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One thing that doesn't get mentioned often is that the West had a "simpler" alphabet of 26 characters, 10 numbers, and a few punctuation marks (~20). Ok, add up

• masklinn 4y ago
  > In particular for Korea: Hangul [0], which is a "simpler" language It's not a language, it's an alphabet. And I fail to see the need for quotes, there's really no denying hangul is simpler than hanja. However the syllabic structure of hangul would still make it a lot more challenging printing than the linear structure of the latin alphabetic script: you'd need either a type piece per syllable (of which there are >10000), or you'd need a variant for each possible block layout. There are 9 possible layouts, though there are limitations which cuts down on the complexity of that option. But still, assuming you want fixed-size blocks and depending on your decisions on complex finals you'd need 6-9 variants of each initial, and 2-3 version of each final. If you're fine with variable-size blocks (and spacers to line things up) then you can probably cut down to 3 or even 2 of each initials, but it's not going to look great.
  • rvba 4y ago
    Is there some way to learn hangul to be able to write it? I dont ask about learning actual Korean. Just Hangul yo say "write English in Hangul" - if it is possible. Or some service that "translitetates" your name to Hangul?
    • half-kh-hacker 4y ago
      You can transliterate English to Hangeul but you'll end up missing some sounds (e.g. you'll not be able to super easily get 'th' or 'f' or 'v' or 'z') because Korean doesn't use those
    • j-bos 4y ago
      Hangul is actually very easy to learn, so much so that it can trick you (me) into thinking Korean should be a snap. To answer you're question, you can find multiple pre built anki decks just for hangul. If you want a quick reference page on the characters, search 'hangul character guide'. This video was also helpful for me: https://youtu.be/TVqJbiSLw-E https://youtu.be/TVqJbiSLw-E
      • thaumasiotes 4y ago
        > Hangul is actually very easy to learn, so much so that it can trick you (me) into thinking Korean should be a snap. I don't really understand this. It's even easier to learn the Italian writing system, coming from English, than it is to learn the Korean writing system. Who concludes from that that it's going to be easy to learn to speak Italian?
        • a1369209993 4y ago
          > Who concludes from that that it's going to be easy Peoples' preconscious lizard brain, that generates gut feelings and first impressions based on superficial brute-force pattern-matching, presumably.
        • terrorOf 4y ago
    • igorkraw 4y ago
      It's actually easy enough to be done in 30 minutes (the guide says 15 but I'm old and slow): https://www.ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/ https://www.ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/ you simply insert padding-vocals and "silences" to make the syllable stuff line up, my name (Igor) becomes (silence)I-go-ru.
  • modernpink 4y ago
    > And I fail to see the need for quotes, there's really no denying hangul is simpler than hanja. Simpler is a culturally conditioned subjective value judgement rather than a scientific one and therefore it expresses an opinionated view. It may be more correct to say it is a more systematic script.
    • MarkPNeyer 4y ago
      There are numerous mathematical measures of complexity. Do you think people believe “tic tac toe is simpler than chess” because of cultural conditioning?
    • affgrff2 4y ago
      I quickly googled: Hangul has 24 different symbols/characters. Hanja had something around 214 radicals that can be combined to thousands of meanings.
      • modernpink 4y ago
        So in which case Korean can said to be a "simpler" language than Chinese (which uses Hanja). But in modern linguistics you would not exactly say any language is "simpler".
        • masklinn 4y ago
          Langage and script are two completely different and largely orthogonal concerns. While there is a “floor” to the complexity of a script in its ability to faithfully reproduce a langage, there is no “ceiling”, you can always pile on complexity. Although I would say that logographic scripts are the other kind of complexity, they’re complicated to learn and use because they’re simplistic in their approach. Syllabic or alphabetic scripts require higher concepts, but that makes them more flexible and composable.
        • bobthepanda 4y ago
          There’s also the fact that Hangul is phonetic, whereas Hanja has very little to do with Korean language that isn’t of Chinese origin. Hangul is simpler, that’s not really in dispute. It was literally designed to be simple so that a native speaker could become literate in ten days.
