Chinese Characters Are Futuristic and the Alphabet Is Old News
On a bright fall morning at Stanford, Tom Mullaney is telling me what’s wrong with QWERTY keyboards. Mullaney is not a technologist, nor is he one of those Dvorak keyboard enthusiasts. He’s a historian of modern China and we’re perusing his exhibit of Chinese typewriters and keyboards, the curation of which has led Mullaney to the conclusion that China is rising ahead technologically while the West falls behind, clinging to its QWERTY keyboard.To get more news about chinese alphabet, you can visit shine news official website.
Now this was and still is an unusual view because Chinese—with its 75,000 individual characters rather than an alphabet—had historically been the language considered incompatible with modern technology. How do you send a telegram or use a typewriter with all those characters? How do you even communicate with the modern world? If you’re a Cambridge-educated classicist enamored with the Greeks, you might just conclude Chinese script is “archaic.” Long live the alphabet.
Mullaney is the author of two forthcoming books on the Chinese typewriter and computer, and we discussed what he’s learned while researching them. His argument is pretty fascinating to unpack because, at its heart, it is about more than China. It is about our relationship to computers, not just as physical objects but as conduits to intangible software. Typing English on a QWERTY computer keyboard, he says, “is about the most basic rudimentary way you can use a keyboard.” You press the “a” key and “a” appears on your screen. “It doesn't make use of a computer’s processing power and memory and the cheapening thereof.” Type “a” on a QWERTY keyboard hooked up to a Chinese computer, on the other hand, and the computer is off anticipating the next characters. Typing in Chinese requires mediation from a layer of software that is obvious to the user.
In other words, to type a Chinese character is essentially to punch in a set of instructions—a code if you will, to retrieve a specific character. Mullaney calls Chinese typists “code conscious.” Dozens of ways to input Chinese now exist, but the Western world mostly remains stuck typing letter-by-letter on a computer keyboard, without taking full advantage of software-augmented shortcuts. Because, he asks, “How do you convince a person who's been told for a century and a half that their alphabet is the greatest thing since sliced bread?”
It’s China’s awkward history with the telegraph and the typewriter, argues Mullaney, that primed Chinese speakers to take full advantage of software when it came along—to the point where it’s now faster to input Chinese than English.
When the telegraph came to China in 1871, the Chinese first had to bend their language to Western technology. The solution, devised by a Dutch astronomer and a French customs officer, was to assign a four-digit code to each character, which was then translated into the dots and dashes of Morse. This worked, but it put Chinese at a disadvantage. Numbers in Morse code contain five dots or dashes and letters only one to three, which made Chinese telegrams both more expensive and less efficient. By some accounts, when former Chinese premier Zhou Enlai was on the road, sending telegrams was his biggest expense.
The Chinese typewriter was a cumbersome object, too. It had a tray bed of more than 2,000 common characters. A typist selected characters by maneuvering a chassis on top of the tray bed, pushing a lever that struck the chosen character against the page. If you wanted to type an uncommon character, you had to go hunting for it among thousands in a secondary tray bed.
At the same time, dozens of inventors tried their hand on better ways to send telegrams or build typewriters. To do so, they had to come up with new ways of indexing Chinese characters, breaking them into subunits. Take, for example, the “four corner method,” which notes the shape in each corner. Ten different shapes are assigned a number 0 through 9; going around the corners in a clockwise direction gives you a four-digit code to send telegrams or to organize characters in a typewriter. If you don’t write Chinese, this might not seem particularly profound. But in fact, it is a complete rethinking of the Chinese character.
It would be like, if instead of spelling an English word letter by letter, you represent it by noting the number of letters that are ascenders (d b l h), descenders (p y g j), or neither. The idea of choosing characters by inputting an abstract code was part of Chinese technology from the start.
On a bright fall morning at Stanford, Tom Mullaney is telling me what’s wrong with QWERTY keyboards. Mullaney is not a technologist, nor is he one of those Dvorak keyboard enthusiasts. He’s a historian of modern China and we’re perusing his exhibit of Chinese typewriters and keyboards, the curation of which has led Mullaney to the conclusion that China is rising ahead technologically while the West falls behind, clinging to its QWERTY keyboard.To get more news about chinese alphabet, you can visit shine news official website.
Now this was and still is an unusual view because Chinese—with its 75,000 individual characters rather than an alphabet—had historically been the language considered incompatible with modern technology. How do you send a telegram or use a typewriter with all those characters? How do you even communicate with the modern world? If you’re a Cambridge-educated classicist enamored with the Greeks, you might just conclude Chinese script is “archaic.” Long live the alphabet.
Mullaney is the author of two forthcoming books on the Chinese typewriter and computer, and we discussed what he’s learned while researching them. His argument is pretty fascinating to unpack because, at its heart, it is about more than China. It is about our relationship to computers, not just as physical objects but as conduits to intangible software. Typing English on a QWERTY computer keyboard, he says, “is about the most basic rudimentary way you can use a keyboard.” You press the “a” key and “a” appears on your screen. “It doesn't make use of a computer’s processing power and memory and the cheapening thereof.” Type “a” on a QWERTY keyboard hooked up to a Chinese computer, on the other hand, and the computer is off anticipating the next characters. Typing in Chinese requires mediation from a layer of software that is obvious to the user.
In other words, to type a Chinese character is essentially to punch in a set of instructions—a code if you will, to retrieve a specific character. Mullaney calls Chinese typists “code conscious.” Dozens of ways to input Chinese now exist, but the Western world mostly remains stuck typing letter-by-letter on a computer keyboard, without taking full advantage of software-augmented shortcuts. Because, he asks, “How do you convince a person who's been told for a century and a half that their alphabet is the greatest thing since sliced bread?”
It’s China’s awkward history with the telegraph and the typewriter, argues Mullaney, that primed Chinese speakers to take full advantage of software when it came along—to the point where it’s now faster to input Chinese than English.
When the telegraph came to China in 1871, the Chinese first had to bend their language to Western technology. The solution, devised by a Dutch astronomer and a French customs officer, was to assign a four-digit code to each character, which was then translated into the dots and dashes of Morse. This worked, but it put Chinese at a disadvantage. Numbers in Morse code contain five dots or dashes and letters only one to three, which made Chinese telegrams both more expensive and less efficient. By some accounts, when former Chinese premier Zhou Enlai was on the road, sending telegrams was his biggest expense.
The Chinese typewriter was a cumbersome object, too. It had a tray bed of more than 2,000 common characters. A typist selected characters by maneuvering a chassis on top of the tray bed, pushing a lever that struck the chosen character against the page. If you wanted to type an uncommon character, you had to go hunting for it among thousands in a secondary tray bed.
At the same time, dozens of inventors tried their hand on better ways to send telegrams or build typewriters. To do so, they had to come up with new ways of indexing Chinese characters, breaking them into subunits. Take, for example, the “four corner method,” which notes the shape in each corner. Ten different shapes are assigned a number 0 through 9; going around the corners in a clockwise direction gives you a four-digit code to send telegrams or to organize characters in a typewriter. If you don’t write Chinese, this might not seem particularly profound. But in fact, it is a complete rethinking of the Chinese character.
It would be like, if instead of spelling an English word letter by letter, you represent it by noting the number of letters that are ascenders (d b l h), descenders (p y g j), or neither. The idea of choosing characters by inputting an abstract code was part of Chinese technology from the start.