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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 Ch
by 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 agoGot a pointer? Chinese typewriters exist, but they are (were) complicated, expensive machines and take a long time to learn to operate.
- UncleMeat 4y agoTom 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 agoMy understanding was that Chinese typewriters were slow to operate until the Chinese government came up with an alternative, phonetic way to spell.
- UncleMeat 4y agoThis 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 agoI mean, the person you are replying to said "slow to operate". Not sure how that's being conflated with "impossible to use".
- canjobear 4y agoMullaney’s article is not uncontroversial. There are substantial technical challenges that come from the Chinese writing system; Chinese typewriters were highly limited compared to Western alphabetic ones. See discussion at https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=25776 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=25776 for example
- UncleMeat 4y agoAcademics whining about other academics pointing out orientalism is not unusual. I'm not familiar with Moser personally. I am not a historian - I am only married to one. So I'll only say that from my personal experience interacting with historians who know Mullaney well (both professionally and personally) that his writing is well respected even if his social media presence is a bit much.