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Certainly companies will try to accommodate the major variations (British English, Australian English, etc.), but I don't see Bostonian, or Jersey as a Siri language.

I don't speak for the people up in Boston, but New Jersey natives don't have an "accent". What is commonly thought of as a "New Jersey" accent is in actuality, a Long Island/NY accent.

The only thing that differentiates NJ people from their mid-western or southern counterparts is that we talk faster than normal, that's all.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

Still hoping for location services in Canada in ios 5.1 (or do we even need an update since its a server side change?)
 
Siri has to evolve in two ways.
First is more language support.
Second is more functionality.
Right now those two things are very limited. It just likes original iPhone that hide its downside behind its snappy UI.
 
Having Mandarin would be good. I can finally explain to my folks why I keep randomly talking to my phone.
 
Cantonese is a totally distinct language, not a dialect. It has its own set of vocabulary and grammar rules. Just for some political reasons, Mandarin call it a "dialect" so the rest of the world would believe there is no loss eliminating it. But the fact is a lot of the Cantonese phrases is linked to the ancient Chinese language thousands year ago. Cantonese is not dying yet. There are still 100M users worldwide. But given the government's power and assistance from the firms, the fate is not far away.

It feels so hurt that Apple is treating Hong Kong people bad for the second time. When they introduced iPad, they left Traditional Chinese unsupported for almost a year, despite the fact that it had already been supported on iPhone (i.e., they were more likely being lazying on porting, rather than having technical difficulties). Hong Kong people love using authentic Apple products a lot. Apple doesn't deserve our love that much but there are not better choices.

Nokia is almost dead; otherwise it would be a better choice. My Nokia phones bought several years ago was already capable reading text messages in Cantonese. Even earlier, when the phones were in dot-matrix monochrome display, Nokia was already supporting Traditional Chinese input and display.

(But don't laugh, Android fanboys. Up to now, most of the Android phones are not yet displaying Traditional Chinese text properly. They just simply plug everything onto a Simplified Chinese fonts. It works basically because it is Unicode, but there are lots of missing dots and misplaced strokes. :D)
 
Cantonese is a totally distinct language, not a dialect. It has its own set of vocabulary and grammar rules. Just for some political reasons, Mandarin call it a "dialect" so the rest of the world would believe there is no loss eliminating it. But the fact is a lot of the Cantonese phrases is linked to the ancient Chinese language thousands year ago. Cantonese is not dying yet. There are still 100M users worldwide. But given the government's power and assistance from the firms, the fate is not far away.

It feels so hurt that Apple is treating Hong Kong people bad for the second time. When they introduced iPad, they left Traditional Chinese unsupported for almost a year, despite the fact that it had already been supported on iPhone (i.e., they were more likely being lazying on porting, rather than having technical difficulties). Hong Kong people love using authentic Apple products a lot. Apple doesn't deserve our love that much but there are not better choices.

Nokia is almost dead; otherwise it would be a better choice. My Nokia phones bought several years ago was already capable reading text messages in Cantonese. Even earlier, when the phones were in dot-matrix monochrome display, Nokia was already supporting Traditional Chinese input and display.

(But don't laugh, Android fanboys. Up to now, most of the Android phones are not yet displaying Traditional Chinese text properly. They just simply plug everything onto a Simplified Chinese fonts. It works basically because it is Unicode, but there are lots of missing dots and misplaced strokes. :D)

Well, we should be glad that MacRumors has mentioned Cantonese in the article already...It's probably one of the most ignored language in the world since the northern Chauvinists regard Cantonese as only a small variant of the "standard" northern Mandarin Chinese... and yet they are totally mutually unintelligible.

The written form is just a form (and they are not the same). Most languages in western Europe use the Roman alphabets too. Do we think that they are just dialects of the same language?

For instance, if your figure is correct (100M speakers), Cantonese is only a bit smaller than Japanese...

And technologically, dragon dictation already supports Cantonese.
 
How about support in english in canada first? What a joke!

----------



They need to fulfill their promises and expand to Canada properly first...

It should be English, English (United States), English (Canada), Australia etc. I think the UK should just have English as it's our language. You don't have French (France) do you.
 
The selling point to most Americans (not fan boys) was Siri. I wonder how Apple was able to market the iPhone 4s in these countries without the Siri support.
Not that well. The 4s only maintained 'rank 1' on sold phones for a few days, and has since slipped in Sweden. Its currently 5th, behind the Galaxy S2, Lumia 800, Xperia Arc S (SE phones have always done dramatically better than norm here), and Galaxy Nexus. This is considerably worse than what the iPhone 4 did in its days. That in turn is currently ranked 10th.
 
