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This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison, and we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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We have a show for you today about a topic I knew virtually nothing about until a week or so ago,
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Namely the invention of the Chinese typewriter, and all that this entailed in terms of challenges
faced and challenges overcome.
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I have with me in the studio someone with eminently entitled opinions on that topic,
someone who knows as much about it as anyone around since he's the author of a forthcoming
multi-volume study that examines China's development of a modern, non-alphabetic information
infrastructure that includes telegraphe, typewriting, word processing, and computing.
The first of the two volumes is called the Chinese typewriter, a global history of the information age,
part one, which will be coming out with MIT Press in 2017.
The second volume to follow is called the Chinese computer, a global history of the information age,
part two. My guest is Tom Mulaney, an associate professor of history here at Stanford,
and what better place for a global historian of the information age than Stanford University,
the home of KZSU, and make no mistake about it. Stanford is first and foremost the home of KZSU,
from which this radio program entitled opinions takes to the air and reaches all four corners of
the globe despite the somewhat wimpy signal of the station, which struggles to reach the East Bay
on good days. For me, there's a certain relief in knowing very little about the topic under
discussion. It means I get to sit back and listen to a story like one of those mariners in an
Eastern seaport who, after a fine dinner, sits back and listens to Captain Marlow, tell the story of
Lord Jim. Hang exertion, one of them says, lighting is piped, let that Marlow talk. That's what I
intend to do today. Hang exertion, let Mulaney talk. Tom Mulaney, welcome to entitled opinions.
It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. So you and I have an undergraduate student in
common, Truman Chen, who is a junior this year, your Truman's advisor, and I had him in one of my
classes when he was a freshman. We did an independent study subsequently. And Truman who's sitting
here next to me joined the production team of entitled opinions this year and had his baptism by
fire when he joined me in a conversation about Randolph-Borne on the first show of the season this
past fall. And I bring him up because he's the one who first suggested that I do a show with you
about the invention of the Chinese typewriter. And my first reaction was why on earth would I want to do a
show about that. But as he began describing your project, I got quite intrigued and said great,
let's see if we can get him on and here you are. So the invention of the Chinese typewriter,
where does this story begin? What were some of the enormous obstacles that had to be overcome,
and how were they overcome? Well, I want to begin by telling you a little bit about this young man,
Truman Chen, while we're on the subject, to give you a sense of this young man, who I consider to be
the most brilliant undergrad that I've had the pleasure working with. I was most recently in a
course with Truman, where he was alongside one other very brilliant undergrad, and then
six, seven PhD students and masters students. And we were working through phenomenally complex
works on the history of 20th century China. And somewhere along the way, we started to realize that
collectively there were lots of texts and great books out there that we were bumping into, that
not everyone in the room had engaged with, that we were using the titles of and the key concepts
of but not having read it. So the idea came about having a Monday evening reading group of the books you
should read before you leave these walls. And we had it for the first winter, and this is this is
Hegel, this is Franz Fanon, this is a number of other texts. And as often happens, things got
busy, we had to postpone every now and then. And then unfortunately in this quarter we were a
little bit on hiatus. And I want to say that Truman has come to my door when it's come to my
office door at least three times and knocked and said, what's the status of that reading group?
But can you remind me, so when are we going to jump into Marx again, why don't we? So that is the
nature of Truman's channel. Anyway, so the story of the Chinese typewriter and the story of the
information crisis in modern China is not a story that goes back to the beginnings of time.
That's the first thing that it's important to emphasize. The idea that the Chinese language and
in particular the Chinese writing system has something wrong with it is in historical terms a very
recent phenomenon. And we need to remember that if we go back to somewhere in the order of the year
1500, if we go back to the Ming dynasty, but I choose that arbitrarily, we find ourselves in one of
the centers of the world economy, one of the engines of the world economy. We find ourselves in a
place of phenomenal cultural literary artistic production. We find ourselves in a polity that is
engaged in a military conflict and conquest with non Chinese peoples in bordering regions.
We find the good and bad of this and we find this entire story being carried out in the Chinese
language and in Chinese writing with phenomenally robust bureaucracy and record keeping and so forth.
This was the pinnacle of modern, let's say, Chinese information technology. So how do we get from there
to fast forward to the year 1900 and suddenly in the US press the American media,
you begin to see cartoons coming out that are caricaturizing and drawing these grotesque portraits
of Chinese typewriters or some sort of imagined object that the artist or cartoonist is clearly
having a great deal of fun with imagining this spectacularly large machine with thousands of buttons
how absurd, how unmodern this language is in this day and age and which we could extend that to the
question of Chinese telegraphy Chinese computing and you hear this a great deal, how do we get from a time
when the Chinese language is doing more than okay? It's not just doing okay, it's at the root
of a phenomenally powerful civilization and culture and then suddenly it becomes a crisis or problem.
And so one thing that I found in my research is that you actually have to think about the history of
the crisis itself and not just take it as a natural given or a natural starting point.
