6 ms·

There's folks who maintain that's why Europe entered the Industrial Revolution way before people out East did - non-Latin languages didn't take too kindly to be

by mkaziz 11y ago

There's folks who maintain that's why Europe entered the Industrial Revolution way before people out East did - non-Latin languages didn't take too kindly to be broken up into the pieces that could be used on a printing press!

Cyph0n 11y ago
That's quite an interesting theory. Do you have any good books on the topic?
- chimeracoder 11y ago
  > That's quite an interesting theory. Do you have any good books on the topic? It's an idea that comes up in online discussions from time to time but is generally not taken seriously by academics because it completely ignores the fact that most non-Latin languages do in fact lend themselves quite well to being written as the composition of smaller elements used in a printing press. It's the same sort of argument made about keyboards to explain "why China, Japan, and India haven't produced as many prolific computer scientists", completely avoiding the fact that keyboards for Chinese, Japanese, Devanagri, etc. have existed for over a hundred years.
  - mkaziz 11y ago
    Urdu, Arabic and Farsi in particular (all using the Arabic script) do not. Urdu, for example has 38 letters, and most of those letters have 2-3 forms depending on whether they are in the beginning, middle and end of the word. Additionally, the letters have to be joined at precise places, otherwise the text becomes illegible real fast. Hindi, Chinese and Japanese, by contrast, may have many characters, but each character is a distinct element.
    - Cyph0n 11y ago
      In addition, Arabic has symbols that can appear either above or below each letter that usually change the meaning of a word completely. For example: عالِم (pronounced a'alim): scientist عالَم (pronounced a'alam): world Notice the difference is essentially the "i" and "a" yet the entire meaning changes. I'd imagine this would add complexity to the mechanisms employed by printing equipment back then.
      - kuschku 11y ago
        So, like world and word? Where a single letter changes the entire meaning?
        Cyph0n 11y ago
        No, the letters are exactly the same. The change is caused by adding an accent above or below the letter, in this case the letter pronounced like "l" in English.
        kuschku 11y ago
        Well, English has situations where the word is written the exact same way, but pronounced differently. The case that accents change meaning is also existing even in many european languages. So, it’s not like latin-1 doesn’t deal with those issues either. I’d assume it’s more other issues that are problematic with Arabic script.
        thaumasiotes 11y ago
        > the letters are exactly the same. The change is caused by adding an accent above or below the letter This is a pretty myopic view of what's significant in writing. Why are you calling the consonant a "letter" and the vowel an "accent"? Would you apply the same rigorous distinction to é, which is a full letter (specifically Latin Small Letter E with Acute, U+00E9), vs é, which is a letter e with a combining accent above?
        Cyph0n 11y ago
        The correct terminology is a diacritic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_diacritics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_diacritics
        thaumasiotes 11y ago
        There is no meaningful difference, for this purpose, between letters and diacritics; it is nonsense to say that "fit" vs "fat" is an easy, simple contrast because 'i' and 'a' are "letters", while the analagous distinction in Arabic is tricky because it is represented in different glyphs. They're all glyphs.
    - chimeracoder 11y ago
      > Hindi, Chinese and Japanese, by contrast, may have many characters, but each character is a distinct element. That's not... really true about Devanagri and related scripts like Bengali, Marathi, etc. At least, no different than the Arabic scripts as you describe it. They have the same considerations with multiple forms per letter (as many as five per-letter, not counting variations in size and joining or conjunct forms), along with the issues regarding character joining affecting meaning in critical ways. Nevertheless, these problems have pretty straightforward solutions when it comes to typesetting. It's also worth noting that English had many of these same problems as well at the time of the printing press, which is why handwritten English before the 15th century looks so different from what we read today. We literally dropped letters from the English alphabet due (in part) to this problem.[0] It's frustrating to see this argument persist because it has next to no evidentiary support by accepted literature, and it comes dangerously close to psuedoscientific post-hoc rationalizations of European political dominance. (e.g., phrenology being used to "explain" why Europeans were able to make scientific advances during the Enlightenment whereas African and Asian societies allegedly "weren't"[1]). [0] For example, the printing press is a major reason that we no longer use the thorn in written English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)#Middle_and_Early_Modern_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)#Middle_and_Earl... [1] which is wonderfully ironic given where numerals in European languages come from (spoiler: originally India, by way of Arabia), but I digress.
      - thaumasiotes 11y ago
        > We literally dropped letters from the English alphabet due (in part) to this problem.[0] Going by your link, there was no technological difficulty at all with printing thorns. Rather, what happened was that England imported type rather than manufacturing it, and foreign type didn't include English-specific letters. > the substitution of Y for thorn soon became ubiquitous, leading to the common 'ye', as in 'Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe'. One major reason for this was that Y existed in the printer's type fonts that were imported from Germany or Italy, while thorn did not.
- mkaziz 11y ago
  Unfortunately, my knowledge is anecdotal and based on conversations with my grandparents. :(
- jerf 11y ago
