5 ms·

The Chinese Typewriter: A History

48 points by forapurpose 8y ago

pieterk 8y ago
Loved Thomas’s quick sketch on that same topic last month: https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/16/1-billion-people-100000-characters-1-typewriter-chinese/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/16/1-billion-people-100000...
Jun8 8y ago
The question why an alphabetic Chinese script was never developed is often asked, a good answer is here: https://www.quora.com/Why-does-China-have-no-alphabet-Why-did-China-never-invent-an-alphabet https://www.quora.com/Why-does-China-have-no-alphabet-Why-di.... Non-Chinese speakers focus on the cumbersomeness of the script while overlooking how good it fits the tonal languages it's used for (not just Mandarin) and the benefits of radicals. Western alphabetic supremacists weren't the first ones to suggest that an alphabetic script should be created, Chinese scholars also thought about this quite early but tradition was probably too string even at that time. A similar situation also applies to Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. Another good writeup of Tom Mullaney's work with more details on early ways of writing Chinese characters using codes, etc. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/chinese-computers/504851/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/chine...
- xenadu02 8y ago
  Yes but later Egyptian eras began using hieroglyphs as a syllabary then eventually an alphabet, with various mixed usage as one might expect. We can also see a partial transition with Japanese hiragana and katakana. The mystery to me is why China never took the next step? Perhaps the two are related. Maybe if you don't switch to an alphabet before your society builds up too many traditions and too much structure, the weight of history (and the social status of using a complex script) tends to calcify many aspects of that society, including the writing?
  - azurezyq 8y ago
    Japanese is no example. Actually you can refer to Wikipedia and you'll find Japanese and Chinese are totally different languages. Japanese "leveraged" some Chinese characters while building the writing system. There's really not a "next step" here. As a Chinese, I've never had difficulty learning to recognize characters when I was a kid. Also they are not random stroke combinations, there's always logic inside and you get that easily after your Chinese reach a certain level. Just like when you see hydro- in Eng, you know it has something with water. Chinese may be difficult as a second language but I cannot find data to support it also difficult as a first language from personal experience. I began to read novels before 10yo anyway.
    - EdwardDiego 8y ago
      My Chinese colleague can't write the character for "sneeze" without looking it up. Anecdotally, that suggests that Chinese script is somewhat harder than others.
  - DonaldFisk 8y ago
    Egyptian is the oldest written language. In its final stage (Coptic) Egyptian adopted a modified Greek alphabet. Greek is the oldest written language still in use today. It was originally written in a syllabary (Linear B) but, 3000 years ago, adopted the Phoenician abjad, adding vowels. Like modern Chinese languages, Ancient Greek had word tones, indicated by accents. Chinese is the oldest script still in use today in a relatively unmodified form. One Sinitic language (Dungan), which is to a large extent mutually intelligible with Mandarin, is written entirely in the Cyrillic alphabet.
- realusername 8y ago
  > Non-Chinese speakers focus on the cumbersomeness of the script while overlooking how good it fits the tonal languages it's used for (not just Mandarin) and the benefits of radicals. Can you really know the tone from a Chinese character or you have to learn categories of them one by one? Vietnamese seems much better in this aspect, you instantly know how to pronounce anything you see.
  - lokedhs 8y ago
    No, you can't. You have to learn each character individually. That said, when I studied Chinese, I found it easier to learn the words and how to write them compared to other languages I had learnt before. Perhaps it's just me, but I find learning symbols easier than words made up from letters.
- yeehong85 8y ago
  Chinese characters are way more difficult to learn than learning any alphabet. And a large part of Chinese Characters are already sort of phonetic. However I’m against alphabetizing Mandarin for the below reasons. 1. Chinese Characters just looks better than an alphabet with tons of diacritics. How many people tattoo Pinyin to look cool? 2. Knowledge of Chinese Characters is seen as a tool that is worth the effort - it gives a different level of understanding of the meaning and words of the language, something that is arguably not immediately available to speakers of English. Who can forget that “tomorrow” is made up of “sun” and “moon” rising and setting, or that “rest” is a “person” leaning on a “tree”? 3. Medical and scientific terminology is far easier to write and understand in Chinese than spell in English. The Chinese word also gives a better clue as to what a given term means, e.g., “肝硬化” literally translates to "liver hardening", ”眼科” literally means “study of the eye”, “儿科” literally means “study of children”, which can be understood even by a low-level, non-native speaker; without more context. 4. The gap between colloquial speech and formal writing can be quite large. For Chinese to be written in Pinyin, Chinese writers would just have to avoid overly ambiguous vocabulary terms and devise some new standard replacements if it became necessary. In addition, writers have to avoid writing in a terse and poetic style influenced by Classical Chinese and more in a informal speaking style. This kind of vocabulary and grammer replacement would have massive linguistic and cultural impacts, similiar to removing all the latin and greek vocabulary in English. It would almost make current formal Chinese writing unintelligible. 5. Chinese Characters allows the Chinese people to access their history and culture directly. Like most technology, backwards compatibility and not ease of learning is a good point for not switching to Pinyin. Switching to Pinyin would cut the Chinese people from thousands of year of culture and history. Every Chinese people is at least familiar with a few lines in ancient Chinese books like Art of War, Analects, Dao De Jing and Han/Tang/Song poetry in the written language. Can you think of a comparable piece of Latin or Greek writing that the average Westerner knows by heart? How many people can recite Virgil and Homer? Bonus if they can do it in the original Latin or Greek. Greek and Latin in the West have been the bastion of the Western civilization, and in this age, all but forgotten. 