But in terms of when the crisis sets in, the crisis sets in in the 19th century,
arguably if you wanted to choose a good starting point, a meaningful starting point,
it would be with the advent and popularization of arguably the most game-changing technology of the
modern age and this is telegraphy. Telegraphy is a technology that those who lived through it,
those who lived in a time before and during and after the full fermentation and popularization of
telegraphy would have lived through something that we have not lived through in the modern age.
The internet comes close but as part of this you have a technology that was originally invented
with the alphabet in mind and particularly the English language and its use of the Latin alphabet.
In the very beginning of telegraphy and the beginning of Morse code that is the linguistic
system that dictates what you can send over these wires, they were actually governing
international governing bodies that decided what could and could not legally be sent across wires.
In the beginning it was A through Z and numbers. It was limited such that not only by the code but
also by the governing bodies that said even for the French uxon tegu that cannot be sent over wire.
And in fact French diplomats and French states been going to speak at this international body had
the petition and fight for the inclusion of their symbols from their own languages. So think about this.
If you have major Western European powers including France and later with Russia with the
Cyrillic alphabet barely moving the needle on this information regime of the mid 18th and
second half of the, I'm sorry mid 19th and second half of the 19th century story. Imagine how
much more inertia is met when suddenly this global and this globalizing information regime
encounters the one major world language that has no alphabet to speak of and that is Chinese.
And consistently from that point on the story that I chart out in the research is one in which
maybe there is one individual or two individuals who in the quiet of their own mind in this euro
American model thinks to themselves you know maybe the problem is us. Maybe the problem is that
actually our system isn't universal that it does exclude a quarter of humanity. But for either
inertia purposes or path dependency however you want to put it the vast majority of people begin to
turn their venom or turn their attention against the Chinese language saying in essence the Chinese
language is at fault for its own technological poverty from that point on and on the Chinese side
and I would love to hear what you think about this on the Chinese side there is a series of
reformers there are series of linguists of intellectuals of everyday practitioners who are in the
throws of modernization and all of the questions that it emerges is that if China is to become a member of
the family of modern nations what are we going to do about this language question what are we going
to do about telegrathy and then later what are we going to do about the typewriter this object
that's changing the nature of business and bureaucracy what are we going to do about word processing
what are we going to do about computing dot matrix printing optical character recognition and the
list goes on and on all of these technologies that by accident of history happened to be developed in regions
that are that are alphabetical start there. So Tom maybe you can tell our listeners a little bit
about the Chinese language absolutely because it is as you said it's the only language without
an alphabet as such and therefore it has thousands upon thousands of characters what is a character
I mean how does the Chinese language work in in its script absolutely so Chinese is is not the only
language on earth that is non-alphabetic but it is certainly unparalleled in its size and scope that's
why I want to emphasize that it is the only major world sizable world language written spoken not
only in mainland China Taiwan but of course the Chinese diaspora southeast Asia and elsewhere and it
has no alphabet to speak of so Chinese writing are composed of characters Chinese characters and if we go
back far enough in time to the the sort of the Neolithic period and deep recesses of human history
and human civilization we will arrive in the origins of the Chinese writing system at what many
believed to be how Chinese works now which is not true but in as pictographs as actual symbolic
representations of reality and so a circle with a dot in it was an original representation of the
Sun for example or a drawing of an of a mountain was a mountain but if we that's a time when
there were only a small number in the thousands of characters in the entirety of the known
script of Chinese by now we are talking about a language that contains by there are many different
counts for this but certainly more than 70,000 characters you cannot through pictographic means
have 70,000 representations of reality and so you have to ask yourself how do we get from this
early period to now and it's a fascinating history the Chinese language has used at the Chinese
civilization has used any number of linguistic techniques to take a fundamentally an originally
pictographic system and stretch it and and and expand it such that it can handle the full
the full quantity a quantity of of human expression and imagination and yet never goes the path
of of of alphabets of A through Z and it's it's a it's a it's a tremendously beautiful aesthetically
beautiful language in many ways because of this in the writing in the writing itself in the
writing itself can can I ask about the quantity because I was reading I don't know I went to
your exhibition that the exhibition that you were largely in charge of installing here at the East
Asian library on campus and here at Stanford which has a lot of interesting documentation sets Chinese
typewriter and computers and so forth I don't know if it was there or elsewhere that I read that
a well educated Chinese person today will read will use on the order of 4,000 to 6,000
characters in reading it's a newspaper or texts or scholarly so although there are many many many
more characters in that are we dealing with something on the order of you know
say forward it's seven eight thousand characters in everyday written usage in in s there is a
there's a major difference there's a sharp difference between commonly used characters in terms of
quantity and then the long tail of specialized language I mean how often do you hear the word
Zoho Morfic in your average life but that but that that word isn't an English dictionary and so
it was it is actually out of the story of this language crisis this so-called Chinese information
crisis of the 19th 20th and now 21st century in which a whole series of scholars linguists
newspaper men publishers educators set out to try to determine how many okay if we can't fit
all 70,000 characters into onto a typewriter or for that matter in the the education system that would