  One of the better discussions of this is probably in http://blog.gatunka.com/2008/05/05/why-japan-didnt-create-the-ipod/ http://blog.gatunka.com/2008/05/05/why-japan-didnt-create-th... , which makes a much weaker claim about the 8-bit era of computing in particular, which I'd think is easier to discuss for a lot of reasons. One other point I'd make is that I think people may be accidentally overestimating the friendliness of English for printing, to some degree, because sometimes it sounds like that people think that Japanese, Arabic, or whathaveyou people are just completely unwilling to make any practical concessions to the fact that technology might have some problems reproducing their language. But it's not as if English was not itself compromised by technology. How much of this discussion sounds like "No English-speaking country would use a typewriter because English is written with a different amount of space allocated to each letter, which typewriters of the era could not reproduce."? English speakers adapted to the tech. Telegrams historically looked like crap... they couldn't even have punctuation!... but they were popular even so. Granted, English may have a particularly easy time of it (it is, admittedly, quite nice to fit a quite usable subset of your language into five bits), but I'd like to see some more concrete evidence that all these other cultures were unwilling to bend for a while, because they were so much more concerned about... whatever it is they were concerned about. (Also, to be clear, I'm speaking about day-to-day usage. Being particular about the Koran is one thing, being unwilling to bend in an text message on your 1998 phone is quite another.)
  - Cyph0n 11y ago
    > One other point I'd make is that I think people may be accidentally overestimating the friendliness of English for printing I don't think so to be frank. When compared to Japanese or Arabic, once could say English was created solely for printing. I'm a native Arabic speaker, so I can appreciate why people would claim it's a difficult language to print. Word processors and some browsers, to this very day, sometimes have trouble rendering Arabic properly, especially when it comes to linking characters and Arabic punctuation. > Telegrams historically looked like crap... they couldn't even have punctuation!. English punctuation does not significantly alter meaning in my opinion. You have sentence-ending punctuation, which is used to differentiate mainly between a statement and a question. Then you have separator punctuation, like commas, semi-colons, and colons. I don't see them making much of a change either. And finally, the apostrophe and quotation mark. In addition, telegrams are short messages, so there usually is no need to convey complex meanings. Therefore, it would have been a slight inconvenience for telegram users at most. In Arabic, changing a punctuation mark above a single letter in a word can change the word's meaning entirely. Furthermore, letters are linked together to form words - this is not essential, but would make things much more difficult to read. Also, the position of a letter in a word dictates its "shape". This introduces a ton of variation to the letters of the language, making it difficult for even modern keyboards to get right. I'd imagine it would have been even more complex at the beginning. Of course, I think that the main barrier to widespread adoption of the printing press in the Arab World was more related to demand than anything else. At the time of the Industrial Revolution and slightly before it, the Arab countries' least concern was printing books, as they were too busy dealing with the imperialist occupation.
- brokentone 11y ago
  Marshall and Eric McLuhan's Laws of media address the technological impact of the latin letter, and how it was extended to other technology. http://www.amazon.com/Laws-Media-Science-Marshall-McLuhan/dp/0802077153/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1448404357&sr=8-1&keywords=laws+of+media http://www.amazon.com/Laws-Media-Science-Marshall-McLuhan/dp... Marshall McLuhan's book The Gutenberg Galaxy is a longer approach to specific conversation around how latin characters led to the printing press which transformed society into the industrial age: http://www.amazon.com/Gutenberg-Galaxy-Marshall-McLuhan/dp/144261269X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1448404569&sr=8-2&keywords=The+Gutenberg+Galaxy%3A+The+Making+of+Typographic+Man http://www.amazon.com/Gutenberg-Galaxy-Marshall-McLuhan/dp/1...
thaumasiotes 11y ago
Those folks are evidently crackpots. China had working printing presses, and mass production of books, centuries before Europe did.
- DanBC 11y ago
  The claim isn't about printing, but about movable type and printing presses. China had printing, and movable type, before Europe, but not printing presses. And movable type was difficult with Chinese characters. http://www.computersmiths.com/chineseinvention/blockprint.htm http://www.computersmiths.com/chineseinvention/blockprint.ht...
  - thaumasiotes 11y ago
    > China had printing, and movable type, before Europe, but not printing presses. Your link contains no support for this rather odd idea. Wikipedia explicitly contradicts it: > A printing press is a device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium (such as paper or cloth), thereby transferring the ink. > Movable-type presses using cast ceramics were employed in China from the early years of the last millennium. (emphasis mine) What exactly does "printing press" mean to you? What distinction are you trying to draw?
    - DanBC 11y ago
      > However, even the greatest technology is constrained by cultural circumstances. Chinese character ideograms are too specific. Consequently, the thousands of distinct characters would be difficulat to categorize in molds. And although the more complex characters can often be decomposed into simpler elements, the process of doing so is so unsystematic that mechanising it efficiently proved impossible. True mass printing could only thrive in a culture with a less sophisticated writing system � an alphabet of few characters. Western civilization in the 15th century would be revolutionized with the Dutch goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg's invention of the movable printing press. Movable type is a reform in the history of printing and contributed much to human civilization.
readymade 11y ago
"According to Suraiya Faroqhi, lack of interest and religious reasons were among the reasons for the slow adoption of the printing press outside Europe: Thus, the printing of Arabic, after encountering strong opposition by Muslim legal scholars and the manuscript scribes, remained prohibited in the Ottoman empire between 1483 and 1729, initially even on penalty of death,[4][5] while some movable Arabic type printing was done by Pope Julius II (1503−1512) for distribution among Middle Eastern Christians,[6] and the oldest Qur’an printed with movable type was produced in Venice in 1537/1538 for the Ottoman market." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_spread_of_the_printing_press https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_spread_of_the_printing_...)

