Zhi feels greatly encouraged. His solitary work is running parallel to these larger endeavors. However, most of them still have not been able to free themselves from the noisy keyboard. Although breaking characters down into components worked well enough for specific character retrieval indexes and typewriter keyboard designs, it did not translate directly to programming such a process. for a computer.
Zhi remembers the advantage of the shape-based approach, where parts of a character help define the entire character directly. To integrate that useful principle into his encoding scheme, Zhi decided to index the characters according to their components — the simpler characters in each symbol — using the letter the first in the pinyin spelling of each component.
The idea took another two years to materialize. On average, characters can be divided into two to four components, and there are 300 to 400 components in total. Most characters can be split into two halves — vertical or horizontal — along with other possible shapes. This yields an alphabet code of two to four letters per character, which means that each character requires at most four keystrokes on a regular English keyboard. The average English word length, for comparison, is close to 4.8 letters. Thus, Zhi made the alphabet work more effectively for personal ideas than for English. The system has also cleverly solved the problem of dialect differences and homonyms. Because the code takes only the first letter, rather than the complete sound of the character, most regional voice variations don’t matter. The four-letter code acts like an acronym for different parts of the character. Basically, Zhi used the alphabet as a representation to spell by components, not words.
He ordered the components of each character in the order they would be handwritten. Coding by components provides context and vital signs reducing ambiguity and the risk of code duplication. The chances of having the same components — or even elements starting with the same letter — happen in the exact same order in two different characters are low.
Zhi’s way of indexing Chinese characters by alphabetical elements makes Chinese input easier for humans — provided you know how to write the language — and creates a human-interface- more systematic machine. For example, in his system, the character for “road”, 路 (lu), has 13 manual strokes, which can be divided into four components: 口 (kou), (Zhi), (pu), and (kou). Isolating the first letter of each element generates the character code of the KZPK. Or get the character (wu), a common family name, that can be quickly split into two parts, (kou) and (tian), generates a character code of KT.
The spelling of letters, once mediated in this way by China, is no longer phonetic but a semantic orthographic system in which each letter actually stands for a character rather than a a sound. This indexing method can also be extended to represent groups of characters. For example, “socialism” or shehui zhuyi: . By tagging the first letter of each of the four characters in the phrase, the phrase can be encoded in a four-letter sequence, SHZY. Or consider another commonly called phrase, the seven characters that make up the “People’s Republic of China” —Zhonghua yuan Gongheguo: 中华人民共和国. It can only be entered as ZHRMGHG.
