Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Original title: "26-key VS Nine Palace Grid, 45-year History of Chinese input method"

Compared with five such codes, Pinyin has a lower threshold as a voice code. What is even more frightening is that behind Pinyin is an entire nine-year compulsory education system.

01 how did the five strokes come from? in December 1978, the national academic exchange meeting on Chinese character coding was held in Qingdao.

This "Qingdao conference" gathered many scholars from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and local universities, and the issues they discussed seem unimaginable today:

How to input Chinese characters into the computer?

In today's era when iFLYTEK is rampant all over the world, and young people button up so fast, it is hard to imagine that Chinese input has become a "neck-choking" technology in China in the 1970s and 1980s.

The reason is also very simple, there are too many Chinese characters.

The national standard GB2312 character set issued in 1980 includes 6763 Chinese characters, while the national standard GB18030-2005 character set released in 2005 contains as many as 70244 Chinese characters.

The national standard GB18030 character set and unlike the Western alphabet, Chinese characters do not have a sorting method such as "ABCD".

At that time, there was no ready-made solution to how to correspond a large number of disordered Chinese characters to the keys on the keyboard. This also makes Chinese characters lag far behind western countries in information processing, especially in information input.

At the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games, when Agence France-Presse reporters saw that Chinese reporters were still writing news articles, they were directly weird: 7000 journalists, only the Chinese are still writing by hand!

At that time, there was no lack of the voice of "the backwardness of Chinese characters" in the academic circle, and some extreme scholars even thought that in the computer age, Chinese phonetic characters would replace square characters and become the way out for Chinese.

The arguments of "pinyin of Chinese characters", "Pinyin replacing Chinese characters" and even "one language and two texts" emerge one after another one after another. In some places, there is even a "full pinyin" teaching in schools.

Standing on the eve of the take-off of computer technology, the problem of Chinese character input must be solved.

At the meeting, many experts and professors put forward different opinions, and the mainstream view is to develop a keyboard specially designed for Chinese character input.

At that time, there were three schemes for special keyboards for Chinese characters, one of which was the whole-character keyboard.

That is to put thousands of Chinese characters, according to the radical partition, on a keyboard as big as a table, where to use it, so easy!

If one keyboard is not enough, you can also put the second one and the third one.

The advantage of this scheme is very outstanding, there is no learning cost, it is very direct. The shortcomings are also very prominent, except for simplicity and directness: you can't type blindly, the speed is very slow, and being able to enter 10 Chinese characters per minute is the limit. And a keyboard costs thousands of yuan, large equipment, high cost, impractical.

The second scheme is to imitate the Japanese to design the "primary and secondary key keyboard".

This scheme consists of a main keyboard and an auxiliary keyboard. The secondary keyboard is responsible for determining the partition, and the main keyboard can enter specific Chinese characters in the partition by pressing the corresponding keys.

It can be seen that this scheme is an improvement on the above one, which reduces the size of the equipment, can type with both hands, and is much faster.

But it creates a huge bug: typists need to remember which partition each character is in and where it is sorted.

Even if there are only a few thousand Chinese characters, it is a huge learning cost. Basically, there is no possibility of popularization of this scheme.

The third scheme is the 256-key "medium keyboard" scheme put forward by Academician Wang Xuan, the father of Chinese character laser typesetting.

Wang Xuan's scheme divides all Chinese characters into more than 1000 strokes and radicals and puts them on 256keys. As long as you combine these "parts" according to the structure, you can spell the desired Chinese characters like Lego.

For the first time, the keyboard used the method of "removing characters", that is, the "code" in the coding type of Chinese characters.

The later Wubi, Zheng Ma and the Changjie input method created by Zhu Bangfu in 1976 all used "code".

Compared with the first two systems, the middle keyboard scheme is obviously much more advanced, but it is far from perfect.

After all, the English QWERTY keyboard, which has only 26 letter keys, has few keys, is light enough, and is already widely used internationally. If you can, who doesn't want to use ready-made things directly? Chinese characters are really too special.

In the same year that the Qingdao meeting was held, Wang Yongmin of the Henan Nanyang Science and Technology Commission also joined the development of Chinese character input methods.

Wang Yongmin was similar to the mainstream idea at that time, and at first he also wanted to build a keyboard that belonged exclusively to Chinese characters.

In order to achieve this goal, Wang Yongmin decomposed more than 12000 Chinese characters in the Modern Chinese Dictionary one by one, classified and counted them, and summed up more than 600 word units. Wang Yongmin named them word roots. And according to the frequency of occurrence, 125 of them are the most commonly used.

As a result of his efforts, he reduced the number of keys on a Chinese keyboard from 256 to 188 and to 62. By 1982, Wang Yongmin had developed the 36-key scheme.