by mkaziz 11y ago

Cyph0n 11y ago

That's quite an interesting theory. Do you have any good books on the topic?

chimeracoder 11y ago
> That's quite an interesting theory. Do you have any good books on the topic? It's an idea that comes up in online discussions from time to time but is generally not taken seriously by academics because it completely ignores the fact that most non-Latin languages do in fact lend themselves quite well to being written as the composition of smaller elements used in a printing press. It's the same sort of argument made about keyboards to explain "why China, Japan, and India haven't produced as many prolific computer scientists", completely avoiding the fact that keyboards for Chinese, Japanese, Devanagri, etc. have existed for over a hundred years.
- mkaziz 11y ago
  Urdu, Arabic and Farsi in particular (all using the Arabic script) do not. Urdu, for example has 38 letters, and most of those letters have 2-3 forms depending on whether they are in the beginning, middle and end of the word. Additionally, the letters have to be joined at precise places, otherwise the text becomes illegible real fast. Hindi, Chinese and Japanese, by contrast, may have many characters, but each character is a distinct element.
  - Cyph0n 11y ago
    In addition, Arabic has symbols that can appear either above or below each letter that usually change the meaning of a word completely. For example: عالِم (pronounced a'alim): scientist عالَم (pronounced a'alam): world Notice the difference is essentially the "i" and "a" yet the entire meaning changes. I'd imagine this would add complexity to the mechanisms employed by printing equipment back then.
    - kuschku 11y ago
      So, like world and word? Where a single letter changes the entire meaning?
      - Cyph0n 11y ago
        No, the letters are exactly the same. The change is caused by adding an accent above or below the letter, in this case the letter pronounced like "l" in English.
        kuschku 11y ago
        Well, English has situations where the word is written the exact same way, but pronounced differently. The case that accents change meaning is also existing even in many european languages. So, it’s not like latin-1 doesn’t deal with those issues either. I’d assume it’s more other issues that are problematic with Arabic script.
        thaumasiotes 11y ago
        > the letters are exactly the same. The change is caused by adding an accent above or below the letter This is a pretty myopic view of what's significant in writing. Why are you calling the consonant a "letter" and the vowel an "accent"? Would you apply the same rigorous distinction to é, which is a full letter (specifically Latin Small Letter E with Acute, U+00E9), vs é, which is a letter e with a combining accent above?
        Cyph0n 11y ago
        The correct terminology is a diacritic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_diacritics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_diacritics
        thaumasiotes 11y ago
        There is no meaningful difference, for this purpose, between letters and diacritics; it is nonsense to say that "fit" vs "fat" is an easy, simple contrast because 'i' and 'a' are "letters", while the analagous distinction in Arabic is tricky because it is represented in different glyphs. They're all glyphs.
  - chimeracoder 11y ago
    > Hindi, Chinese and Japanese, by contrast, may have many characters, but each character is a distinct element. That's not... really true about Devanagri and related scripts like Bengali, Marathi, etc. At least, no different than the Arabic scripts as you describe it. They have the same considerations with multiple forms per letter (as many as five per-letter, not counting variations in size and joining or conjunct forms), along with the issues regarding character joining affecting meaning in critical ways. Nevertheless, these problems have pretty straightforward solutions when it comes to typesetting. It's also worth noting that English had many of these same problems as well at the time of the printing press, which is why handwritten English before the 15th century looks so different from what we read today. We literally dropped letters from the English alphabet due (in part) to this problem.[0] It's frustrating to see this argument persist because it has next to no evidentiary support by accepted literature, and it comes dangerously close to psuedoscientific post-hoc rationalizations of European political dominance. (e.g., phrenology being used to "explain" why Europeans were able to make scientific advances during the Enlightenment whereas African and Asian societies allegedly "weren't"[1]). [0] For example, the printing press is a major reason that we no longer use the thorn in written English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)#Middle_and_Early_Modern_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)#Middle_and_Earl... [1] which is wonderfully ironic given where numerals in European languages come from (spoiler: originally India, by way of Arabia), but I digress.
    - thaumasiotes 11y ago