6. Chinese characters promotes national unity and cohesiveness. The stature of Han Chinese as the largest national grouping in the world can be explained partially by the writing system. All literate Chinese, even if they speak mutually unintelligible “dialects”, can read the same books and feel that Chinese Characters is their own language. If they had a phonetic writing system, they might have broken up into separate national groups, as did the Italians, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian. 7. Chinese characters are part of Chinese identity. From a western perspective it's difficult to truly understand the degree to which Chinese characters are interwoven into Chinese cultural identity. In the West, calligraphy is seen as a niche interest, while in China you have people studying and imitating the ancient calligraphy masters, students taking calligraphy courses, elderly writing characters in parks, families hanging proverbs outside their doors, decorating homes with calligraphic art etc. If Chinese characters were abandoned, Chinese calligraphy would not be the same, all riddles/ jokes/ puns/ poetry would become meaningless, Chinese names would become gibberish. Chinese characters are an extremely emotional issue and are something more than just writing. That is why even the idea of simplifying Characters outraged so many people.
- wahern 8y ago
  > how good it fits the tonal languages Chinese may not have been tonal when the script originally arose. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Chinese_phonology#Tones_and_final_consonants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Chinese_phonology#Tones_an... and http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4906 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4906
- mislankanova 8y ago
  It seems to me (a native speaker of Mandarin) that the written Chinese is not closely tied to the phonetics or spoken Chinese. A person who could only speak Cantonese can write something that can be easily understood by someone who speaks only Wu. While an alphabetic writing system seems to be secondary to an underlying, spoken language, in which case the written language represents the way in which the language is spoken. Such a perception might be the result of the divide between vernacular and written/literary Chinese that remained uncontested until a hundred years ago. An alphabetic writing system for Chinese would essentially unify spoken and written Chinese, which goes against the aforementioned perception. Hence the resistance against an alphabetic writing system.
jkabrg 8y ago
This talk goes into some detail about the history of Chinese typewriters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdT-oFxc-C0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdT-oFxc-C0 -- the presenter claims that a form of predictive text first originated for Chinese typewriters. This is a video of someone using an electromechanical Chinese typewriter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRKAUDHk_MM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRKAUDHk_MM -- it's hard to appreciate the topic without seeing one used.
- forapurpose 8y ago
  TFA says the same thing about predictive text.
  - jkabrg 8y ago
    "TFA" is one paragraph long. BTW your usage of "TFA" can come across as rude.
    - forapurpose 8y ago
      I've never considered that about "TFA" (I could see how 'RTFA' could be rude); no rudeness intended. The article as my browser displays it is a couple dozen paragraphs long; just in case you can't access it, here is the relevant section: The spectre hanging, however genially, over every attempt to create a Chinese typewriter is Lin Yutang. While others repackaged Japanese machines, the Tsinghua and Harvard-educated Lin was inventing his own. A brilliant and congenial figurehead with two English-language bestsellers in the 1930s, in the 1940s Lin came up with his MingKwai (Clear, Quick) typewriter. Roughly the size of an English-language typewriter, and equipped with a recognisable keyboard, the MingKwai’s appearance belied its complexity. Its compact chassis concealed 43 rotating cylinders, and featured a viewfinder (‘the Magic Eye’) that allowed users to select characters by depressing keys marked with character components – some radicals, some strokes, and some bold and intuitive groupings of Lin’s own devising. IBM and Remington expressed their interest, and Lin’s typewriter was celebrated in dozens of newspapers across the US, from the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune to the Los Angeles Times and Newsweek. But it was never mass-manufactured: the plans were undone partly by the rise of the Chinese Communist Party, which didn’t seem to bode well for patent rights, and partly by the invention of the phonetic system Pinyin, which briefly threatened, at least in the eyes of American manufacturers, to make Chinese typewriters obsolete. Today if you open a laptop or unlock a phone to type in Chinese, the first thing you’ll notice is how intent the software is on doing all your work for you. The letters typed on your keyboard trigger the on-screen display of several dozen likely possibilities, arranged in order of frequency. This seems so obviously computational it is a surprise to learn that it originated with the actuating keys Lin devised for his typewriter, and with the fervour of the typists in the early days of the Revolution. In 1951, typesetter Zhang Jiying shattered speed records by arranging characters in associative clusters, which he called lianchuan – ‘chain’ or ‘free-association’, later adopted as the term for what is now called predictive text. Zhang recognised how much of language is cliché. ‘Liberation’ (jiefang) was likely to be followed by ‘army’ (jun), ‘American’ (Mei) by ‘imperialist’ (di). While it is true that grammar and word-order impose certain expectations on form in every language, it is particularly true of Chinese, where collocations influenced by tone, metre and rhythm have, by a centuries-long process, migrated towards one another. Typists and typewriter manufacturers rejigged their keyboards in the wake of Zhang’s discovery. And so while typewriters became more attuned to the language of people generally, they became less like people personally.
jkabrg 8y ago
What about Japanese typewriters? Kanji is similar enough to Chinese characters.