push young young adults are through into the stages of literacy on a complete scale in term
with the advent of mass education in the turn of the 20th century so there was this there was this
deep concern with the question of how many characters do we really need before we can begin to call
ourselves or another person literate and capacitor a series of very painstaking all by hand analyses of
tens of thousands and millions of characters worth of newspapers of text was undertaken by
actually a great many people and what they arrived at was a very common set of outcomes which is
that if you are in if you are in possession or if a mission let's say a typewriter is in possession
or has on its machine somewhere in the order of two three thousand characters that will account
for let's say eighty eighty five percent of everything that an average typist would type and if you
push that to five thousand characters you're getting closer to ninety plus percent but you will
never ever arrive at a total comprehensive solution for the language but it is true that
someone it's it's often said that someone that goes through higher education will be in command
of it's actually greater than four thousand it's somewhere in the order of eight nine ten thousand
but that the average what you need in order to navigate a newspaper let's say an educated but not
specialist piece of nonfiction writing is somewhere more is closer in the order of five thousand
four thousand six thousand in that in that range so this is another background question sure for we
get to the typewriter it it must be much more difficult to learn how to read and write in Chinese than it is
in
languages that rely on alphabet is that the case the no doubt that the educational pathway is different
the educational pathway is different uh and especially on the front end in preschool kindergarten
early education is that the acquisition of the Chinese language undoubtedly
is is a longer initial path by virtue of the fact that uh by virtue of you know nature is of the
writing system something that's interesting that is often overlooked is in fact in in very early
age when a young uh Chinese student begins the process of learning the Chinese language
that student will also learn the Latin alphabet and the way in particular us a a romanization
or phoneticization system a way of rendering Chinese in roman letters uh called pinion which was
invented by Chinese linguists in the 1950s and they will learn the Latin alphabet at precisely
the same time and it serves at this it doesn't replace Chinese characters but it serves as an aid
to pronunciation to memorization and so forth and so in very fascinating ways China in both mainland
China Taiwan elsewhere has in a certain sense harness the Latin alphabet in service of Chinese language
literacy in ways that are often often overlooked. So you have these thousands of characters and I
saw some of the some of the caricatures uh the cartoonists depicted in the show where you have
an individual climbing over this huge kind of typewriter of face as if you had to have you know
one key for every character but obviously that that was never really part of the uh solution to this
question so can you tell us how to solve um transition from all these characters to a typewriter of sorts
sure sure sure so the first thing that the the so the caricatures that you're describing are are
really something to look at they they emerge in the American press right around 1900 1901 that that time
period and the metaphor or the the caricature takes on a very consistent shape and what you'll see are
you'll see a massive building sized typewriter with sort of squiggly marks that are meant to
represent Chinese characters one on every key at where the typist the the Chinese typist is a person
that is sort of running over the face of this building this massive typewriter in order to
depress the key and have that character uh you know uh show up on the page and this is it's easy to
dismiss a cartoon like that and just imagine that someone's trying to have their fun but there's
actually some really powerful if we want to do a kind of deep reading a kind of Freudian reading of
these of these cartoons they're actually quite revealing because what it shows me is that by the year
1900 a very powerful set of assumptions had reached let's call it unconscious proportions it had
really become part of the way that people thought in an unconscious sense and what that was was they
had that the the typewriter had been around by that point in popular imagination may be for a decade
two decades and in the early histories of the typewriter there were lots of different types of
typewriters in fact there were ones with single keyboards with a shift key that we know and love there
were ones with very large keyboards that had the capitals and the lower case all there there were
there were ones where you could operate entirely with one hand there were typewriters western
typewriters with no keyboard at all where you moved a tray of letters around um there was a very
rich and interesting ecology of what this technology would be but by the time you get to 1900 that
ecology has died out and has become basically a technological monoculture it's as if there's only one
tree left in the forest and what that what those cartoons show me is that when someone in 1900 was
presented with just the words Chinese typewriter that it actually was in a sense impossible for
them to imagine anything but an immense typewriter because in their mind a typewriter was a thing that
definitely has keys and a typewriter is a thing that has keys where there's a one-to-one
relationship between the key the you know something on a key which we think of as a letter and
what you want to appear on the page and so if you put those if you put those two assumptions
together any thinking human being is going to arrive at an idea that the Chinese typewriter must
be this building-sized object so it's actually quite revealing of American technological imagination or
actually lack of imagination around 1900 that this cartoon and this image become so consistent it's
not consistent because the image is circulating that people are seeing it and ingesting it like a
catching a cold they're actually spontaneously thinking of this on their own and it actually goes
to show what's going on now the actual Chinese typewriter looked nothing like these things the actual
Chinese typewriters there were there were one of two approaches that were taken in Chinese
typewriting one becomes industry dominant and one is never successful but it kind of it kind of
continues and stays in the background and then makes a big resurgence in the age of computing
the first we've already talked about a bit which was called the common usage typewriter and that
was a compromise of sorts the compromise was well we cannot we cannot fit all 70,000 plus characters