Supporting Mandarin doesn't necessarily "leave out" speakers of Cantonese, Fukienese, Shanghainese, etc. Mandarin is a compulsory subject in school in mainland China and many speakers of the various Sinitic languages can communicate in it. Of course, not all Chinese know Mandarin, and obviously many of those who do would likely still prefer support in their native language.
 
Originally Posted by Carlanga said:
Quizás segundo Podemos hacerlo en este orden: Español (Latino), Catalan y Luego Castellaño (España) si quieres

O mejor aún, Español (América), Español (España). Ambos son "latinos".
 
Apple doesn't even have a single official Apple Store in Russia.
I'd be surprised if they release Russian earlier than Spanish!
 
Supporting Mandarin doesn't necessarily "leave out" speakers of Cantonese, Fukienese, Shanghainese, etc. Mandarin is a compulsory subject in school in mainland China and many speakers of the various Sinitic languages can communicate in it. Of course, not all Chinese know Mandarin, and obviously many of those who do would likely still prefer support in their native language.

Interestingly, Mandarin is not as useful as one would think. There are extreme examples like Shi Shi Shi showing how different Chinese characters end up pronounced the same in the language. Meanwhile, the same poem does not suffer the same problem in other spoken forms. It would be interesting to see how Siri is going to dictate correctly.

And I will stick with UK English Siri. I know Mandarin but I just don't like it. It is just forcefully erected by the governments. Because of governments' propaganda, some Mandarin-speaking people would even claim it is all others' responsibility to speak in their language. I wish Apple is not on their side for too long. :D
 
The written form is just a form (and they are not the same). Most languages in western Europe use the Roman alphabets too. Do we think that they are just dialects of the same language?

Formal written cantonese IS formal written chinese. Therefore your comparison of european languages is not valid. Written French is generally not the same as written english.

Anyhow, you guys in HK really needs to cool it... the whole Mainland vs. Hong Kong thing is getting silly.
 
Formal written cantonese IS formal written chinese. Therefore your comparison of european languages is not valid. Written French is generally not the same as written english.

Anyhow, you guys in HK really needs to cool it... the whole Mainland vs. Hong Kong thing is getting silly.

As this thread is about Mandarin and Chinese, I guess we are not off topic yet. :D

It depends how you define the term "Chinese". The written Cantonese and Mandarin are really different in vocabulary. Let's say the term "quality", in Cantonese and old Chinese it is called "質素". In Mandarin, because the newly defined pronunciation is awkward, it got the characters reversed as "素質" to make pronunciation smoother. It is not just matter of taste. In old Chinese the latter would be very confusing as the reader can also take "素" (plain) as an adjective describing the "質" (texture) of something. Just as an example, the newest Union Edition of Bible has turned Mandarin-optimised. One of the major changes is that lots of the terms got reversed like the previous example. (I have no hard feeling as I can buy the older editions dated 100 and 30 years ago respectively...)

Sometimes the written "Chinese" difference is not due to Cantonese vs Mandarin, but locality. The terms on mainland are very different from the counterparts in Taiwan. Take "random access memory" as example. In mainland it's called "內存" (literally: internal store) while the latter calls it "記憶體" (literally: memory unit).

That's why you can see there are often multiple Chinese translations for the same software. It's not like English(UK) vs English(US). It must be at least Traditional Chinese vs Simplified Chinese. Or, in Microsoft's way, Chinese(PRC) vs Chinese(Taiwan) vs Chinese(Hong Kong) vs ..., etc. The translation has to be performed or assisted by real humans. Microsoft, Apple and even Nokia have been doing well on this. Wikipedia, however, placed too much trust in automatic machineries, mixing everything into a single pool. From time to time "Chinese" wiki contributors from different parts of the world would contend about how a particular wiki page should be written.

Back to the heated topic. Just to help here is an understated analogy. Imagine one day there is a loophole in UK constitution. A lot of people on European continent (No offense. I have European citizenship, too.) rush into London, occupy most of the maternity facilities, give birth and have the children taking right of adobe. During the visit, the continent people also force the Londeners to speak in other languages, asserting who refuse so are dogs. Even worse, the government is reluctant to fix the adobe right loophole. What would the Londoners react? Such a loophole has been found in Hong Kong for a decade and yet the governments refuse to react. If someone were to be blamed, it must be the governments and the loophole exploiters.

By the way, Hongkongers are nice. Even when hundred thousands of people are protesting, they don't break things along the way. So it is always very safe to pay us a visit. :D
 
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