

List of Chinese Inventions - DaniFong
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_inventions

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jaytee_clone
I was raised in China, so these inventions (the major ones) were as ingrained
as the founding fathers for Americans.

Much of the Chinese pride was rooted in such golden eras of the Chinese
history. Sadly, in the modern days, this pride has become a nationalistic tool
and is used to brainwash people into believing that the Chinese way has been
and will always be superior to the other countries', when in fact there is so
much the culture can learn from the rest of the world. (I suppose you can say
that about any country.)

Things are changing however, hopefully for the better.

~~~
Prrometheus
That is interesting because in practice it looks like China is borrowing a lot
of the best ideas from the rest of the world and mixing it with its society.

~~~
qaexl
I've been recently studying more ancient Chinese history and the game of Weiqi
(Go, as it is known in the US). Weiqi is a good way to understand the
sociopolitical strategies of China. In Weiqi, it is often easier to surround
and assimilate (embrace and extend) than it is to invade and conquer. If there
is a grand strategy of the current political heads of China, it is to make
China the pivot point of the world. America goes forth and spread democracy; I
think the Chinese prefers to get other countries to orbits around them, the
way the earth orbits inside the sun's gravity well.

An observation of the inventiveness of the (Han) Chinese I think is best
written by Neal Stephenson in his essay published in Wired Magazine in 1994:
<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.02/mao.bell.html>

"This article is the result of a two-week trip to Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and
Shanghai during September '93, during which I tried to get some sense of how
the Chinese perceived the influence of technology - particularly digital
technology - on their culture.

The answer is that this issue hasn't occurred to the Chinese yet, and probably
never will, because it basically stems from a Western, post-Enlightenment
perspective. Going to China and asking people about the Hacker Ethic is like
going to Peoria and talking to the folks down at Ned's Feed & Grain about
Taoism. The hacking part comes to them easily enough - China is, in a sense, a
nation of analog hackers quickly entering the digital realm. But I didn't see
any urge to draw profound, cosmic conclusions from the act of messing around
with technology. "

------
tokenadult
William Boltz has a very interesting book

<https://www.eisenbrauns.com/ECOM/_2JN00T3AO.HTM>

about an invention that China didn't adopt when it could have (as shown by
recently uncovered archeological evidence): a written system based on the
consistent sound-indicating principle relatively easy for the masses to learn.
That might have made for a radical change in Chinese history, coupled with the
subsequent inventions of paper and of movable-type printing.

See

[http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_go2081/is_/ai_n2867916...](http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_go2081/is_/ai_n28679162)

for an overview of Boltz's argument.

~~~
markessien
Who is to say the change would have been for the better? Korea switched
systems, since then, there was no major advantage of Korea over China. And the
2nd largest economy in the world - Japan - still uses such a system.

I don't think that writing with an alphabet vs writing with characters makes
that big a difference. Characters are relatively easy to learn for a child.

(I assume here that with sound-indicating principle, you mean a western like
system)

~~~
tokenadult
"Characters are relatively easy to learn for a child."

Which elementary reading textbooks have you been looking at from what
countries and what periods of history?

To reply to your assumption, by "sound-indicating system" I was referring to
something like the Japanese kana syllabaries. They are inscriptions that have
been found through rather recent archeological work in China from around the
time of the founding of the Han Dynasty in which Chinese characters are used
strictly for sound value, in disregard of their etymological meaning. It is,
of course, possible to write any language strictly by writing out sounds--just
as people are able to talk on the telephone, without clues from writing in the
air or gestures.

~~~
markessien
I don't understand what you're trying to say. Can you repost your comment, but
in a way that a person who is not a language expert would understand?

For example, what do you mean by

"used strictly for sound value" "etymological meaning"

I've been looking at chinese characters, and the simplified characters are
pretty easy to learn. The old chinese characters are somewhat more
complicated, but the difference in learning to read such a text is minimal -
they are more difficult to write, but reading is not more difficult.

~~~
tokenadult
My first attempt to post this expired. Let's see if this works. I'm attempting
to reply to your follow-up question.

It's conventional for popular descriptions of Chinese characters to describe
them as being symbols of the MEANING of the character, with no particular
relationship to how the word being written is pronounced. That's why many
people informally call Chinese characters "ideograms." Let's see if I can
resort to Unicode here and put some Chinese characters into my reply.

