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Not to disparage one of the four great inventions of the Chinese but Europeans invented the printing press which is kind of the crux here: massive partially aut
by AvenueIngres 10y ago
Not to disparage one of the four great inventions of the Chinese but Europeans invented the printing press which is kind of the crux here: massive partially automated distribution of knowledge.
- douche 10y agoThe Chinese did have movable type and all of the building-blocks centuries earlier, though. Unfortunately, much of the head start the Chinese had in printing seems to have been chewed up by their devilishly difficult writing system. Learning the thousands of characters necessary to become literate in Chinese is a steeper task than the couple dozen of Latin letters and the few tens of ways that they combine phonetically. Not to mention the purely prosaic result that a Latin script requires far, far fewer different varieties of type for printing. On the other hand, I am not sure that European literacy and printing would have exploded so quickly without the Protestant Reformation inducing demand for the printed word, or rather Word.