  • hatsunearu 4y ago
    To add, Korean as a language existed long before hangul. There was a writing system where they used Chinese characters to encode the words semantically. Like how modern Korean still uses Chinese words in the "backend" so to speak, and the old system was exactly how Japanese Kanji works, you write the Chinese character and you read it with the Korean pronunciation (unwritten, and you had to memorize it, just like Japanese--difficult!) Now the kicker is, they encoded pure-Korean words using stand-ins using Chinese. Particles would be written in Chinese with ridiculously complex rules, and pure Korean words were written phonetically in Chinese, with the pronunciation of the Chinese characters would be "close enough" to the pronunciation of the Korean word. It was a horrendous system which is why hangul was made (like the yangban nobles literally needed full time learning all day for like a decade to master it, and the literacy test to get into high status government jobs was literally just to write a few essays) The first few lines of 훈민정음 (basically a declaration that hangul is a thing we made, please use it) starts off with "the language of our land is different to that of the chinese and our writing system is not compatible. For that reason the uneducated subjects of the kingdom have trouble accomplishing their desires. So I (king sejong) find pity in this so I have created a new system of 28 characters, and would like everyone to practice it daily so that people can use it comfortably"
  • simonebrunozzi 4y ago
    You're right, I meant that Hangul's alphabet is simpler than Hanja. Thanks for pointing that out.
• segfaultbuserr 4y ago
  > One thing that doesn't get mentioned often is that the West had a "simpler" alphabet of 26 characters This article has presumably mentioned it. It says: > Answering this question is actually quite complex because it involves mechanical knowledge, metallurgy, mills and writing systems. I have read numerous articles on this topic, but I started to notice that everyone leaves out some different essential part of the story. Here I am trying to include all the factors involved. The content is cut off in the middle by the paywall (which raises the question of whether it's suitable to be submitted to HN in the first place, if there's no workaround available).
  • franciscop 4y ago
    I didn't notice it was a paywall and thought it was just the end of the article+sub box until you mentioned it and I went back to check it!
  • socialdemocrat 4y ago
    The simple workaround is sign up for a free 7-day free trial. You don't have to be a paid subscriber. It does get into discussing alphabets at the end.
    • incongruity 4y ago
      Signing up for something isn’t a workaround - it’s signing up for something.
      • a1369209993 4y ago
        To be fair, the term "paywall" is kind of misleading here; just by looking at it, it's hardly obvious that it also refers to things like "sign up" (or "disable your adblocker", etc). It's unfortunate that less opaque terms like "signupwall" are too awkward to supplant it. (Of course, if they did, we'd probably have the opposite problem, of people pretending something's not a signupwall because you can pay without signing up. If socialdemocrat has any suggestions for a term for this single concept that's etymologically compatible with both of those special cases, I'd quite like to hear them.)
• MichaelCollins 4y ago
  Gutenberg's 42-line Bible required about 299 glyphs. The natural presumption is his letters were cast from a single matrix (e.g. a single 'A' mold casts thousands of 'A' types), however careful analysis of his books reveals variations between letters which suggest multiple subtly different matrices were used. The reason for the apparent variation between the matrices is disputed, but one explanation is the variation between matrices may indicate the matrices were produced by composing several individual stroke punches, rather than one punch per gylph. I think this technique of using individual stroke punches to compose matrices then used for die casting could work for Eastern languages too. I don't know how many individual stroke punches you would need for Korean or Chinese, but it's surely fewer than the number of glyphs those languages have.
  • rob74 4y ago
    That's very interesting actually! Today it's tempting to think that you only need 26*2 glyphs for the entire alphabet (although with ligatures that's not quite true either), but back then they probably still felt the need to more faithfully emulate hand-written books? That would explain that there are several variations for the same letter?
