[David Shaffer]

David Shaffer asked the Naked Scientists:

Dear Dr Chris,

During the days of the telegraph, did the Chinese & Japanese people use Morse Code for their languages, or some other method of communication?

Kind regards,
David Shaffer of Southend-on-Sea, Essex.

What do you think?

[paul.fr]

There was certainly chinese morse, don't know about japanese though.

[lyner]

http://homepages.cwi.nl/~dik/english/codes/morse.html#japanese
http://www.njstar.com/tools/telecode/jim-reeds-ctc.htm
Try these two links.

[qazibasit]

well morse was used by almost everyone to transmit but at the reception end there used to be a translator device which converts it into the real msg.

[Bored chemist]

In my understanding there was generally a person at the receiving end. However I don't see how Qazibasit's post answers the question in any way.
When Morse wrote his code he only bothered to translate the Roman alphabet and some punctuation etc into dots and dashes beacuse that's all his language (Englush) needed. The Chinese character set is entirely different so it's not clear how Morase code could transmit it.

[lyner]

there used to be a translator device which converts it into the real msg.

It was called a Radio Operator! He /She did it with a brain.
Codes for machine reading /recognising were not and are not based on Morse Code.

Sending messages for a language with a pictographic writing system would probably have to use a system based on the phonetic sounds of the actual speech.

[qazibasit]

ya sophiecentaur elaborated that it was not a device as i said it was used to be an operator who do the translation work.

[Alan McDougall]

Morse code is no longer used anywhere. (officially)

[Bored chemist]

"Morse code is no longer used anywhere. (officially)"
Someone needs to tell these people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHF_omnidirectional_range

[Alan McDougall]

B/C

Thank you for link

[engrByDayPianstByNight]

I believe qazibasit did answer the question. I think he meant to say that Morse code was used whenever there was a telegraph station set up, and they would have to hire a local operator who understood English so as to be able to receive the message and write it down in English, and then he would have to translate it to the local language (Chinese, Japanese, etc.).

I don't think there was a separate telegraph code system for these two languages since they are not alphatbetized, though. But in today's computer science, these countries have developed their own ways of entering Chinese/Japanese characters into computer without using the English alphabet as a medium. However, I don't have the details of how this is done.

In my understanding there was generally a person at the receiving end. However I don't see how Qazibasit's post answers the question in any way.
When Morse wrote his code he only bothered to translate the Roman alphabet and some punctuation etc into dots and dashes beacuse that's all his language (Englush) needed. The Chinese character set is entirely different so it's not clear how Morase code could transmit it.

[engrByDayPianstByNight]

I sent out the previous post without checking sophicentaur's URLs on the Chinese/Japanese versions of the Morse code. Therefore I stand corrected of what I said in the second paragraph of my last post.

I guess it kind of depends on how you define Morse code. If you mean the particular dash/dot system that Morse developed, then there is only one Morse code; if, you consider Morse code to be a brilliant idea of breaking alphabet/characters into a sequence of dots/dashes that can be transmitted electrically over a great distance, then all Morse codes in different languages are merely the variations of the idea.

As a side note, at least I think one piece of Morse Code, SOS, seems universal enough.

[Pumblechook]

If you listen on various shortwave and VHF frequencies you will still hear Morse (CW).

http://www.cqwpx.com/

Even used when bouncing signals off the Moon.

Many radio beacons send an ident in Morse. 

Japanese certainly did use Morse in WW2.  Americans and British picked up the signals and broke the codes.

In the early days of radio (and it may have caused a problem when the Titanic sank) the USA and Europe used slightly different versions of Morse.  The European version is the one which became universal.



Titanic sent CQD mainly (Come Quick Distress).  Some think they may have tried the 'new' German SOS later.