      > We literally dropped letters from the English alphabet due (in part) to this problem.[0] Going by your link, there was no technological difficulty at all with printing thorns. Rather, what happened was that England imported type rather than manufacturing it, and foreign type didn't include English-specific letters. > the substitution of Y for thorn soon became ubiquitous, leading to the common 'ye', as in 'Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe'. One major reason for this was that Y existed in the printer's type fonts that were imported from Germany or Italy, while thorn did not.
mkaziz 11y ago
Unfortunately, my knowledge is anecdotal and based on conversations with my grandparents. :(
jerf 11y ago
One of the better discussions of this is probably in http://blog.gatunka.com/2008/05/05/why-japan-didnt-create-the-ipod/ http://blog.gatunka.com/2008/05/05/why-japan-didnt-create-th... , which makes a much weaker claim about the 8-bit era of computing in particular, which I'd think is easier to discuss for a lot of reasons. One other point I'd make is that I think people may be accidentally overestimating the friendliness of English for printing, to some degree, because sometimes it sounds like that people think that Japanese, Arabic, or whathaveyou people are just completely unwilling to make any practical concessions to the fact that technology might have some problems reproducing their language. But it's not as if English was not itself compromised by technology. How much of this discussion sounds like "No English-speaking country would use a typewriter because English is written with a different amount of space allocated to each letter, which typewriters of the era could not reproduce."? English speakers adapted to the tech. Telegrams historically looked like crap... they couldn't even have punctuation!... but they were popular even so. Granted, English may have a particularly easy time of it (it is, admittedly, quite nice to fit a quite usable subset of your language into five bits), but I'd like to see some more concrete evidence that all these other cultures were unwilling to bend for a while, because they were so much more concerned about... whatever it is they were concerned about. (Also, to be clear, I'm speaking about day-to-day usage. Being particular about the Koran is one thing, being unwilling to bend in an text message on your 1998 phone is quite another.)
- Cyph0n 11y ago
  > One other point I'd make is that I think people may be accidentally overestimating the friendliness of English for printing I don't think so to be frank. When compared to Japanese or Arabic, once could say English was created solely for printing. I'm a native Arabic speaker, so I can appreciate why people would claim it's a difficult language to print. Word processors and some browsers, to this very day, sometimes have trouble rendering Arabic properly, especially when it comes to linking characters and Arabic punctuation. > Telegrams historically looked like crap... they couldn't even have punctuation!. English punctuation does not significantly alter meaning in my opinion. You have sentence-ending punctuation, which is used to differentiate mainly between a statement and a question. Then you have separator punctuation, like commas, semi-colons, and colons. I don't see them making much of a change either. And finally, the apostrophe and quotation mark. In addition, telegrams are short messages, so there usually is no need to convey complex meanings. Therefore, it would have been a slight inconvenience for telegram users at most. In Arabic, changing a punctuation mark above a single letter in a word can change the word's meaning entirely. Furthermore, letters are linked together to form words - this is not essential, but would make things much more difficult to read. Also, the position of a letter in a word dictates its "shape". This introduces a ton of variation to the letters of the language, making it difficult for even modern keyboards to get right. I'd imagine it would have been even more complex at the beginning. Of course, I think that the main barrier to widespread adoption of the printing press in the Arab World was more related to demand than anything else. At the time of the Industrial Revolution and slightly before it, the Arab countries' least concern was printing books, as they were too busy dealing with the imperialist occupation.
brokentone 11y ago
Marshall and Eric McLuhan's Laws of media address the technological impact of the latin letter, and how it was extended to other technology. http://www.amazon.com/Laws-Media-Science-Marshall-McLuhan/dp/0802077153/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1448404357&sr=8-1&keywords=laws+of+media http://www.amazon.com/Laws-Media-Science-Marshall-McLuhan/dp... Marshall McLuhan's book The Gutenberg Galaxy is a longer approach to specific conversation around how latin characters led to the printing press which transformed society into the industrial age: http://www.amazon.com/Gutenberg-Galaxy-Marshall-McLuhan/dp/144261269X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1448404569&sr=8-2&keywords=The+Gutenberg+Galaxy%3A+The+Making+of+Typographic+Man http://www.amazon.com/Gutenberg-Galaxy-Marshall-McLuhan/dp/1...

