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blackoxford's review
5.0
Reverential Technology
Life is too short to learn Chinese. At least it was until Mao reduced the number of characters in the language from over 45000 to less than 3000 and introduced a Latinised form that reasonably tracked the official dialect (Mandarin). Until then, only the elite officialdom was privy to the power of its complex ideographs. And many of that elite after a lifetime of study knew the secrets of this beautiful script but almost nothing of its written content. At the beginning of the 20th century the literacy rate in the country was no more than 10%, and almost no one in that minority was engaged in scientific research, engineering, or material innovation.
Yet during a century of national trauma - including occupation by almost every European nation, the overthrow of the ruling Qing dynasty, political degeneration into warlord rule, invasion and destruction by Japan, the Communist revolution and its aftermath in events like the Cultural Revolution, and the terrible famine of The Great Leap Forward - literacy is now almost 100%, and the country’s scientific, engineering, and material achievements exceeds all others except the United States. Jing Tsu’s history of the transformation of the Chinese language records the development of the underlying technology of this dramatic transformation, the Chinese language itself.*
Chinese is of course ideographic. Like ancient Egyptian, it uses glyphs. But unlike Egyptian, which was transformed into Coptic using the Greek alphabet, it never became expressed phonetically. There was good reason not to take the phonetic plunge. The disconnection between symbol and sound allowed enormous linguistic variation over a vast empire while maintaining the ability to communicate without translation. While there was an official pronunciation, this was used only among the elite at the imperial court. Even the Manchu invaders of the 17th century adopted the script without understanding a word of it. And Mao decreed the Mandarin dialect although he couldn’t speak it at all.
Jing recounts the details of the technical changes in the language that adapted it to modern technology, first to the telegraph, then to the mechanical typewriter, and ultimately to the computer. These are not insignificant for a script as aesthetically nuanced as written Chinese, and for a pronunciation that requires the subtlety of tone to distinguish among the language’s many homonyms.** As a reference point, think of the difficulties involved in doing complex mathematics with Roman numerals. The temptation to simply abandon the traditional script was always present. But for me the most remarkable aspect of his story is the persistent cultural reverence for the ancient script itself. It was valued for what it was not for what it could do.
The men (and they are exclusively so except for the unnamed women who developed a esoteric women’s script in Southern China) who pioneered these conceptual, bibliographic and technological changes are cultural heroes. Their devotion to the Chinese language, on occasion to the point of death, is something usually associated with religion in the West. The debate about the condition of the language is much like that of an English Council arguing the most appropriate programme for the restoration of a Grade I listed building. That is, the discussion is typically about alternative aesthetics rather than merely economic or technical efficiency, which are considered constraints but not objectives. Few other modern countries have had China’s linguistic experience (Korea made the phonetic shift from Han characters in the 15th century; Soviet Tajikistan and other Arabic speaking republics experienced Latinisation in the 1920’s and 30’s; the ancient Phoenicians may have been the first when the Greeks and Jews alphabetised their ideographic symbols***).
In short, Chinese is revered not simply because of its antiquity, or its use by about a third of the world’s population. It is also an aesthetically beautiful object in its own right. Jing Tsu captures that beauty throughout her book.
*For a discussion of language as the fundamental technology see here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3091071526?type=review#rating_452588846
**Consider, for example, the difficulties involved in creating a Latin script of some fixed number of alphabetic characters. In principle this appears easy since most Chinese words are composed of only two sounds, a beginning consonant followed by a vowel (each of these sounds has its own character as well). Suppose an extended alphabet of say 30 consonants and 10 vowels were used to express these sounds. This combination would yield 300 possibilities, that is, less than 10% of the distinctive sounds required in the vastly reduced number of words in the current dictionary. In fact a character is not a word in the Western sense. Its context defines it as much as the glyph. This is correlated with the crazy-making structure of the Chinese dictionary as well as the more-than-arbitrary character of library subject classifications.
***See here for a discussion of the Western transition to phonetic script: https:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2252565391
Life is too short to learn Chinese. At least it was until Mao reduced the number of characters in the language from over 45000 to less than 3000 and introduced a Latinised form that reasonably tracked the official dialect (Mandarin). Until then, only the elite officialdom was privy to the power of its complex ideographs. And many of that elite after a lifetime of study knew the secrets of this beautiful script but almost nothing of its written content. At the beginning of the 20th century the literacy rate in the country was no more than 10%, and almost no one in that minority was engaged in scientific research, engineering, or material innovation.
