no "standard" method.
By 1989, bopomofo and pinyin were available for the IBM PC.[12] In mainland China, pinyin methods such as Sogou Pinyin are the most popular. In Taiwan, use of bopomofo input predominates; and in Hong Kong and Macau, the Cangjie is most often taught in schools, while a few schools teach CKC Chinese Input System.[13]
Other methods include handwriting recognition, OCR and speech recognition. The computer itself must first be "trained" before the first or second of these methods are used; that is, the new user enters the system in a special "learning mode" so that the system can learn to identify their handwriting or speech patterns. The latter two methods are used less frequently than keyboard-based input methods and suffer from relatively high error rates, especially when used without proper "training", though higher error rates are an acceptable trade-off to many users.
The user enters pronunciations that are converted into relevant Chinese characters. The user must select the desired character from homophones, which are common in Chinese. Modern systems, such as Sogou Pinyin and Google Pinyin, predict the desired characters based on context and user preferences. For example, if one enters the sounds jicheng, the software will type 繼承 (to inherit), but if jichengche is entered, 計程車 (taxi) will appear.
Various Chinese dialects complicate the system. Phonetic methods are mainly based on standard pinyin, Zhuyin/Bopomofo, and Jyutping in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, respectively. Input methods based on other varieties of Chinese, like Hakka or Minnan, also exist.
While the phonetic system is easy to learn, choosing appropriate Chinese characters slows typing speed. Most users report a typing speed of fifty characters per minute, though some reach over one hundred per minute.[14] With some phonetic IMEs (Input Method Editors), in addition to predictive input based on previous conversions, it is possible for users to create custom dictionary entries for frequently used characters and phrases, potentially lowering the number of characters required to evoke it.
Shuangpin (双拼; 雙拼), literally dual spell, is a stenographical phonetic input method based on hanyu pinyin that reduces the number of keystrokes for one Chinese character to two by distributing every vowel and consonant composed of more than one letter to a specific key. In most Shuangpin layout schemes such as Xiaohe, Microsoft 2003 and Ziranma, the most frequently used vowels are placed on the middle layer, reducing the risk of repetitive strain injury.
Shuangpin is supported by a large number of pinyin input software including QQ, Microsoft Bing Pinyin, Sogou Pinyin and Google Pinyin.
Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
Several input methods allow the use of Chinese characters with computers. Most allow selection of characters based either on their pronunciation or their graphical shape. Phonetic input methods are easier to learn but are less efficient, while graphical methods allow faster input, but have a steep learning curve. Other methods allow users to write characters directly via touchscreens, such as those found on mobile phones and tablet computers.
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. Unlike the Pinyin input method, Cangjie is based on the graphological aspect of the characters: each graphical unit, called a "radical" (not to be confused with Kangxi radicals), is re-parented by a basic character component, 24 in total, each mapped to a particular letter key on a standard QWERTY keyboard. An additional "difficult character" function is mapped to the X key. Keys are categorized into four groups, to facilitate learning and memorization. Assigning codes to Chinese characters is done by separating the constituent "radicals" of the characters.
The CKC Chinese Input System is a Chinese input method for computers that uses the four corner method to encode characters. The encoding uses a maximum of four digits ("0" - "9") to represent a Chinese character. All possible shapes of strokes that forms any given Chinese character are classified into ten groups, each represented by one of the ten possible digits 0-9. Chinese characters can then be input by following the order in which the strokes are identified at the four corners of the character. As a result of this simplicity in coding using the ten numeric digits, users typically need to use only a numeric keypad to input Chinese. Implementations for both Traditional and Simplified Chinese are available, though the coding principle applies to both. In other words, users only need to be trained once and the skill can be applied equally well to both Traditional and Simplified Chinese version of the CKC Chinese Input System. Training courses on the CKC Chinese Input System are provided by training centres in CKC Centre for the Development of Information Technology for Chinese Language Teaching of The Hong Kong Institute of Education, IVE Haking Wong and of Hong Kong University.
The Stroke Count Method (Chinese: 笔画; pinyin: bǐ huà), Wubihua method, Stroke input method or Bihua IME (Chinese: 五笔画输入法; pinyin: wǔ bǐhuà shūrù fǎ or Chinese: 筆劃輸入法; pinyin: Bǐhuà shūrù fǎ) (lit. 5-stroke input method) is a relatively simple Chinese input method for writing text on a computer or a mobile phone. It is based on the stroke order of a word, not pronunciation. It uses five or six buttons, and is often placed on a numerical keypad. Although it is possible to input Traditional Chinese characters with this method, this method is often associated with Simplified Chinese characters. The Wubihua method should not be confused with the Wubi method. Each of the five keys from 1 to 5 are assigned a certain type of stroke (resembling the Eight Principles of Yong; these five are sometimes called 橫竖撇捺折 (橫豎撇捺折; héng-shù-piē-nà-zhé) with each character of this phrase being a one-syllable description of the respective five strokes: A horizontal stroke from left to right (一) A vertical stroke from top to bottom (丨) A long diagonal stroke downward from right to left (丿) A very short dash stroke downward from left to right (丶) A horizontal stroke from left to right, ending with a downwards hook to the left (乙) To input any character, the user simply presses the keys corresponding to the strokes of a character then select from a list of matching characters. The list of suggestions to choose from becomes more and more specific as more digits of the code are entered. The system will not recognize a character input with an incorrect stroke order. Some people find this method of entering characters into a mobile phone to be faster than pinyin. In fact, as pinyin is based upon Mandarin Chinese, many Chinese people – particularly in the southern regions of China like Hong Kong and Macau – who speak other varieties of Chinese and never learned pinyin relied solely on this method of entering characters on their phones, until touchscreen-based smartphones allowed the possibility of handwriting recognition. Wubihua is one of the easiest to learn methods because it is simple and does not require knowledge of pronunciation or pinyin. However, it tends to be vague, as a Wubihua code will normally match ten characters, and each character has one correct code, which confuses users whose stroke orders are wrong. Strokes map to Wubihua input generally according to the following table:
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
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