Read The Chinese Typewriter: A History (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University) By Thomas S. Mullaney Full Books Online in HD Quality

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. Clerks and secretaries in this era experimented with alternative ways of organizing characters on their tray beds, inventing an input method that was the first instance of "predictive text."

Today, after more than a century of resistance against the alphabetic, not only have Chinese characters prevailed, they form the linguistic substrate of the vibrant world of Chinese information technology. The Chinese Typewriter, not just an "object history" but grappling with broad questions of technological change and global communication, shows how this happened.

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

The Chinese Typewriter: A History (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University)

The Chinese Typewriter: A History (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University)

More Books

Your Republic Is Calling You

Young-ha Kim

China's Last Empire: The Great Qing (History of Imperial China, #6)

William T. Rowe

The Word for World Is Forest

Ursula K. Le Guin

翦商：殷周之变与华夏新生

李硕

The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI

Fei-Fei Li

Swann’s Way (In Search of Lost Time, #1)

Marcel Proust

The City & the City

China Miéville

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

Marcel Proust

Poor Things

Alasdair Gray

A Geology of Media (Volume 46) (Electronic Mediations)

Jussi Parikka

Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town

Barbara Demick

Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern

Jing Tsu