onto a single machine so we have some decisions to make our typewriter is not going to look
exactly like the western typewriter and we have to come to terms with this one thing that we have
to come to terms with is that a keyboard is not going to work that is not an avenue open to us so
think about this in the nineteen hundreds at precisely the moment when the rest of the world is
actually becoming unconsciously wedded to the idea of a typewriter keyboard engineers and linguists
and those who wanted to think of a Chinese typewriter had to think outside the keyboard box they had
to give up on the keyboard at precisely the moment that the keyboard was gaining this immense cachet
and and so okay we're going to give up the keyboard so what else do we have to give up
well we also have to think about how do we fit our language well and that brings us back to these
thorough going detailed painstaking i would have hated to have done it myself
analyses of the entire Chinese language trying to figure out exactly how often
the average person used every single character in the language and this was something that was
never done on that scale for the English language because it never needed to be done
and so at the very beginning the engineers linguists everyday practitioners who are trying to think
through the Chinese typewriter problem we're confronting challenges that none of their brethren on
the western typewriting world had to let's say had to think about and that has some very impressive
outcomes when you allow the the the real of history to continue and move into the age of computing
all of that hard work which at first doesn't necessarily pay off as beginning to pay off in major
ways in the 21st century and in a certain sense the western typewriting world or computing world
soon is wondering what happened so how does it work how does the standard usage computer work
for for contemporary Chinese computer user well originally what was what so the keyboard is not
going to be an option okay what's a place so for the typewriter the way it works is in essence the
Chinese typewriter becomes a small scale movable type printing press in which you only have one
of every character it's a little bit difficult to describe just odd in an audio format
but in essence if you were sitting in front of a Chinese typewriter what you would be looking at
is a a rectangle with about 2,500 characters 35 by 70 characters in front of you and you could move
that trebid left and right and what you would be moving the trebid to do is to bring one of those
2500 characters to the right position underneath a a basically a small device that grabs the character
out of this tray and strikes it very quickly against the surface of the paper how were they sequenced
they were sequenced according to the standard Chinese dictionary of the time yeah so anyone that
would have sat down that was literate would have known the basic layout of this machine you know
so then you choose your character and choose your character you push down on a lever that then grabs
that character out of the matrix it inks it and then it strikes the surface of the paper in
exactly the same way as the western typewriter so the sound of a Chinese typewriter would have been
entirely different was entirely different than the western typewriter the cadence that we're used to
thinking about with typewriting is the kakakakakakakakting you know that's the that's what we think of is is the
typewriter a Chinese typewriter has a has a momentum and a sound that is more deliberate because every
one of those impressions is not a letter it's a character it is either it is either a word
unto itself or when paired with another character it is a word so it's a different framework the feel
the sound the aesthetics of the Chinese typewriter is not easily just sub-categorized sub-coordinated to the
western typewriter that we that we know and love and now are nostalgic about so I take it that in the
initial phases it was much slower process than the western typewriter it was yeah and there were
other challenges to be facing and that there were some quite ingenious improvements absolutely so
this story plays out the the typewriter makes its way in China into banks into into universities into
law offices it was it it was a machine that would not have been it wasn't owned widespread by
individual owners it was more you would want to think of it as like a a fax machine in the 80s or a
Xerox machine this was something that an office had they might have more than one but this was an
office equipment not something that people would have at their homes and so fast forward this
story in the 1920s and 30s and 40s typists are operating at a clip of 20 to 30 characters per minute
if they're at a at a good pace when we move into the post Chinese communist revolution era the
communist revolution of 1949 into the early period of of the Chinese communist regime in the Maoist
era of the 1950s onward something happens and what happens is is that individual typists of their
own accord sort of collectively arrive at a very similar conclusion and then they begin to share
this conclusion with each other well if in my daily life i find myself rather frequently typing the
same kinds of sentences out and this was the era of mass mobilization and propaganda campaigns
during the Korean war something that everyone would have had as part of their life would be
resist America support Korea these these phrases or or chairman Mao or Mao Zedong or whatever
it might be socialism well if i find myself typing out these phrases over and over again why would i
why would i want my the characters on my machine to be organized according to the dictionary format
why not reorganize the characters on my tray bed so that the characters that tended to go
together in everyday speech were as close as possible and what this turns into is in the
long run is a threefold increase in the speed of the machine without any changes to the actual
physical object of the machine no electrification necessary no other major innovations it was
simply by rearranging the characters on the machine itself in which you had this massive increase
this is the earliest application that thus far is known of what later will become predictive
text or natural language arrangement of languages and it has a profound effect even in this
mechanical typewriting age and then very importantly is that beginning immediately in the 60s
well late 50s 60s and 70s with the advent of Chinese computing predictive text becomes a core part
of Chinese computing from day one of the computing industry in china
whereas it will take another half century almost for predictive text become a daily
feature of of computing in the western world because that become
in the western world predictive text becomes more necessary with the smaller screens be it the
laptop or especially the smartphone screens i mean the mobile screens and smaller screens are