    • masklinn 4y ago
      Nah it’s probably that they had multiple matrices to cast more types faster. You only need 62 glyphs for a basic Latin alphabet including case (although gutenberg’s german would require a few more), but you need a lot of copies of each to lay a complete page, and they’d lay multiple pages per sheet. Not to mention because character frequencies are not equal you need a lot more of some than others so you might have a multi-type matrix of just Es in order to cast enough of those for your needs in a reasonable time frame.
      • MichaelCollins 4y ago
        > You only need 62 glyphs for a basic Latin alphabet (although gutenberg’s german would require a few more), Gutenberg's bible used ligatures and various symbols too, that ups the count a lot. I haven't counted them myself, but wikipedia says 290 characters and cites John Man's book about Gutenberg. A paper I found about using ML to do cluster analysis on the glyphs says 299 unique glyphs and cites Gottfried Zedler. I can't read either of those sources, but a bit less than 300 seems like a safe bet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutenberg_Bible#Type https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutenberg_Bible#Type https://deepai.org/publication/classifying-the-typefaces-of-the-gutenberg-42-line-bible https://deepai.org/publication/classifying-the-typefaces-of-...
• UncleMeat 4y ago
  The "too many characters" thing is used to justify a huge amount of myths about asian printing technology. For example, people love to say that there were no Chinese typewriters because the alphabet is too complex and this is just straight up false. Tom Mullaney at Stanford has good writing on a lot of this.
  • thematrixturtle 4y ago
    Got a pointer? Chinese typewriters exist, but they are (were) complicated, expensive machines and take a long time to learn to operate.
    • UncleMeat 4y ago
      Tom Mullaney, as mentioned in my post, is arguably the global expert on the chinese typewriter and has done a lot of work on chinese printed and digital language technology. His books would be the starting point.
  • colinmhayes 4y ago
    My understanding was that Chinese typewriters were slow to operate until the Chinese government came up with an alternative, phonetic way to spell.
    • UncleMeat 4y ago
      This is largely a myth. They are very different than typewriters for english, but not impossible to use. Functional typewriters existed for the chinese language long before simplified chinese.
      • filleduchaos 4y ago
        I mean, the person you are replying to said "slow to operate". Not sure how that's being conflated with "impossible to use".
  • canjobear 4y ago
• kamaal 4y ago
  This is often cited as a reason why Printing press didn't get moving in cultures using Arabic script, including Turkish lands. Of course we can print anything today. But in early days some of these things add additional complexity and barriers to what is already a very nascent tech and social trend.
  • shipman05 4y ago
    I've often wondered if digital media is a factor in the way many East Asian countries have closed the gap with Europe when it comes to economic productivity. - Phase 1: Before movable type printing press - no strong advantage for either character set - Phase 2: After printing press but before digital media - advantage Latin characters - Phase 3: After digital media - no strong advantage for either character set Phase 2 just happens to line up very neatly with the "great divergence" where Europe surpassed China in technology and economic output. Probably just a coincidence, or, more likely, one small factor among many.
    • aetherson 4y ago
      I think it's a big factor among many. This article spends a lot of time expressing that the Gutenberg printing press was better than Eastern printing presses. That's true. But why was the Gutenberg press better, given that there were eastern printing presses hundreds of years earlier? I think a big part of the answer was that because of the difficulties in printing their languages, there was no big incentive to improve their printing presses. You couldn't look at it and say, "Oh, man, if I could just solve this problem, my fortune would be assured!" And so the technology languished. And the result was, as the article demonstrates, a vast difference in literacy and knowledge storage/transfer in the West. And that's certainly not the only reason why the West diverged from the East, but it's a big factor.
    • bobthepanda 4y ago
      I mean, Japan’s postwar convergence is largely before digital media.
      • 4y ago
• drewcoo 4y ago
  Medieval writing had diphthongs, strange, often regional abbreviations, and, based on what I remember from college, were difficult for someone used to reading Latin in current print form. There was still need in Europe to standardize and simplify those things. That process was still underway well into the 18th century. There was also the problem of spelling. Early Latin print in Europe is similar to Chinese also in that it's written form was more or less understood by educated Europeans, but their spoken langues had splintered away and we're often not mutually intelligible.