thaumasiotes 11y ago

Those folks are evidently crackpots. China had working printing presses, and mass production of books, centuries before Europe did.

DanBC 11y ago
The claim isn't about printing, but about movable type and printing presses. China had printing, and movable type, before Europe, but not printing presses. And movable type was difficult with Chinese characters. http://www.computersmiths.com/chineseinvention/blockprint.htm http://www.computersmiths.com/chineseinvention/blockprint.ht...
- thaumasiotes 11y ago
  > China had printing, and movable type, before Europe, but not printing presses. Your link contains no support for this rather odd idea. Wikipedia explicitly contradicts it: > A printing press is a device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium (such as paper or cloth), thereby transferring the ink. > Movable-type presses using cast ceramics were employed in China from the early years of the last millennium. (emphasis mine) What exactly does "printing press" mean to you? What distinction are you trying to draw?
  - DanBC 11y ago
    > However, even the greatest technology is constrained by cultural circumstances. Chinese character ideograms are too specific. Consequently, the thousands of distinct characters would be difficulat to categorize in molds. And although the more complex characters can often be decomposed into simpler elements, the process of doing so is so unsystematic that mechanising it efficiently proved impossible. True mass printing could only thrive in a culture with a less sophisticated writing system � an alphabet of few characters. Western civilization in the 15th century would be revolutionized with the Dutch goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg's invention of the movable printing press. Movable type is a reform in the history of printing and contributed much to human civilization.

readymade 11y ago

"According to Suraiya Faroqhi, lack of interest and religious reasons were among the reasons for the slow adoption of the printing press outside Europe: Thus, the printing of Arabic, after encountering strong opposition by Muslim legal scholars and the manuscript scribes, remained prohibited in the Ottoman empire between 1483 and 1729, initially even on penalty of death,[4][5] while some movable Arabic type printing was done by Pope Julius II (1503−1512) for distribution among Middle Eastern Christians,[6] and the oldest Qur’an printed with movable type was produced in Venice in 1537/1538 for the Ottoman market." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_spread_of_the_printing_press https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_spread_of_the_printing_...)