certainly a driving force in the western world for experimenting with it because of course how do we
how do we allow a person to input text on a small screen with a smaller keyboard we want to
offer a kind of assistance to the user and augmentation so it's otherwise it would be very
laborious to type on this small surface out entire sentences but really i think that what we
think of as predictive text is is reaches a kind of highly sophisticated level in the western world
with the google search bar suggestions so that as you're typing in something it is using
what it knows about searches that have been done in the recent some amount of time
in some amount of space to say we think this is what you're looking for is this what you're
looking for and you can select it now this was this is fascinating in the world of search but what we
have to remember is that in the context of chinese computing this process of the computer attempting
to guess and give you suggestions as to what you might want now and now and now doesn't just
happen in the google search bar or the bidoo search bar it happens when you're typing in
microsoft word it happens while you're writing an email it happens when you're writing a text
file it happens it is a built in part of the process of computing there is no such thing as chinese
computing where the uh... the computer is not giving you suggestions as to what you want initially
in the seventy sixty seventies eighties those suggestions were pretty simple maybe you want this
character maybe you want this other character but over the course of the nineties the rise of
the declining cost of of memory the increased speed of processors cloud technology and so forth
now you can get to the point where you could type in abbreviated input a sort of shorthand
version and i've seen programs that that that suggests to their user an entire tongue dynasty
poem saying based on my based on what you have entered thus far uh... and it is high probability that
what you want to type is the following stands up of a poem um... this is phenomenal but i don't
understand how that uh... has its source in the mechanical short sure it has its source in the
mechanical typewriter that you know so many things in the history of technology uh... are ones in
which in fact the technology kets catches up with the concept or the it actually the the actual
invention or is actually has happened in the realm of uh... of the mind of of of a cultural
acceptance of a certain form of experimentation and then in a certain sense technology
catches up until to a moment where this this concept this this this way of acting this way of
being can explode on to the scene in a big way so uh... the reason why it has its origins in
the mechanical world are twofold the first one is very simple is that in the late fifties and
early sixties the actual engineers linguists computer scientists well really let's say electrical
engineers and so forth who are thinking about building machines are using this these these
innovations from the canical chinese typewriting as inspiration and started so there's a gene
ecological uh... there's a red thread uh... there's a chain of custody let's say from the mechanical to
the digital uh... because they're looking at these arrangements and saying this is phenomenally
useful and once we move out of the mechanical into the digital realm we can do this
in orders of magnitude more complexity in fact uh... so one is one is genealogical but the other
is cultural so uh... the these predictive text chinese typewriters were not invented by the president
of the company and said everyone here by should use this it actually was in to use parlance of
science technology society was a user led innovation it was it was something that in fact chinese
elites in the chinese communist party discuss amongst themselves and believe that the average
chinese person would not be intellectually sophisticated enough to rearrange their
typewriters in this way and in a certain sense type is said well darn it we're going to
go ahead and do it anyway and so what what what what this means is that when you get to the age of
computing and when you put this kind of functionality this kind of possibility in front of
a chinese user that there already is multiple generations of familiarity and openness
to using this very powerful technology there are lots and lots of things you can do with the
english language if you wanted to um... in ways that are totally a departure from the way we
use the standard karate keyboard but who are the individuals who use those exceptionally
weird and interesting ways they are they are regular attendees at makers fair they are early
adopters they go to kamakan they're they they are kind of at the fringe of the technological
world and while they're interesting they are not mainstream users mainstream chinese computer users
are totally on board and and and open and familiar with these kinds of predictive text things and that
then places uh... companies in china in in a position of saying okay let's push this technology
forward because we have a highly receptive mainstream not just early adopter audience and that
has a huge effect on on on contemporary computing so in a certain sense it it sounds like although it
it began at a disadvantage with the invention of the typewriter that now in the age of computer
technology that that there at the cutting edge of the predictive texting for sure and maybe even
in other ways as well absolutely i i think that it's an accident of history
my people ask me often what i think my philosophy of history is and it's uh it's the old man and the
horse adage which is the story of the old man and this old man living in the rural areas
has a horse the horse runs away his neighbors say to him how terrible that is he says well let's
see and then the horse comes back having brought with uh him a wild horse which can be domesticated
and everyone says this is wonderful you now you have two horses and he says well let's see his son
gets on this wild horse is thrown off breaks his leg or says that's terrible let's see
oh local warlord comes to conscript men for the army but because the son has a broken leg cannot
be conscripted they say that's wonderful he says let's see so this this i mean the the idea of
of advantage and disadvantage is this constantly constantly inverting constantly spilling out
process and history that uh that is unpredictable but i think that at least for taking a cross-section
of time the here and now absolutely i would be betting on chinese language uh innovations people
thinking in chinese language spaces about the future of computing to a far greater extent
than i would expect to hear anything of interest coming from the latin alphabetic world and i
actually think that even for innovators in silicon valley who don't care let's say about chinese
applications or the chinese market or doing anything literally with the chinese language nevertheless
