SMS: Save my Language…
January 3rd, 02009 by Alexander Rose
The Wall St Journal ran a piece in their January 2nd Edition on the narrow group of languages that can use SMS cell phone text messaging. Our very own Laura Welcher was quoted in the article:
“The idea of having your cultural identity represented in this technology is increasingly important,” says Laura Welcher, director of the Rosetta Project of San Francisco’s Long Now Foundation. Ms. Welcher, who says linguists fear half the world’s languages will disappear in the near future, thinks at least 200 languages have enough speakers to justify development of cellphone text systems. “Technology empowers the poorest people,” she adds.
This entry was posted on Saturday, January 3rd, 2009 at 11:48 am and is filed under Rosetta. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Posted on January 12th, 2009 at 10:22 am
Laura Welcher and the Long Now team on the Rosetta project would want to be aware that a mobile software company is nearing release of a patented technology that allows mobile users to send SMS text messages on any mobile phone, anywhere in the world. The application downloads to the phone like a ringtone or game and has under a 2-minute learning curve. Unlike other solutions that are hardware-based (hybrid phones) and contained to a specific carrier network and/or region. This startup’s solution is software-based, downloadable, and will work on any network element, i.e. messages can be sent around the globe using any Latin or Non-Latin character set, e.g. Cyrillic, Hindi, Greek, Hebrew, etc. The company’s patented compression technology allows transmission of 16-bit characters within the limitations of the current standard GSM-7, and the interface is faster than multitap … the input of characters requires no more than 2-taps to input any character. The company intends to address every written language in the world!
Posted on January 13th, 2009 at 4:59 am
[...] SMS: Save my language… — Language geekery by way of text messaging. Interesting confluence of culture and technology. (Thanks to brendacooper.) [...]
Posted on January 13th, 2009 at 4:59 am
[...] SMS: Save my language… — Language geekery by way of text messaging. Interesting confluence of culture and technology. (Thanks to brendacooper.) [...]
Posted on January 13th, 2009 at 6:57 am
Carl Fusch: “The company’s patented compression technology allows transmission of 16-bit characters within the limitations of the current standard GSM-7, and the interface is faster than multitap … the input of characters requires no more than 2-taps to input any character.”
I’m happy to hear of better multilingual support, presumably with Unicode, but how can 2 taps possibly suffice to input all of 2^16=65536 possible characters? It would seem roughly 256 keys would be needed to enter all Unicode characters in 2 taps. A typical cellphone has maybe 20 keys.
Even if you have to explicitly switch languages (requiring more taps of course) so that you’re tapping input from a limited subset of Unicode, that still wouldn’t explain 2-tap entry of languages with large numbers of symbols (e.g. Chinese).
Posted on January 13th, 2009 at 10:17 am
Contrary to the commonly held view that text messaging is damaging literacy, a UNICEF report, Innovation for Africa, concludes that mobile phones, especially text messaging, present a significant economic incentive for becoming literate.
In many places, sending one SMS is five times cheaper than a one-minute phone call. If the value of reading a book is not apparent enough to inspire literacy, spending less on valuable communication is an obvious motivator.
See web link fo rmore
Posted on January 13th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
For Russ … for the case of chinese, and some other Asia character sets, the input does present a challenge, but there are several solutions that will probably be utilized. One is Pinyin possibly in conjuction with predictive texting. Traditional Chinese (stroke-based characters) does present a challenge due to the number of character possibilities and would be most easily addressed at the end of the first year on touchscreens in conjuction with character recognition technologies. iPhone in China is doing something similar to this by utilizing character recognition, but sending/receiving is contained to the iphone and the region and/or network element.
For the largest percentage of character sets input is achieved by a very crafty (”gee, why didn’t I think of that”) design. Its difficult to describe in this blog exactly what the interface looks like and how the input has been achieved, but when I first saw it, the first thing I thought about was Velcro and Postit notes … it was very simple, yet incredibly effective. I’ll try at a later time to craft a blog that hopefully could be understood in writing and without pictures.
With regards to switching languages, its a simple menu selection of the language desired (3 taps, ‘menu’>’select language’>’Russian’. An interesting point is where I’ve seen the language changed with in the same SMS text, e.g. several words written in English, switch to Cyrillic, and back to English. Although a rare requirement, the feature is available. The only time I can think of when someone might want to make a ‘midstream’ change, might be something like, “This is how to say ‘hello’ in Russian, _________”
Posted on January 13th, 2009 at 4:15 pm
Mike Grenville: I agree that SMS texting could very well be contributing to literacy … and believe that texting using one’s native language (and script) further contributes. I believe that from a global perspective, all would benefit from, at the least, being able to select their native language and script … or a second or third language to encourage multilingual learning.
Another interesting point … and perhaps my own opinion having worked closely with multilinguals wanting to encourage their children to retain their families’ culture. Given that X and Y (and Millenium) generations are texting like crazy, texting in their native language might carry a very interesting benefit, i.e. imagine a Russian family in the U.S. … their kids are texting in English, and gee wouldn’t it be great if they could text with their families and other Russian friends (in the U.S. and in Russia) in Cyrillic!? I say let them select the appropriate language fit for the situation … and of course we know Mom and Dad would be happy to see them perpetuating / retaining their ability to write in their native language. Maybe Mom and Dad would even start texting! ;-)
Drive learning even higher … and with fun!
Posted on January 14th, 2009 at 7:58 am
Carl – thanks for the response!
I actually type multilingual SMS reasonably often, so the ability to type any Unicode in one message is a Good Thing.
About the (inevitable?) need to select a language before actually typing characters: hopefully the user will be able to store a short list of languages they use instead of needing to select from a list of ALL languages… :)
In my case: English, Esperanto, Polish. Which raises a concrete specific point: don’t forget Esperanto.
Posted on January 14th, 2009 at 9:29 am
Russ – The technology is Unicode (UCS-2) compliant, and the list will always be short as the end-user will download only languages of choice. So you shouldn’t need to scroll through a long list. ;-) As for Esperanto, I’ll see that it hits the list and get you feedback from the Chief Scientist. Polish is on the list, and will probably be available early-on.