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Comment by LeffeBrune | Hacker News Reader

> Why would I type my native language with a foreign language keyboard? Would you type Russian with an American keyboard?

Yes, I would, and I have been doing this all my life when no Russian layout is available. This is called transliteration, and I would argue most Russian speaking tech users used it at least once in their life.

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Emphasis on "when no Russian layout is available". If anyone told you "no, this is the Russian layout", you'd still flip them off.

Doesn’t seem to be the case here. More like “improved autocomplete for Russian words in the English keyboard”.

This is probably a bad example. The problem with typing pinyin instead of jyutping is that you must type a very different set of latin characters to get the result you want.

And the problem with jyutping is that it's not a standard romanization taught to Hong Kongers. Wasn't the case for sure when I was in school in Colonial Hong Kong. Pretty sure not the case in SAR Hong Kong.

Some of the romanization of Cantonese sounds are baffling. It's a bit like watching English speakers struggle to pronounce the Q sound in Qing (e.g. Qing dynasty).

Then they should use a different one. There are at least half a dozen of these, and most of them do not require any symbols not found on most keyboards. Jyutping is actually an outlier among them for how it uses j and z. These are truly not intuitive for people used to the english, french or spanish alphabets.

The key thing, IMO, isn't whether they should use a different one. The key thing is to pick one that will be taught to all student, so that it becomes a standard.

Good luck to anyone in the HKSAR government trying to propose that though - it would just be politicized like what the author of the article tried.

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