The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #106253   Message #2193318
Posted By: GUEST,Keinstein
14-Nov-07 - 04:51 AM
Thread Name: BS: Texting in Chinese/Japanese etc
Subject: RE: BS: Texting in Chinese/Japanese etc
two of their three scripts, actually, and they aren't alphabets but syllabiaries. there's no particular problem with transmitting Chinese texts: the SMS standard allows up to 140 (IIRC) characters in a message. These are 8 bit characters, 256 possible values, suitable for an alphabet plus numbers and punctuation. But combine 2 characters, and you can have up to 65536 possible values: plenty for a full set of common Chinese ideograms and spare. Since each ideogram is a word, it's actually far more efficient than using an alphabet. Input is the problem. One solution is Roman character input using Pinyin etc., the words then being translated automatically to ideograms.