And all of this is developed without computers and pure manual statistics.

At this time, there were two roads in front of him.

One is to promote the 36-key scheme. This scheme was successfully launched in 1982, and as the most advanced scheme at that time, it is already possible to popularize it.

The other way is to go back to work and compress the keys to a fully matched 26-key QWERTY keyboard.

You know, the less key bits are compressed, the more duplicate codes, that is, a set of keys correspond to different words, and word selection will greatly affect efficiency. At this stage, it is already very difficult to compress further.

But Wang Yongmin chose a more difficult path.

In order to reduce the repetition code, after nearly a year of research, Wang Yongmin invented the "last stroke recognition code", which locates the last stroke code of each word and reduces the repetition rate by an order of magnitude.

On August 28, 1983, the "five-character" invented by Wang Yongmin was born.

The first of the advantages of the five strokes is "fast".

Because of the introduction of the partition of five kinds of strokes, users only need to press the button up to 5 times to lock the unique Chinese characters.

There is no duplicate code, which means that users no longer need to select the words they want. after practice, they can even achieve double-blind input, that is, typing without looking at the keyboard or the screen.

And compared with the large keyboard and the medium keyboard, the five strokes have fewer keys and the learning cost is lower.

Many post-80s may also memorize "five formulae", such as "Green head beside the King and May Day, Tushi two dry ten inches of rain". The skilled five-stroke user does not even need these and can input them by relying on muscle memory.

The second is the five strokes are perfectly compatible with the QWERTY keyboard, there is no need to specifically develop new hardware.

At the beginning of the five-stroke release, because there was no need for a special keyboard, it was even regarded by the academic circles as "worshipping foreigners and fawning on foreigners", but the market and users voted with their feet.

In 1984, the State Science and Technology Commission and the Commission of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense successively issued the "Red head document" to promote the five-character character to the whole army.

In 1986, the five-character character entered the United Nations through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and in the same year, it sold the right of use to DEC of the United States at the price of hundreds of thousands and US dollars, becoming the first computer patent technology exported from China to the United States.

Since then, IBM, Microsoft and Apple have purchased patent rights one after another.

The five strokes are still widely used in Southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia and Singapore.

In China, Wubao has also become the earliest Chinese character input method contacted and learned by a generation of Chinese people.

In the 1990s, when computers were not yet popular, the use of computers was regarded as a vocational skill. There are a large number of training courses in China, and five strokes are the most important teaching content of these training courses.

At that time, many domestic computers not only had English letters on their keyboards, but also marked with five-character roots, making it easy to learn.

But why is it that such a "contemporary movable type printing" has become a loser of Pinyin input method, synonymous with "minority" and the tears of the times?

02 Why are five strokes defeated by Pinyin in 1995, intelligent ABC input method was born.

This is a classic pinyin input method, those who have used intelligent ABC should be old netizens like me.

But the classics are classics. To be honest, compared with the current Pinyin input method, there is no relationship between intelligent ABC and intelligence at that time.

Its existence is to provide a huge word library, which allows users to find words and words corresponding to Pinyin.

In fact, its thesaurus is also impractical, because at that time, the thesaurus was mainly obtained from the reports of the state media and various newspapers and magazines, so such a thesaurus actually does not meet the language needs of ordinary people. There is no way to update the thesaurus online.

Now the necessary functions of Pinyin input method, such as association input, fuzzy sound, common vocabulary memory and so on, were even more impossible at that time.

As an intelligent ABC level 10 player, in the long-term use, has developed a memory: those frequently used words, I will remember in which page.

And because the thesaurus is not updated, sometimes we have to find some stupid ways to improve typing efficiency. For example, when I want to play "like tea", the fastest way is to type "like" and "tea" respectively, and then delete the extra words.

In a word, the efficiency of the Pinyin input method at that time is far from comparable to that of the five strokes.

Why is Pinyin input inefficient?

One point is that as we mentioned earlier, the repetition rate of Pinyin is very high, only more than 400 combinations regardless of tone, and these combinations correspond to thousands of Chinese characters.

This means that Pinyin should not only be typed, but also choose words. It is often easier to type than to find words.

In particular, some pronunciation corresponds to a large number of polysyllabic words, such as zhi, chi, shi.

If you have a yi word in your name, which happens to be a rare word, and you only know how to use pinyin, congratulations. There are 407 words in the national standard GB18030 word set that read yi alone. Typing for a moment, looking for a word crematorium.

In the three principles of code design put forward by Wang Yongmin, the first principle is the "compatibility principle". That is, the repetition rate should be low to ensure the uniqueness of the coding. Preferably less than 2%. There are a large number of polysyllabic homophones in Pinyin, so the efficiency is obviously failing.

