Hi folks,
I have one question primarily for people actively speaking or studying Chinese language. I was wondering, why there isn't a simple mechanical keyboard to type chinese characters simply with theyr names and tone marks, quickly and efficiently.
today, after I teached Kubo (my speech synthesiser) to interpret pinyin correctly, I found out an answer. It is because one pronounced character can have more written forms, from which each has a different meaning.
For example ta1 means he, as well as she and it. All of these are wrote differently, but spoken the same.
So I am wondering now how can blind person handle this? Sighted users have keyboards, where they can choose which character to use while writing, but this is useless for us, because chinese speech synthesisers will make no difference between he and she like real speaker even if we have opportunity to choose from a list.
May be there is a braille keyboard with support of chinese characters? But if yes, how does it look? Because even eight point braille notation is not suitable, it can represent only 256 characters, what is not enough for chinese's 7000.
Thanks.
Greetings
Rastislav