48 points by forapurpose 8y ago

Loved Thomas’s quick sketch on that same topic last month: https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/16/1-billion-people-100000-characters-1-typewriter-chinese/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/16/1-billion-people-100000...

Jun8 8y ago

The question why an alphabetic Chinese script was never developed is often asked, a good answer is here: https://www.quora.com/Why-does-China-have-no-alphabet-Why-did-China-never-invent-an-alphabet https://www.quora.com/Why-does-China-have-no-alphabet-Why-di.... Non-Chinese speakers focus on the cumbersomeness of the script while overlooking how good it fits the tonal languages it's used for (not just Mandarin) and the benefits of radicals. Western alphabetic supremacists weren't the first ones to suggest that an alphabetic script should be created, Chinese scholars also thought about this quite early but tradition was probably too string even at that time. A similar situation also applies to Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. Another good writeup of Tom Mullaney's work with more details on early ways of writing Chinese characters using codes, etc. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/chinese-computers/504851/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/chine...

xenadu02 8y ago
Yes but later Egyptian eras began using hieroglyphs as a syllabary then eventually an alphabet, with various mixed usage as one might expect. We can also see a partial transition with Japanese hiragana and katakana. The mystery to me is why China never took the next step? Perhaps the two are related. Maybe if you don't switch to an alphabet before your society builds up too many traditions and too much structure, the weight of history (and the social status of using a complex script) tends to calcify many aspects of that society, including the writing?
- azurezyq 8y ago
  Japanese is no example. Actually you can refer to Wikipedia and you'll find Japanese and Chinese are totally different languages. Japanese "leveraged" some Chinese characters while building the writing system. There's really not a "next step" here. As a Chinese, I've never had difficulty learning to recognize characters when I was a kid. Also they are not random stroke combinations, there's always logic inside and you get that easily after your Chinese reach a certain level. Just like when you see hydro- in Eng, you know it has something with water. Chinese may be difficult as a second language but I cannot find data to support it also difficult as a first language from personal experience. I began to read novels before 10yo anyway.
  - EdwardDiego 8y ago
    My Chinese colleague can't write the character for "sneeze" without looking it up. Anecdotally, that suggests that Chinese script is somewhat harder than others.
- DonaldFisk 8y ago
  Egyptian is the oldest written language. In its final stage (Coptic) Egyptian adopted a modified Greek alphabet. Greek is the oldest written language still in use today. It was originally written in a syllabary (Linear B) but, 3000 years ago, adopted the Phoenician abjad, adding vowels. Like modern Chinese languages, Ancient Greek had word tones, indicated by accents. Chinese is the oldest script still in use today in a relatively unmodified form. One Sinitic language (Dungan), which is to a large extent mutually intelligible with Mandarin, is written entirely in the Cyrillic alphabet.
realusername 8y ago
> Non-Chinese speakers focus on the cumbersomeness of the script while overlooking how good it fits the tonal languages it's used for (not just Mandarin) and the benefits of radicals. Can you really know the tone from a Chinese character or you have to learn categories of them one by one? Vietnamese seems much better in this aspect, you instantly know how to pronounce anything you see.
- lokedhs 8y ago
  No, you can't. You have to learn each character individually. That said, when I studied Chinese, I found it easier to learn the words and how to write them compared to other languages I had learnt before. Perhaps it's just me, but I find learning symbols easier than words made up from letters.
yeehong85 8y ago
