Adapting the Chinese Script for Technology Has Been an Incredible Feat

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. If you pull down an English dictionary from the shelf, it’s a fairly simple matter to look up a word. You know that words starting with A are going to be at the beginning, and words that start with Z are going to be at the end. And if a word shares the same initial letters as another words, like say the words production and progress, you just keep looking letter by letter from left to right until you find what you want. And that’s simple.

All you had to do to understand the system was learn your ABCs, just 26 letters. Using a Chinese dictionary, though, is quite different. A Chinese character is a unit of meaning. It’s roughly equivalent to a word. And to look up a Chinese character, you pull down that dictionary, and you first either go to the front or the back of the book, where there’s a table that lists the particular components of Chinese characters. And these components of strokes are called radicals. There are 214 of those, and assigned to each radical is a number. And you follow that number to another table, and you find all the characters that contain that radical, and there can be as many as 64. And then once you find the character you want in this table, now you have the page number in the actual dictionary itself. So you turn to that page and you hunt until you find the character and the definition. So it’s a lot more complicated.

Or consider typewriters. The first QWERTY typewriters were marketed in the United States in the early 1870s, and these were portable and relatively easy to use. But the first Chinese typewriter, which was invented a few decades later, looked like a small table with this huge flat disk containing more than 4,000 commonly used characters arranged in concentric rings. And you would use one hand to rotate the disk and use a long, thin pointer to select the character you want. And you use the other hand to position the carriage that holds the paper underneath. All of which means that a century ago, China faced a huge challenge. How do you adapt this magnificent Chinese script into modern technology? How do you reinvent the Chinese language so that you can more easily use things like computers?

It’s a fascinating story, and it’s told in a new book called Kingdom of Characters, The Language Revolution That Made China Modern. It’s by Jing Su, and she’s a professor of East Asian languages at Yale. And she’s written a history of this massive technological transformation in China. And she also writes about this colorful assortment of innovators through the years who were passionate about the Chinese language and about reinventing it for the modern age. It’s a fascinating read, Grant.

Yeah, it sounds fascinating. Wow, it took so many brilliant, bright people to sort that out, to take this sophisticated script and put it into our computers and to make it possible to produce all these great books and beautiful text and newspapers and so forth.

Well, speaking of great books, this one is called Kingdom of Characters, The Language Revolution That Made China Modern, and it’s by Jing Su. That’s J-I-N-G-T-S-U. We’ll list this book and all of our book recommendations on our website at waywordradio.org. And you can reach out to us with your language thoughts, ideas, and questions. Just go to waywordradio.org contact.