In order to improve efficiency, there was a double input later. However, as long as it is based on Pinyin, repeated code is a problem that cannot be solved.

In addition, the five-character font is designed on the key layout.

As can be seen from the picture above, also based on the QWERTY keyboard, the five-stroke typing is basically balanced in the load rate of both hands.

But pinyin input means that the right hand is busy and the left hand is on holiday. And if you use standard typing, you will find that the strongest index finger of the left hand seems to have nothing to do, but the little finger with the least strength is heavily burdened.

To put it simply, Pinyin typing is not very scientific in ergonomics.

Of course, this pot will still be thrown to the QWERTY keyboard, the keyboard key design is not reasonable, which I will talk about later.

Therefore, in terms of efficiency and science, Wubao is far more than the existence of Pinyin input method.

What has really changed the awkward situation of Pinyin input method is the memory and the Internet.

As an input method which is extremely dependent on the word library, the Pinyin input method needs a lot of storage space to store the word library. In the 1980s, when computer memory was calculated according to K and storage space was calculated according to MB, it was impossible to store a large enough font at all.

Until the 1990s, mainstream computers have reached the GB level of hard disk capacity, memory has also reached the level of dozens of MB, which has a larger and larger phonetic font library.

The larger the word base, the more words can be matched, and the efficiency will be improved.

The Internet has brought about greater changes.

In 2006, Sogou Input was born. It is not very different from intelligent ABC and Ziguang Pinyin in basic principle, the only difference is that it has greatly expanded its thesaurus through Sogou's search engine.

The pinyin entered by the user no longer corresponds to the local thesaurus, but matches the content of the entire Chinese Internet.

In addition, Sogou also includes whole sentence input and association input functions. You know, typing a whole sentence is much more efficient than typing a word. And most of the time you don't have to type the complete pinyin, the system will help you finish it.

In addition, it will record the high-frequency words you use, and as you use them, it will become easier and easier.

With the addition of these functions, the efficiency of Pinyin input method takes off directly. Sogou Input grabbed 90 per cent of the market share in one year. Even after Tencent Baidu Google joined the war, Sogou's market share did not fall below 70 per cent.

But objectively speaking, in essence, these input methods do not make Pinyin a more accurate and lower repetition rate input method. It only uses big data, thesaurus and networking functions to forcibly improve the matching efficiency.

It's like a joke I've heard about programmers:

What should I do if the performance of the product is not enough? A programmer will have two choices, one is to work hard for six months to write a very complex program to improve the performance of the system. The other is to take half a year off and sleep at home. When you wake up, the price of the more NB hardware has been reduced, and changing the hardware directly will solve the problem.

The real advantage of Pinyin over the five strokes is that it is a lower threshold for input.

Chinese characters are the trinity of shape, sound and meaning. Among these three, we often understand the sound and meaning of the word first, that is, we first learn to listen and listen, and then learn to read and write.

And our thinking is often carried out by voice, when we think about things, there will be a voice in our head.

Compared with five such codes, Pinyin has a lower threshold as a voice code and is more in line with our instincts.

What is even more frightening is that behind Pinyin is an entire nine-year compulsory education system.

Pinyin input method is not without learning threshold, but very few people need to learn Pinyin.

Since the first Chinese class in the first grade of primary school, we have been learning aoeiu ü. Until the college entrance examination, Pinyin has never left the study of Chinese.

With the current consolidation rate of more than 90% of China's nine-year compulsory education, Pinyin is almost a factory setting for this generation of young Chinese.

Interestingly, among the five users, there are many post-60s who have not received a complete pinyin education, but can read and write. This group of middle-aged and elderly people use five strokes more smoothly.

However, in the face of China's increasingly complete education system and a large population of Pinyin users, five strokes have no chance of winning.

Why Internet companies are willing to make great efforts to develop Pinyin input method, but also because of the large user base and commercial imagination, the giants are willing to invest manpower and material resources in the marginal market such as input method.

In the era of mobile Internet, Pinyin has really settled down.

03 Jiugong vs full keyboard still remembers that at school, both boys and girls liked to buy bigger uniforms, with sleeves at least able to hide their hands. Half to hide the headphones, listen to music in class, half to tuck the phone in the sleeve, and send text messages to each other in class.

Only me, no girls and I send text messages, I play with my mobile phone in class in order to watch NBA live text.

At that time, although there were no large-screen smartphones, almost every student was proficient in blind typing skills because the phone had nine physical keys.

With the popularity of smart phones, we, who were used to using the nine grid at that time, began to use the full keyboard again.

The history of mobile phone input method also starts from the 1990s.

In 1993, Nokia released its first GSM phone that supports text messaging.

Since then, the mobile phone is no longer a pure mobile phone, it has entered the text era.

But the mobile phone is really an efficient text communication tool, thanks to an input technology called T9.