• brudgers 4y ago
  Another thing that isn’t mentioned is Gutenberg had a “killer use case” — printing Bibles to prosthelytize Protestantism. The spread of new scientific ideas mentioned in the article only came later on the exhaust fumes of spreading new religious ideas.
  • samatman 4y ago
    Gutenberg died in 1468, Martin Luther was born in 1483. Gutenberg was a Catholic who sold Bibles to the gentry.
• bnralt 4y ago
  > One thing that doesn't get mentioned often is that the West had a "simpler" alphabet of 26 characters, 10 numbers, and a few punctuation marks (~20). Really? I feel like this is usually used as the main - sometimes only - argument for why moveable type took off in the West. If you look at the Wikipedia for moveable type[1], the simpler alphabet is listed in the article summary at the top of the page as a reason for why Gutenberg's printing press was so successful. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_type https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_type
• jmyeet 4y ago
  Yeah I too am surprised at how often the alphabet is ignored or dismissed in these comparisons. Not only for printing but also for the development of the computer. I havne't seen a good analysis of this but I wonder how much the impact of literacy has on the demand for books. Now in the Middle Ages in Europe, literacy wasn't universal. The monastic class, clergy, the nobility and certain professions (eg merchants) were likely literate but less so the general population. A simpler and more phonetic alphabet clearly impacts literacy. Post-1929 Turkey is good evidence of this (where Turkish switched from the Arabic alphabet to what they use today). Chinese is notoriously difficult to learn to read and write. Is it possible that lower literacy reduced the demand for printed works? Was literacy in China actually lower than in European countries 500-1000 years ago? I have no idea but it's an interesting thought.
  • mmis1000 4y ago
    Fun fact, you used to need a dedicated hardware to print Chinese character on screen before personal computer have enough memory and storage space to fit every characters in. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language_card https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language_card
  • satellite2 4y ago
    The Arabic alphabet is no more complex than the Latin one. That's definitely not a good example.
    • jmyeet 4y ago
      Arabic is cursive and usually but doesn't necessarily skip vowels in written form. A lot of Arabic words have the same 3 letter root (eg IIRC ktb for "book", "librarian" and others) and they're all written the same if vowels are omitted so you have to discern the meaning in context. Plus it has gender and case. Plus Modern Standard Arabic ("MSA") differs a lot from colloquial Arabic. So there is a lot of inherent complexity in Arabic. From a typesetting POV (both for the printed press and computers), Arabic's cursive nature is more difficult because the letters need to connect and the shapes can vary depending on what's next to them.
• daniel-cussen 4y ago
  It's not just the alphabet size, it's that you need many of each glyph to make a page, and it varies a lot. So also if you're using a Chinese character repeatedly in an essay, you're going to need lots of those glyphs to make that page, so you need really really huge collections of glyphs to make anything. It's a game of scrabble essentially. And in addition Gutenberg found an alloy using antimony, a metal nobody had any uses for in absolute, but was known to be toxic (anti-mony anti-monk killed the monks who volunteered for testing its toxicity, similar to the Jesuits with malaria, Catholic scientific testing). So he was a jeweller and he banged out an allow that slightly expanded when cooled, it was always the opposite until that point...I'm not sure if with bronze too. Antimony, tin and silver IIRC. So expensive glyphs, and further once the Americas started pumping out silver the economics of the printing press improved a lot, because it was silver-intensive. Further, printing presses every now and then piss the fuck out of the ruler, when that happens the whole place gets confiscated so there go your millions of Chinese silver glyphs, and all the work into making them the typography, that's expensive. China is also centralized geographically, so censorship was too easily carried out, resistance was impossible. On the other hand in India it was too fragmented, no common language, also problematic for literacy, letters, glyph sets. Though they didn't do badly, China in terms of the development of books I would have to say did do badly, sometimes it's that simple. Invented paper, gunpowder, the compass, and gave them all away to Europe. There's more to it, it made sense to have carved wood blocks in the context. I'll truncate here.