Yet during a century of national trauma - including occupation by almost every European nation, the overthrow of the ruling Qing dynasty, political degeneration into warlord rule, invasion and destruction by Japan, the Communist revolution and its aftermath in events like the Cultural Revolution, and the terrible famine of The Great Leap Forward - literacy is now almost 100%, and the country’s scientific, engineering, and material achievements exceeds all others except the United States. Jing Tsu’s history of the transformation of the Chinese language records the development of the underlying technology of this dramatic transformation, the Chinese language itself.*
Chinese is of course ideographic. Like ancient Egyptian, it uses glyphs. But unlike Egyptian, which was transformed into Coptic using the Greek alphabet, it never became expressed phonetically. There was good reason not to take the phonetic plunge. The disconnection between symbol and sound allowed enormous linguistic variation over a vast empire while maintaining the ability to communicate without translation. While there was an official pronunciation, this was used only among the elite at the imperial court. Even the Manchu invaders of the 17th century adopted the script without understanding a word of it. And Mao decreed the Mandarin dialect although he couldn’t speak it at all.
Jing recounts the details of the technical changes in the language that adapted it to modern technology, first to the telegraph, then to the mechanical typewriter, and ultimately to the computer. These are not insignificant for a script as aesthetically nuanced as written Chinese, and for a pronunciation that requires the subtlety of tone to distinguish among the language’s many homonyms.** As a reference point, think of the difficulties involved in doing complex mathematics with Roman numerals. The temptation to simply abandon the traditional script was always present. But for me the most remarkable aspect of his story is the persistent cultural reverence for the ancient script itself. It was valued for what it was not for what it could do.
The men (and they are exclusively so except for the unnamed women who developed a esoteric women’s script in Southern China) who pioneered these conceptual, bibliographic and technological changes are cultural heroes. Their devotion to the Chinese language, on occasion to the point of death, is something usually associated with religion in the West. The debate about the condition of the language is much like that of an English Council arguing the most appropriate programme for the restoration of a Grade I listed building. That is, the discussion is typically about alternative aesthetics rather than merely economic or technical efficiency, which are considered constraints but not objectives. Few other modern countries have had China’s linguistic experience (Korea made the phonetic shift from Han characters in the 15th century; Soviet Tajikistan and other Arabic speaking republics experienced Latinisation in the 1920’s and 30’s; the ancient Phoenicians may have been the first when the Greeks and Jews alphabetised their ideographic symbols***).
In short, Chinese is revered not simply because of its antiquity, or its use by about a third of the world’s population. It is also an aesthetically beautiful object in its own right. Jing Tsu captures that beauty throughout her book.
*For a discussion of language as the fundamental technology see here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3091071526?type=review#rating_452588846
**Consider, for example, the difficulties involved in creating a Latin script of some fixed number of alphabetic characters. In principle this appears easy since most Chinese words are composed of only two sounds, a beginning consonant followed by a vowel (each of these sounds has its own character as well). Suppose an extended alphabet of say 30 consonants and 10 vowels were used to express these sounds. This combination would yield 300 possibilities, that is, less than 10% of the distinctive sounds required in the vastly reduced number of words in the current dictionary. In fact a character is not a word in the Western sense. Its context defines it as much as the glyph. This is correlated with the crazy-making structure of the Chinese dictionary as well as the more-than-arbitrary character of library subject classifications.
***See here for a discussion of the Western transition to phonetic script: https:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2252565391
timdams007's review
4.0
Eye-opening, interesting, scary and sometimes thrilling. Did not expect this book to be such an entertaining and insightful read on the history and future of the Chinese written language.
It's a shame (and hence no 5 stars) that the kobo version in fact has a couple of missing Chinese character even though the final chapter touts how Unicode basically should've killed of that type of errors.
It's a shame (and hence no 5 stars) that the kobo version in fact has a couple of missing Chinese character even though the final chapter touts how Unicode basically should've killed of that type of errors.
kxiong5's review
3.0
3.5 stars
Thinking through the Chinese language—essentially retrofitting its script and how it’s represented in sound, in forms (ideograph parts, radicals, etc.)—is no mean feat. this book captures the technical mastery and hard work it took to get there and the ways in which technology and politics and national survival / national image are inextricably linked.
