
A Look at Early Japanese Typewriters (2016) - caust1c
https://filthyplaten.com/2016/07/23/__trashed/
======
TMWNN
For more on the topic of tyewriters in non-alphabetic languages, I recommend
_The Chinese Typewriter_ ([https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/chinese-
typewriter](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/chinese-typewriter)) from MIT
Press.

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roddylindsay
Came to the comments to recommend this as well! Fantastic read.

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aoki
+1, and I’m eagerly awaiting Mullaney’s follow-on (in progress) about post-
typewriter text entry.

An odd but interesting related book is Unger’s _Fifth Generation Fallacy_. If
you ignore the dubious framing about 1980s Japanese AI, there’s a long
discussion of kanji text entry (including computer text entry) with some
kanji-specific references that _Chinese Typewriter_ necessarily skips.

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vharuck
It bothers me so much that the pairing of katakana and alphabetical characters
has nothing to do with pronunciation.

>The positive thing about Kanji is that it allows for quite an efficient
expression with more nuance.

As a person only a year and a half into learning Japanese, the positive thing
is clearly marking separate words and particles. Japanese only has a few
unique syllables and rarely uses spaces or other separators. I've repeatedly
had trouble parsing loan words written in katakana, especially when it's more
than one word smushed together.

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rootsudo
What are you talking about? Have you used a proper Japanese input on Android
or Google?

They are paired, vowels first and then phonetically.

On Android and iOS,

あうえおい A, u, e, o, i かくけこき Ka, ku, me, ko, ki さすせそし Sa, su, se, so, shi

The alphabet has no real _existence_ in the Japanese language, it is a
different language and romaji is bad to pick up, but the characters are
grouped together to enable fast typing and auto detection of grammar and
Kanji.

\--

Then with any proper keyboard, you can change the input setting so you _do_
not need a Japanese keyboard, you can write solely phonetically via a English
keyboard and have the software correct it , which I think is annoying because
you have to type two keyboard inputs for one character.

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Izkata
GP is referring to the first typewriter in the article, where the katakana has
no relation to the English letters they share a key with.

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junar
Such a mapping would not be feasible, for several reasons.

* There are more kana than English letters. You can see that there are numbers paired with kana, keys in the bottom-right with two kana, and on this particular keyboard, ヲ (wo) appears to be omitted.

* Broadly speaking, each kana represents a pair of sounds: one of ten consonants plus one of five vowels. You will have English consonants with no real Japanese counterpart, and Japanese consonants with fewer than five appropriate English counterparts.

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supernova87a
Very interesting, thanks for posting!

Reminds me of the articles I saw about 2-3 years ago on the difficulty of
creating new fonts for Asian languages compared to Roman alphabets. The sheer
number of characters required to build up a base of shapes is huge, compared
to our 26x2 or whatever variation on that, plus accented characters and
symbols.

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knolax
And yet despite this, graphic design in Asian countries still manages to use a
greater variety of fonts than in Western ones. For example compare this[0]
advertisement for curry to this advertisement for fries[1].

[0] [https://chancurry.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/11/9c0f748dfcd...](https://chancurry.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/11/9c0f748dfcd19d8f413988fe36d79216.png)

[1]
[http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1965451/thumbs/o-SATISFRY-570.jpg?...](http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1965451/thumbs/o-SATISFRY-570.jpg?1)

~~~
athenot
The font helps to reinforce a branding identity. This is why the fries example
has a unified face. The copy is also seconday to the brand, which is the first
thing the eye sees. Contrast with he curry one where the branding is taking a
back seat to the messaging.

These are two different styles of advertisement.

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gumby
I used to see a _lot_ of those last machines (the one with the pointer and the
ray of type) back in the 80s. The blog author says he bought it off a
journalist, perhaps thinking it was for foreigners. Presumably it was light
because the journo needed something portable.

The reason for the type case is that companies would insert the specific
characters they needed to conduct their business.

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asciimike
Sort of related, but I remember visiting a ham radio store in Akihabara and
finding out that Japan has its own Morse code: Wabun code
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabun_code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabun_code))

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ahmedfromtunis
Obviously, I have no idea what this was used for but I expected to see a
katakana/hiragana combo where one of the two alphabets is activated via a
shift-like mechanism. Are such typewriters a thing?

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uranusjr
That’s basically how JIS works, which is the layout that dominates the market
later on, and what you’d find on most PCs. The keys has hiragana on them, and
a special key is used to switch input type.