Plainly, the characters

一 (one)

二 (two)

and

三 (three)

are visual representations of tally marks and can be taken to be ideographic
characters. The relationship of these characters to the underlying
pronunciations of the WORDS (which are yī, èr, and sān in standard Mandarin)
is entirely arbitrary.

But most Chinese characters, since the earliest stage of what can properly be
called writing in Chinese, have been mostly sound-indicating. The pattern of
historical development is that the language spoken at that time had a lot of
words, which in the case of early Chinese were mostly although not quite
entirely words consisting of one-syllable meaningful parts (morphemes), some
of which were readily pictureable (e.g., horse, fish, mountain, woman, tree)
but many of which were not. Ancient scribes would find a sound-alike word, or
a close-enough-for-government-work similar sounding word, to represent
nonpictureable words, and mark the distinguishable usage of that written
character with "radicals" that broadly indicated what semantic category the
sound-alike word belonged to, for ease of reading.

Here is a list of Chinese characters that all have the pronunciation /fang/
(in various tones) in Mandarin:

方 放 房 訪 防 芳 仿 妨 紡 坊 肪 枋 倣 舫

I think your eye can spot the common visual element in all those characters.
The "proper" way to use each of the characters is to associate it with a
particular word (really, morpheme) that has a particular meaning. But one
could, in principle, use any of those characters to write any syllable /fang/
that appears anywhere in the Chinese language, and the reader reading aloud
would still know from context which morpheme pronounced /fang/ was intended by
the writer. Boltz points out that there is actual archeological evidence that
Chinese writers more than 2,000 years ago were moving in the direction of
using Chinese characters solely for sound value in writing (as shown by their
using the "wrong" sound-alike characters in many inscriptions) and they could
have gone all the way to what Japanese did in developing systems of syllabary
characters that can exhaustively write all sounds in the spoken language with
no more written characters than the language has syllables.

P.S. I asked about textbooks above, because no Chinese society had mass
literacy until elementary pupils in Chinese-speaking countries were taught to
read first by using sound-indicating writings systems (alphabets in all actual
cases) as a first step in teaching literacy. In Taiwan, as before in
Nationalist China, the zhuyin fuhao (BO PO MO FO) alphabet, with written
alphabetic characters based on the shapes of parts of traditional Chinese
characters, has long been used for this purpose, and in general any pupil who
has completed first grade can write anything that anyone can speak in that
system. The P.R.C. since the 1950s has used the elegant Hanyu pinyin Roman
alphabetic characters for the same purpose.

P.P.S. An interesting and rather astounding link

[http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200501/03/eng20050103_1695...](http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200501/03/eng20050103_169500.html)

shows that for a long time Western writers have been overestimating the number
of inhabitants of China who are actually conversant in Mandarin. The lower
than expected percentage of Chinese persons who can understand one another in
Mandarin illustrates how little provision of primary education, broadcasting,
or telephony has reached the hinterlands of China. The comparable percentage
in Taiwan, which a generation ago had a much lower percentage of families with
any family heritage of speaking Mandarin, is much higher, a sign of Taiwan's
greater success in providing education and mass communications to all
inhabitants.

Please ask follow-up questions as needed.

~~~
qaexl
"... shows that for a long time Western writers have been overestimating the
number of inhabitants of China who are actually conversant in Mandarin. The
lower than expected percentage of Chinese persons who can understand one
another in Mandarin illustrates how little provision of primary education,
broadcasting, or telephony has reached the hinterlands of China. The
comparable percentage in Taiwan, which a generation ago had a much lower
percentage of families with any family heritage of speaking Mandarin, is much
higher, a sign of Taiwan's greater success in providing education and mass
communications to all inhabitants."

I think the more interesting question is how the Chinese were able to hold
together a culture as diverse as having many separate, unintelligable
dialects, yet still live with the popular myth that they "speak Chinese".

Personally, having these ideograms isn't a bad thing. It makes it harder for
me to type in Chinese. However, the way the language is setup has allowed me
to think along different lines I would not have had, if I only knew English.

A different line of thought: our decendents may look back and say that the
Internet had changed things profoundly, but not for the reasons we think of it
now. The legacy may well end up being the ubiquitous use of the Unicode
standard.

------
mace
Another good list <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_inventions>:

    
    
      Decimal Number System
      Binary Numbers
      Panini-Backus Form (similarities to BNF)
      Chess

------
DaniFong
It's often said that the Chinese were on the leading edge of scientific
advantage throughout much of history, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading this
extensive list.

------
villageidiot
Good list.

Another good one - Ancient Roman Technology:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Roman_technology>