have a great deal of inspiration and uh to be derived and a lot of assumption shattering
moments to be experienced if they even are aware of what's happening in not only the chinese market
korean arabic i mean the the non-latan world this is not just a chinese story uh but that's where
i would be if i were a tech investor that's where i would be looking for the future
so let's uh jump from predictive text now to predictive let's say opinions let let me ask you
would do you think it's possible that in the very near future the chinese might decide to
adopt enough of that no i don't think so and give up the character base script of it no i don't think so
because i think that i think that we will hear it again i i have no doubt if you ask me to bet
five dollars on one horse or another i would bet on the horse that says we will hear that we will
be i guarantee that somewhere over the next twenty years there will be a headline one of these days
some high-ranking official somewhere in the people's republic of chinese advocating the abolition
of characters that's a that's a that's a mainstay which shows up uh periodically heartfelt but
it shows up periodically well it doesn't have to be abolition it could be adjacent to the adoption
of an alphabetically based uh form of writing well it's possible that it could coexist but the
the basic fact of the matter is that it actually now does exist so uh since you know going back to
that cartoon from the year nineteen hundred the expectation at that time was the only way china
will ever join the family of modern nations on this in and overcome its language problem
will be the alphabetization of china okay the alphabet will have to conquer china and
accidentally i mean i don't think it was a plan i don't think it was it certainly was a conspiracy
it actually i'm not even sure if if everyone has sort of taken note of this even in china even in
the silicon valleys of china is it the alphabet didn't conquer chinese china if anything
conquered the alphabet china absorbed and his harness the latin alphabet uh and now it is something
that is totally a part of everyday life and is used every day in computing you sit down at a
computer in china it is a quarty keyboard but you're using a through z not to produce a through z
but to produce chinese characters and so in a certain sense the the alphabet has did end up
playing a major role in the modernization of the chinese language but it wasn't anything like what
people were predicting in the year nineteen hundred and um you know if and when we hear that high
ranking uh figure in the p_r_c_ advocate that i guarantee you that that will be the most
blind leader because they actually won't realize what they're already in possession of
that person will be living in the nineteen seventies will be living in the nineteen thirties will
be living in nineteen hundred and in fact it'll be very interesting to see new generations of chinese
leaders who actually take notice of of what has taken shape in the twenty-first century which is
something we haven't seen in the modern period uh it's something what's happening in the realm of
language and technology in china is not something we see anywhere else in the world um it's sort
of two script it's sort of bilingual it's sort of code switching uh but it's not what we you know it's
not something that we are familiar with there that we can easily categorize uh and i'll just make
one more point you and i i think there are people out there that um that are in a sense like my
hypothetical leader uh there are people that on a yearly basis go to the international conferences
that govern uh for example you are else and web addresses and make very strong petitions
for the ability to have chinese character web addresses as if this is a major victory
that's a total that's a total uh uh uh uh primrose path because it's it is a belief that some victory
has been won it's a belief that some sort of equality has been enforced in the digital realm
but the basic fact of the matter is you talk to anyone in cs or engineering and all of those
chinese character web addresses behind the scenes as the computer is doing it's thing all resolve
back down to alphabets and alphanumeric systems no equality has been achieved in fact um it will
be interesting to see a new leadership within china that actually realizes that they're living in a new
age that no one has sort of given a name to or or taken full possession of that's what i think
would be interesting i gather that over the centuries and millennia the design of chinese characters
has changed quite a bit and i think even mow tried to simplify or uh streamline you know the traditional
chinese characters is computer technology a new chapter in this uh evolution and modification of
the way chinese characters are represented absolutely it is this is a very important question i'm
really glad that you raised it is the the the natural state of i guess any language but certainly
that we're speaking about the chinese language is is a state of change and what's happening now
is is a permutation of that so if you think about if we were to put ourselves in the situation
of carving the three of us carving chinese characters on the plaster of a tortoise or of a
bone with a particular instrument versus carving it with a particular instrument on the surface of
bronze versus using a brush and paper versus the the the the instruments use the the materials used
they leave their imprint they shape what is produced and now that we're entering into a digital
realm it is absolutely reshaping uh the nature of the character um in in really fascinating ways
that i don't think that we've gotten our heads around completely and i know that i'm struggling to get
my head around but is it impoverishing the the aesthetic beauty of the chinese characters i don't
think so i don't i thought it was when i looked at the the the the the simplification of introduced
by mau and and then the traditional i think the traditional is more complex to be sure but
seemed more beautiful to me well absolutely i mean this is i mean it's it i think it's
i think that's a case that can be made i mean i and i think that in in many cases it's true and
then of course there's this beauty is in the eye of the beholder there there are many arguments at
stake in the so called traditional versus simplified debate a lot of it has to do with
the taiwan straits you know cross straits relation uh the relationship between taiwan which
uh which did not simplify characters in the same way as the mainland versus mainland uh there's
there there are also very strange and interesting ideas of what what simple i'm using air quotes
here you can't see what simple means in the con in the context of simplification any
i don't know cognitive scientist will tell you that it is not necessarily simpler to recognize
uh a chinese character that has fewer strokes in it than more strokes on it in fact probably the
