Name: The Chinese typewriter
ISBN: 9780262536103

The Chinese typewriter

"Chinese writing is character based, the one major world script that is neither alphabetic nor syllabic. Through the years, the Chinese written language encountered presumed alphabetic universalism in the form of Morse Code, Braille, stenography, Linotype, punch cards, word processing, and other systems developed with the Latin alphabet in mind. This book is about those encounters -- in particular thousands of Chinese characters versus the typewriter and its QWERTY keyboard. Thomas Mullaney describes a fascinating series of experiments, prototypes, failures, and successes in the century-long quest for a workable Chinese typewriter. The earliest Chinese typewriters, Mullaney tells us, were figments of popular imagination, sensational accounts of twelve-foot keyboards with 5,000 keys. One of the first Chinese typewriters actually constructed was invented by a Christian missionary, who organized characters by common usage (but promoted the less-common characters for "Jesus" to the common usage level). Later came typewriters manufactured for use in Chinese offices, and typewriting schools that turned out trained "typewriter girls" and "typewriter boys." Still later was the "Double Pigeon" typewriter produced by the Shanghai Calculator and Typewriter Factory, the typewriter of choice under Mao.

What Hacker News says

ssnistfajenSep 2022

Glaring paywall in the article obscuring the actual statement/conclusion aside, I recommend reading "The Chinese Typewriter : A History" by Thomas S. Mullaney (ISBN 9780262536103). The book covers a lot about Chinese language(s) adaptation to an Information Age crisis brought by technologies based on primarily Western/Latin alphabets, and how some of these adaptations paved the way for Chinese language's integration into the information technology world of today.

I recommend approaching these topics without predetermined judgement on whether a language is inherently superior or inferior. Such biases are the last things we need in today's world full of division and tribalism.

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UncleMeatSep 2022

Tom Mullaney, as mentioned in my post, is arguably the global expert on the chinese typewriter and has done a lot of work on chinese printed and digital language technology. His books would be the starting point.

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sohkamyungJul 2021

See also the book, "The Chinese Typewriter: A History" By Thomas S. Mullaney [1] for more on the history of Japanese and Chinese typewriters.

[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/chinese-typewriter

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nathillardAug 2020

I hadn't heard of this, but something similar has been attested with Thai:

"Two of the consonants, ฃ (kho khuat) and ฅ (kho khon), are no longer used in written Thai, but still appear on many keyboards and in character sets. When the first Thai typewriter was developed by Edwin Hunter McFarland in 1892, there was simply no space for all characters, thus two had to be left out." (source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_script , pointing to https://web.archive.org/web/20101219214315/http://www.t-h-a-... )

I originally heard about this in this fantastic book, which I read earlier this year: https://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Typewriter-Thomas-S-Mullaney-... . Its focus is mostly the Chinese keyboard, and it does a great job detailing this, but there's a section about Edwin Mcfarland and his theories: https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/GuV1DwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gb...

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sohkamyungJul 2020

I enjoyed "The Chinese Typewriter: A History" by Thomas S. Mullaney [1]. An interesting look into the history and technology used to create typewriters that can produce almost all the Chinese (and later, Japanese) characters in various ways.

[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/chinese-typewriter

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TMWNNJul 2020

For more on the topic of tyewriters in non-alphabetic languages, I recommend The Chinese Typewriter (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/chinese-typewriter) from MIT Press.

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