Andrew Dunbar wrote:

>
> Before I left Vancouver for Mexico I made a Taiwanese
> friend who, when explaining the pronunciation of the
> Chinese characters in some word, wrote it in bopomofo.
> I'd never seen anyone actually use it before. A bit
> later I made another Taiwanese friend who had an
> electronic dictionary similar to the Japanese and
> Korean ones I'm familiar with, but I'd never seen a
> Chinese one before. This one actually had a bopomofo
> keyboard. I asked and was told that indeed bopomofo is
> the normal way to type on computers also in Taiwan.

Of the five input methods that come with the Mac Chinese Langagae Kit
(and presumably are also available in OS X), the one that uses bopomofo
is the most reliable for me -- I never could get it to accept the
digraph or accented pinyin spellings.

> Please correct me if I'm wrong. I thought that in
> Taiwan everybody spoke the local Chinese "dialect"
> and was later educated in Mandarin and that the
> traditional characters are used there. Does anybody
> know if they would be typing the bopomofo
> pronunciation
> for the local "dialect" or Mandarin? If Mandarin then
> uneducated people would not be able to use computers,
> electronic dictionaries, etc. This problem was avoided
> in Hong Kong by using input methods based on the
> script rather than the sounds of any particular
> "dialect". Is this right?

The Cantonese-specific characters found in Hong Kong have apparently not
been included in any of the international standard character sets.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...