mind enjoys having that extra data because what the mind is doing and what we know the reason that
a the letter a is the letter a is not because it's the letter a it's because it's not the letter
b c d e f and that you know so the mind is a differentiator and so having more strokes from the
perspective of being able to read it or or or understand it could actually be simpler what
mal and the simplifiers had in mind and he was you know he was in a long line of simplifiers he
was just the one whose regime managed to push it through the the the the the nationalist regime
under chiang kaichek wanted to do this as well but but couldn't push it through was a kind of
where simplicity was about the simplicity of writing something by hand that's really what was at
stake in simplicity i think is the production of it and there's an interesting story which may
be apocryphal um was that uh the head of the committee long after he retired from the committee
that oversaw the simplification campaign had an encounter with uh i think it was in the 70s
is the story goes with the developer of a word processor a chinese word processor uh in taiwan
and apparently in this conversation after seeing this device for which traditional characters
simplified characters didn't mean anything in the same way that you could sit at your computer and
you can switch just like a button between traditional and simplified and apparently then this
conversation uh which again you want to want to make sure uh you know don't cite this in your book
but said look to this machine and said if we had this there would have been no need to simplify
because the because the meaning changed the number of strokes in these characters because that
would have been a meaningless thing to do at that time that wouldn't have made it simpler or harder
would have had no effect uh but now in a certain sense we're living in the in the we're living as the
third generation inheritors of this new the this new script which i find very beautiful i i mean i
grew up learning traditional first and therefore i have this sort of emotional attachment to it
but those that say that try to say simplified is x y z versus the grandeur that they're rehearsing
i think they're rehearsing many others senses and sensibilities um that aren't that that are
that are in the eye of the beholder i think fair enough can you inform me and i'm sure many of
the listeners of this show about the relationship between chinese and japanese because there's a
also a in the exhibition i i i there's it's written that the history of chinese information
technology can't be told without also playing paying close attention to japan in what way is japanese
different in in when it comes to the challenges faced by you know information technology writing
technologies that then then now chinese the relationship between japanese and chinese in in the
information ages is a very is a very interesting one so the first thing that we need to
note is that linguistically grammatically structurally the japanese language is and the chinese
language have no fundamental relationship to one another there's a great deal of grammatical
relationship between for example japanese and korean uh... but when you know the
a japanese speaker listening to a chinese speaker vice versa wouldn't have the slightest idea
so it's not a part of the sino to betton knowledge it i mean by some distant some distant
i mean when you push back the family tree far enough you begin to have connections again but
in the in the actual lived reality they are they are entirely distinct now what's
now where the intersection happens of course uh... is that for the greater part of the
let's say the medieval into early modern into modern era uh... up until is up until the rise of
this emboldened japanese empire that japan was uh... squarely within the synedic civilization
zone i mean the chinese uh... very various chinese dynasties and and and cultural centers
bequeathed upon many of their neighboring states uh... cultural forms forms of dress
the organizations of capital cities and how the arrangement of the axis of that the notions of
ethical and philosophical uh... uh... uh...
corpus and so forth and so one of the inheritances we might say
that japan uh... took from china were con is congee or chinese characters as applied to an
already existing oral language that is japanese and so um... it is an over it is it is in a certain
sense an overlay of of a writing system that is born out of a particular language chinese in
relation to and then is overlaid on to a spoken language that is it that is distinct
okay all i when you say overlaid so if uh... if a japanese is reading
chinese characters is he are they the same characters they denote the same
same are they picked up the same thing originally or or so right right so would he be reading a chinese
text in in japanese terms so there are or this is a con this is actually a slightly complex
question um... if we go back far enough we are talking about not unlike uh... i don't know
church latin uh... and if you asked if an Italian or a french is reading a latin text are they
read so that if we go back far enough in time we are talking about a in a certain sense a shared
cultural linguistic space but that is because it is understood that the literati of many of
the surrounding states not all but many of the surrounding states of this chinese
civilization or core gain access to this this literati world by being uh... fluent and
conversant and capable within a literary chinese language they literally have learned this
language but there are other parts of the story which are that when the these characters are brought
into uh... for example but also korea japan vietnam uh... they're there are lots of strategies
for how to use these characters in some cases it might be that the characters brought in
as an exact transplant of a word but that might have a different pronunciation uh... or
or inflected pronunciation uh... either entirely different or kind of uh... inflected pronunciation
but there are also strategies in which uh... this is something that happens quite frequently
where one takes the character one steals the character purely for its sound value
and doesn't care about its original character meaning or connotations is using it in a certain
sense as a a syllable uh... through which to spell out the sounds of one's own language
and that is one in which so you know these are the this is the beautiful thing about humanity
in language is is that
language is a totally and fundamentally arbitrary system so you get to play with it in
different ways
now where this intersects back in the twentieth century
is that by virtue of this inheritance
by virtue of the fact that one component of the japanese writing system not the only
component there's also a syllable a salabic system that evolves over time called kana
uh... through which it is possible to write out japanese words in and purely uh...
