4 ms·

what's the technological difference between Chinese Writing and Western Writing? why are they separate?

• Qwertious 1y ago
  (Not an expert but) Chinese writing is hieroglyphic, wheres 'western writing' is phonetic. Western writing has a very small character set and is thus well-suited to a printing press, whereas hieroglyphics have thousands of characters (for thousands of concepts) but aren't fundamentally linked to the language like western characters are.
  • Nicook 1y ago
    this is why Mesopotamian and Egyptian writing are upstream of so much.
  • UncleMeat 1y ago
    > Western writing has a very small character set and is thus well-suited to a printing press This is vastly overstated. This was a widely popularized idea in the west but has largely been debunked by more recent scholarship that is less interested in demonstrating the superiority of the west.
    • adrianN 1y ago
      Do you have links to relevant research?
      • UncleMeat 1y ago
        Tom Mullaney at Stanford has a good book on chinese typewriters (this narrative is usually presented against both printing presses and typewriters) and is a good entrance into the intersection of chinese script and technology. History research is typically published in books rather than papers, so it isn't content I can link to directly.
  • mbs159 1y ago
    > Western writing has a very small character set If you include all of the Latin-script characters, Cyrillic, Greek, accent symbols and ligatures, you'd have over 300 characters, and that is a very conservative estimate