Chinese characters are way more difficult to learn than learning any alphabet. And a large part of Chinese Characters are already sort of phonetic. However I’m against alphabetizing Mandarin for the below reasons. 1. Chinese Characters just looks better than an alphabet with tons of diacritics. How many people tattoo Pinyin to look cool? 2. Knowledge of Chinese Characters is seen as a tool that is worth the effort - it gives a different level of understanding of the meaning and words of the language, something that is arguably not immediately available to speakers of English. Who can forget that “tomorrow” is made up of “sun” and “moon” rising and setting, or that “rest” is a “person” leaning on a “tree”? 3. Medical and scientific terminology is far easier to write and understand in Chinese than spell in English. The Chinese word also gives a better clue as to what a given term means, e.g., “肝硬化” literally translates to "liver hardening", ”眼科” literally means “study of the eye”, “儿科” literally means “study of children”, which can be understood even by a low-level, non-native speaker; without more context. 4. The gap between colloquial speech and formal writing can be quite large. For Chinese to be written in Pinyin, Chinese writers would just have to avoid overly ambiguous vocabulary terms and devise some new standard replacements if it became necessary. In addition, writers have to avoid writing in a terse and poetic style influenced by Classical Chinese and more in a informal speaking style. This kind of vocabulary and grammer replacement would have massive linguistic and cultural impacts, similiar to removing all the latin and greek vocabulary in English. It would almost make current formal Chinese writing unintelligible. 5. Chinese Characters allows the Chinese people to access their history and culture directly. Like most technology, backwards compatibility and not ease of learning is a good point for not switching to Pinyin. Switching to Pinyin would cut the Chinese people from thousands of year of culture and history. Every Chinese people is at least familiar with a few lines in ancient Chinese books like Art of War, Analects, Dao De Jing and Han/Tang/Song poetry in the written language. Can you think of a comparable piece of Latin or Greek writing that the average Westerner knows by heart? How many people can recite Virgil and Homer? Bonus if they can do it in the original Latin or Greek. Greek and Latin in the West have been the bastion of the Western civilization, and in this age, all but forgotten. 6. Chinese characters promotes national unity and cohesiveness. The stature of Han Chinese as the largest national grouping in the world can be explained partially by the writing system. All literate Chinese, even if they speak mutually unintelligible “dialects”, can read the same books and feel that Chinese Characters is their own language. If they had a phonetic writing system, they might have broken up into separate national groups, as did the Italians, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian. 7. Chinese characters are part of Chinese identity. From a western perspective it's difficult to truly understand the degree to which Chinese characters are interwoven into Chinese cultural identity. In the West, calligraphy is seen as a niche interest, while in China you have people studying and imitating the ancient calligraphy masters, students taking calligraphy courses, elderly writing characters in parks, families hanging proverbs outside their doors, decorating homes with calligraphic art etc. If Chinese characters were abandoned, Chinese calligraphy would not be the same, all riddles/ jokes/ puns/ poetry would become meaningless, Chinese names would become gibberish. Chinese characters are an extremely emotional issue and are something more than just writing. That is why even the idea of simplifying Characters outraged so many people.
wahern 8y ago
> how good it fits the tonal languages Chinese may not have been tonal when the script originally arose. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Chinese_phonology#Tones_and_final_consonants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Chinese_phonology#Tones_an... and http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4906 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4906
mislankanova 8y ago
It seems to me (a native speaker of Mandarin) that the written Chinese is not closely tied to the phonetics or spoken Chinese. A person who could only speak Cantonese can write something that can be easily understood by someone who speaks only Wu. While an alphabetic writing system seems to be secondary to an underlying, spoken language, in which case the written language represents the way in which the language is spoken. Such a perception might be the result of the divide between vernacular and written/literary Chinese that remained uncontested until a hundred years ago. An alphabetic writing system for Chinese would essentially unify spoken and written Chinese, which goes against the aforementioned perception. Hence the resistance against an alphabetic writing system.