phonetic system
but by virtue of this inheritance of chinese characters into the japanese language or kangi
that some of the same challenges or problems in this new nineteen twenty-first-century world
are shared are also encountered
by japan and for that matter by korean
and so uh... that's why you have japanese typewriters in the nineteen twenties and thirties
which are based around the exact same design and engineering principles as chinese
typewriters and that's why in the seventies and eighties
mmm very exciting breakthroughs in
chinese computing are actually made by some japanese computer scientists or vice versa
there is some overlap by accident of history
that these two histories should should sort of braid together
uh... despite the fact that the two languages in a linguistic front are very very different
great so you mentioned that now the quirky keyboard is in use in china
yes how does that work obviously it doesn't work the way it works
in the western world where you type a letter and you
it's reproduced on the page or on the screen
right so the
courty keep the courty keyboard
becomes a mainstay of chinese computing
actually rather late in the story in the sixties and seventies and eighties there
lots of different experiments for input surfaces pen computing
but in the nineties uh... in the in the later post-mou dunge-yau ping opening up
of china
normalization of relations with many countries around the world the opening
of factories in the sale of goods
one of the goods that begins to make its way
uh... more heavily into china is the personal computer and with that comes the
courty keyboard
and so in a certain sense for engineers for inventors the courty keyboard
becomes
the new pallet the new uh...
the new well if we want to invent a new way of sitting in down at the at the
at the and and computing let's start with the courty keyboard as our
starting point and then see where we can go and one of the ways that
basically everyone goes i guess you could say
is the first thing you have to dispense with
isn't yet another deeply embedded assumption that's baked into the
minds of the average computer user
in the western world and that is
it's almost it's always on silly when you say it out loud but in fact it's
it's a profound assumption
my assumption is is that if i push a button and that button
has a particular symbol on it whether it be the letter q or a wire an
exclamation mark i assume
that that same symbol will appear on the screen
it's the most unspoken of assumptions
in the case of chinese that assumption is not up for grabs
and so instead
the you cannot simply push a button and have that symbol appear because you
can't fit all the symbols onto that keyboard
and so they sever that relationship and say okay
we want to treat the the courty keyboard
and the letters thereof
as a way of providing instructions
to a program which is called an input method editor that runs in sort of the
background on the computer in in any chinese system
that intercepts that steals those keystrokes as they're coming in
and uses them according to certain protocols that the that the computer user
would know
to try to
guess
probabilistically what you're looking for
so let's say you're sitting down at your computer
you have it set to an input method editor that happens to be
phonetically based so you so now the system knows okay
the letters on this on this on this machine are going to be used to describe
the phonetic values of the characters that the user wants
so i start typing be the moment i touch the screen the moment i touch the
keyboard be
it immediately starts to search
okay what our guys let's go into the let's go into the database let's find all
the characters in our database
for which the first letter of the pronunciation is a bug sound
and then it begins the process of developing candidates that it will
present to you as the user but then i type the letter e and it says okay so he
doesn't want all of those characters let's get rid of those
i type in i and it says okay everyone
this computer user wants us to give him in this case
all of the characters in our database that have the pronunciation bay
and there are many of those so how are we going to give it to him let's give it to
him in the order
of probability what's the most common bay the second most common bay the
third most common bay and then it's if i see the character i want in that
list i will use one of the numbers one through nine to say yeah i want number
three from that list
but that's just the simplest most straightforward way i can use abbreviations
i can continue going i can write very long sentences like the tongue dynasty
example tongue dynasty poem example
and i can and now you have input method editors that are profoundly powerful
and are can make very good guesses about what it is that you want
and now chinese input is arguably faster than english language input for all
of these reasons
well tom i'm glad you know what you're talking about
and it sounds like we're in for uh... while wild and rather unpredictable
twenty-first century when it comes to information technology is so
no i hope so so i want to thank our guests professor tom malaenie for
coming on in title opinions and sharing this extraordinary
expertise at a fascinating story about uh... the invention of the chinese
typewriter and into the computer age
and also to true and true and chinese uh... the one who who uh...
first suggested that we had to wish on this and i'm delighted that we did that
thanks again for coming on thank you for having Robert Harrison for entitled
opinions
take care
uh...