Ever wonder about Chinese typewriters? I have.
The Chinese writing system is pictographic. Written characters represent entire words, not just phonemes as in our Latin alphabet. There are currently more than 100,000 of these characters. The advantage of this is that people who speak entirely different languages can understand what each other write if both are familiar with Chinese writing.
One disadvantage is that mechanical reproduction of this language isn't exactly straightforward. If a Chinese-language typewriter (or computer keyboard) were made on the same principle as an English-language one, it would be about the size of a truck and no one would be able to find anything on it.
In the forties, a Chinese author named Lin Yutang had a remedy. He invented a typewriter where a relatively small number of keys could be used to select from a much larger number of characters. The invention actually took some time to take off, but it was absolutely crucial in spreading the language.
1 comment:
That was a very fascinating story. Every so often the question of what kind of keyboards the Chinese use has come up but I've never investigated as it seemed impossible. As you mentioned, codifying a character based language that has more than 100,000 characters would require a machine that looks like a truck, or as Mullaney's book tells us, machines that were figments of popular imagination, such as sensational accounts of twelve-foot keyboards with 5,000 keys.
I read the article from Stanford several times without really understanding how the machine worked, although I did understand a little more when Jer pointed out the numbers at the bottom of the keyboard were a significant hint. Since I usually need visual examples of complex systems I did find a video of the inside of the MingKwai which helped a lot. It's still incredibly complicated it was good to be able to see the insides of this old typewriter. Amazing artifact.
https://youtu.be/WVPFU3TK9fU?si=dbn-5-q84mJY8jSo
I understand that although Han Chinese, or any Chinese language, is difficult it's not the only one.. Japanese, Arabic and others are very different from English. I wondered what their keyboards would look like.
Computer Keyboards Around the World:
https://keyboardplaying.org/blog/2022/04/computer-keyboards-around-world/
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