
The Chinese Typewriter: A History - forapurpose
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n05/jamie-fisher/the-left-handed-kid
======
Jun8
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-di...](https://www.quora.com/Why-does-China-have-no-alphabet-Why-
did-China-never-invent-an-alphabet). 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/chine...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/chinese-
computers/504851/)

~~~
yeehong85
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.

~~~
peterburkimsher
I spent the last 4 years in Taiwan, although I also lived in China for 5
months before that.

Traditional characters are easier to read, in my opinion. There's more
radicals to guess the meaning. I can also use my program
[https://pingtype.github.io](https://pingtype.github.io) to decompose the
character if I write it wrong.

Simplifying the number of strokes made it faster to write. This helped
literacy because the education system is built on copying characters by rote -
a terrible method, in my opinion. I prefer reading in parallel, with the
pinyin and literal translations below (also in Pingtype).

What Chinese really needs, and doesn't contradict the history, is spaces
between words.
Imaginehavingtoreadenglishwithoutanypunctuationandyoullsurelyrecognisethatitsabarriertolearning.

~~~
azurezyq
For your last point, you can probably check with your Chinese friend and I'm
pretty sure they don't buy the idea.

Basically our brain already has built-in text segmentation
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_segmentation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_segmentation)).
I tried to think how I actually do that. It's more like prefix matching over a
moderate large dict. It's not complicated and worked pretty well for Chinese.
For your particular example, maybe the difference lies in word lengths. Most
Chinese words are under 2~3 characters, makes prefix matching way more
efficient.

------
jkabrg
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
TFA says the same thing about predictive text.

~~~
jkabrg
"TFA" is one paragraph long. BTW your usage of "TFA" can come across as rude.

~~~
forapurpose
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._

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

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

