BS: Texting in Chinese/Japanese etc

Subject: BS: Texting in Chinese/Japanese etc
From: GUEST,Dazbo at work
Date: 14 Nov 07 - 04:27 AM

After a discussion at work the other day it occured to me that, assuming it is possible, how do the Chinese text messages on their mobile phones? The Japanese do have an alphabet of sorts in one of their three scripts but the Chinese, AFAIK, don't.

So, how do people text in languages without an alphabet?

Subject: RE: BS: Texting in Chinese/Japanese etc
From: GUEST,Keinstein
Date: 14 Nov 07 - 04:51 AM

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.

Subject: RE: BS: Texting in Chinese/Japanese etc
From: GUEST,Dazbo at work
Date: 14 Nov 07 - 07:40 AM

I was more perplexed by how they got the particular symbol for each word, did they type in a number and get the ideogram, if so they'd have to learn a bloody lot of numbers.