jkabrg 8y ago

This talk goes into some detail about the history of Chinese typewriters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdT-oFxc-C0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdT-oFxc-C0 -- the presenter claims that a form of predictive text first originated for Chinese typewriters. This is a video of someone using an electromechanical Chinese typewriter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRKAUDHk_MM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRKAUDHk_MM -- it's hard to appreciate the topic without seeing one used.

forapurpose 8y ago
TFA says the same thing about predictive text.
- jkabrg 8y ago
  "TFA" is one paragraph long. BTW your usage of "TFA" can come across as rude.
  - forapurpose 8y ago
    I've never considered that about "TFA" (I could see how 'RTFA' could be rude); no rudeness intended. The article as my browser displays it is a couple dozen paragraphs long; just in case you can't access it, here is the relevant section: The spectre hanging, however genially, over every attempt to create a Chinese typewriter is Lin Yutang. While others repackaged Japanese machines, the Tsinghua and Harvard-educated Lin was inventing his own. A brilliant and congenial figurehead with two English-language bestsellers in the 1930s, in the 1940s Lin came up with his MingKwai (Clear, Quick) typewriter. Roughly the size of an English-language typewriter, and equipped with a recognisable keyboard, the MingKwai’s appearance belied its complexity. Its compact chassis concealed 43 rotating cylinders, and featured a viewfinder (‘the Magic Eye’) that allowed users to select characters by depressing keys marked with character components – some radicals, some strokes, and some bold and intuitive groupings of Lin’s own devising. IBM and Remington expressed their interest, and Lin’s typewriter was celebrated in dozens of newspapers across the US, from the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune to the Los Angeles Times and Newsweek. But it was never mass-manufactured: the plans were undone partly by the rise of the Chinese Communist Party, which didn’t seem to bode well for patent rights, and partly by the invention of the phonetic system Pinyin, which briefly threatened, at least in the eyes of American manufacturers, to make Chinese typewriters obsolete. Today if you open a laptop or unlock a phone to type in Chinese, the first thing you’ll notice is how intent the software is on doing all your work for you. The letters typed on your keyboard trigger the on-screen display of several dozen likely possibilities, arranged in order of frequency. This seems so obviously computational it is a surprise to learn that it originated with the actuating keys Lin devised for his typewriter, and with the fervour of the typists in the early days of the Revolution. In 1951, typesetter Zhang Jiying shattered speed records by arranging characters in associative clusters, which he called lianchuan – ‘chain’ or ‘free-association’, later adopted as the term for what is now called predictive text. Zhang recognised how much of language is cliché. ‘Liberation’ (jiefang) was likely to be followed by ‘army’ (jun), ‘American’ (Mei) by ‘imperialist’ (di). While it is true that grammar and word-order impose certain expectations on form in every language, it is particularly true of Chinese, where collocations influenced by tone, metre and rhythm have, by a centuries-long process, migrated towards one another. Typists and typewriter manufacturers rejigged their keyboards in the wake of Zhang’s discovery. And so while typewriters became more attuned to the language of people generally, they became less like people personally.

jkabrg 8y ago

What about Japanese typewriters? Kanji is similar enough to Chinese characters.