In fact, in western countries, telephone numbers used to contain numbers and letters, so the number keys of landlines were marked with letters. Not only for typing, but also for users to remember phone numbers.

This set of keyboard is called E.161 keyboard, and interestingly, there are no Q and Z on this set of keyboards for a long time.

In 1995, an American software company called Tegic Communications was founded, which specializes in developing technology for small electronic devices, which was later acquired by AOL. And it is this company that has developed the T9 input method.

T9 used predictive text technology earlier than Sogou, the common word association input function we mentioned earlier, and it supports not only pinyin but also stroke input.

This set of technology has made a qualitative leap in mobile typing.

In the late 1990s, T9 input method began to be widely used by Samsung, Nokia and other mobile phone manufacturers. That is, what we commonly call "Jiugong grid".

I remember that when the ninth palace was the most popular, there were many related codes, such as 962464 for "I love you" and 647449633 for "you are mine".

Maybe this is the earthy love words that belong to the post-90s generation.

The combination of full keyboard and mobile phone will be in 1996.

That year, Nokia released a mobile phone called 9000, which is also the world's first full keyboard phone.

It has a laptop-like design, the outside looks like an ordinary mobile phone, open the top cover, inside is a large screen and an entire QWERTY keyboard.

As a PDA-level product targeted at business people, the Nokia 9000 not only supports email, but also has a browser function to support web surfing.

After 96 years, it is almost like a cool techs.

And the full keyboard, for a long time, is also considered to be standard for business mobile phones.

Later BlackBerry, Palm and Nokia E-series focused on business attributes, and a large number of models were equipped with full keyboards. In addition, side-sliding full keyboards have also been popular for some time, such as Nokia's N97.

It was not until 2007, when iPhone was released, that this situation was changed.

For a long time, Apple has been obsessed with virtual keyboards. It wasn't until iOS7 in 2013 that Apple began to support Nine Palace Grid, and it wasn't until the second year of iOS8 that Apple opened up third-party input methods.

However, for quite a long time, mainstream smartphone manufacturers have set the full keyboard as the default input mode, resulting in the mobile Internet era, full keyboard input has finally become the mainstream.

This has also caused a protracted debate about whether the nine-house grid is more efficient or the full keyboard is more efficient.

The next words are my personal goods, so you can listen to them.

I have read a lot of theories, and there are fans on both sides. People who use the nine palace grid say that the nine palace grid is more convenient to operate with one hand, and the miscontact rate is lower, so it is easier to hit blindly.

People who use the full keyboard will retort that now the phone screen is big enough to be touched by mistake, and typing with both hands on the full keyboard is obviously more accurate and more efficient.

At this time, people who use double spelling will say that if you are used to double spelling after practice, double spelling is the fastest.

On the other hand, the elders of the five strokes said that they were all scum and were not as fast as the five strokes.

But I find that what most people fight for is not efficiency at all.

I prefer to use the nine palace grid, just because I am a post-90s, before the advent of smartphones, I already used the nine palace grid on Nokia.

For people who have just come into contact with a mobile phone that is a full keyboard, this input method, which is more consistent with the computer keyboard, is obviously more natural, so why bother to learn Jiugong grid?

And like my father, at that time, he didn't even have nine years of compulsory education, and many people didn't learn pinyin well. The first time they came into contact with typing was five strokes, so it was impossible for him to change to Pinyin.

In fact, the efficiency of the input method is indeed high or low. But this slight difference is negligible in daily chat and writing.

What we pursue is not efficiency at all, we are just defending our habits and growing up.

Very often, when I want to argue with people about something, I suddenly find that what supports my crazy online search for arguments is not my obsession with the right, but my obsession with the position.

Input method is just a tool for communication and output, just as we never judge the value of language by the speed of speaking, "what to write" is more important than "how fast to write".

In fact, this kind of nothingness pursuit of "efficiency" often becomes a kind of inefficiency.

This reminds me of a time when I was addicted to the use of "efficiency" tools and often recommended software that I thought was good in my moments.

I have learned Luhmann's card notebook, tried notion, used flomo, obsidian, craft and other cooperation to do knowledge architecture, paid for screens and paid for xmind, and changed ulysses, metion, bear, iawriter, typora and so on just to improve a little bit of "efficiency".

Until one day I saw a post in which the author, as a senior efficient software user, compared the advantages and disadvantages of each software in detail and provided his own experience.

At the end of the post, it said: now I start to use pen and paper.

Suddenly let me have the kind of place in the sword mound, see the sentence "after forty years old, do not stay in things, plants, trees, bamboo and stone can be swords." Since then, he has gradually developed into a situation where a sword is better than a sword. "what it feels like.

This is the realm.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: IC Lab (ID:InsightPlusClub)

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