Cool things! Like how Chinese played a surprising role in the development of phototypesetting and rendering for computers. (Chapter 6 and 7 are so interesting to me.) Or how critical speed is in printing news to keep up with the world and not just for its own sake. Lots of interesting insights.
but it also sometimes seems to leave out some important stories or focus on stories that don’t seem important (eg why focus on a typewriter creator whose system didn’t end up seeing widespread use and not on the person who came after? Why talk about computer systems that use pinyin coding without talking about where pinyin came from in relation to existing forms of romanization? The link to pinyin remains unestablished and the void goes unacknowledged, as does the link to other computer science developments—eg when it’s mentioned that Wang Xuan used vectors to represent Chinese characters, the book treats it like this is something that never happened before in computer science? When vectors are pretty common?). At first, it focuses more on great man stories than on the actual process of development and the ways these innovations link together in a continuity (or why these innovations form a continuity at all) / the people who worked on later iterations / the other things that matter.
it seems like these stories aren’t also tied together in the form of a historical trajectory or fully situated in a progression in light of each highlight’s social background (and it avoids a critical voice in all cases, almost studiedly neutral, as if great man stories exist in such a void).
Also, I keep thinking about phonocentrism here and the philosophical turn and what it means here and :/ it gets sort of subsumed in the technical weeds.
overall: a good technical introduction, but someone familiar with 19th and 20th century Chinese history or someone who presently uses Chinese scripts in everyday life may have some questions unanswered / feel like the core things that are important have gone undiscussed.
Thinking through the Chinese language—essentially retrofitting its script and how it’s represented in sound, in forms (ideograph parts, radicals, etc.)—is no mean feat. this book captures the technical mastery and hard work it took to get there and the ways in which technology and politics and national survival / national image are inextricably linked.
Cool things! Like how Chinese played a surprising role in the development of phototypesetting and rendering for computers. (Chapter 6 and 7 are so interesting to me.) Or how critical speed is in printing news to keep up with the world and not just for its own sake. Lots of interesting insights.
but it also sometimes seems to leave out some important stories or focus on stories that don’t seem important (eg why focus on a typewriter creator whose system didn’t end up seeing widespread use and not on the person who came after? Why talk about computer systems that use pinyin coding without talking about where pinyin came from in relation to existing forms of romanization? The link to pinyin remains unestablished and the void goes unacknowledged, as does the link to other computer science developments—eg when it’s mentioned that Wang Xuan used vectors to represent Chinese characters, the book treats it like this is something that never happened before in computer science? When vectors are pretty common?). At first, it focuses more on great man stories than on the actual process of development and the ways these innovations link together in a continuity (or why these innovations form a continuity at all) / the people who worked on later iterations / the other things that matter.
it seems like these stories aren’t also tied together in the form of a historical trajectory or fully situated in a progression in light of each highlight’s social background (and it avoids a critical voice in all cases, almost studiedly neutral, as if great man stories exist in such a void).
Also, I keep thinking about phonocentrism here and the philosophical turn and what it means here and :/ it gets sort of subsumed in the technical weeds.
overall: a good technical introduction, but someone familiar with 19th and 20th century Chinese history or someone who presently uses Chinese scripts in everyday life may have some questions unanswered / feel like the core things that are important have gone undiscussed.
oliviabulka's review
It was automatically returned to TPL because I took too long :(
indianabrown's review
3.0
The writing style was a little dry and didn't grab me, kind of slogged through it. I really enjoyed the chapters about telegraphy and typewriters though
audrareads's review
5.0
As the kids would say: ten million stars
There’s a chapter on inventing and adapting the typewriter. Another on the telegraph. Monks and librarians. Printing presses. Computers. People who spent their lives trying to increase literacy. Examples of how characters were simplified to be more accessible. Inventing an alphabetization system because there wasn’t one?! And just in general expanding your worldview and technologies beyond a 26 character alphabet.
Even with no background in Chinese, this was very approachable and fascinating.
There’s a chapter on inventing and adapting the typewriter. Another on the telegraph. Monks and librarians. Printing presses. Computers. People who spent their lives trying to increase literacy. Examples of how characters were simplified to be more accessible. Inventing an alphabetization system because there wasn’t one?! And just in general expanding your worldview and technologies beyond a 26 character alphabet.
Even with no background in Chinese, this was very approachable and fascinating.