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A review by sumatra_squall
Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution that made China Modern by Jing Tsu
3.0
From the subtitle of the book "A Tale of Language, Obsession, and Genius in Modern China", I thought this book would be a more riveting read than it actually was. It begins promisingly enough, recounting how former mandarin Wang Zhao, wanted for treason by Empress Dowager Cixi after advocating for reforms, disguises himself as a monk to return to China from Japan in 1900. Wang would eventually develop a Mandarin Alphabet that sought to create a script that would allow ordinary people to recognise and notate their own speech exactly as it sounded in writing - this would allow people living in different regions, each speaking their own regional dialect, communicate across "dialectal, regional and possibly national divides".
In each chapter, Jing lays out how efforts over the decades to standardise, categorise and indeed, reshape the Chinese language so that it could plug into modern technologies of printing, data processing and telecommunications. From Wang's efforts to notarise Chinese speech, the book moves into efforts to establish a national language and standard tongue (initially, it looked like southern speakers would win given their numerical advantage but Wang managed to institute a one province one rule vote which gave the advantage to northern vernacular Mandarin-speaking provinces).
Chapter Two - Chinese Typewriters and America (1912) - details efforts to create an ideographic keyboard. While the Roman alphabet only has 26 letters which can be manipulated into endless permutations, how might one create a keyboard capable of producing thousands of Chinese characters which for centuries had been organised on the basis of anything from two to four hundred radicals?
Chapter Three - Tipping the Scale of Telegraphy (1925) - details efforts to try to encode the Chinese language as efficiently as possible for the purposes of telegraphy. Morse code's combinations of dots and dashes were meant to accommodate the letters of the alphabet and the numbers 0 to 9. To communicate in Chinese, the characters had to be translated into a combination of letters and numbers (which would then be translated in turn into dots and dashes), an extremely costly exercise both in terms of time, effort and message length. Moreover, assigning combinations of numbers and letters to Chinese characters meant that "there was no...meaningful correlation between characters and their codes...a Chiense sender would essentially have to grapple with his or her native language as a foreign code". Might the solution be to develop "an alphabetic capacity...from the Chinese script itself"?
Chapter Four - The Librarian's Card Catalog (1938) - then goes into efforts to reorganise the language for systematic and efficient use. We learn about Lin Yutang who proposed indexing characters by stroke and stroke order, and who created a keyboard that could produce Chinese characters.
Chapter Five - When "Peking" became "Beijing" (1958) - details China's efforts under Mao to simplify the Chinese script and to Romanise it, in order to lower the threshold for reading and writing Chinese characters for the masses. The challenge of Romanising the Chinese language, with all its homophones, is illustrated by Zhao Yuanren's 92-character parable about Sir Shi who had a wildlife fetish and mistakenly tried to eat ten lions made from stone. There are 31 different characters in the tale but when Romanised without tonal differentiators, basically goes "shi shi shi shi shi....". Wade-Giles, Latin New Script, New Romanization were some of the earlier efforts before pinyin was ratified by the National People's Congress in Feb 1958.
Chapter Six -Entering into the Computer (1979) - covers efforts to input the Chinese language into a computer, to "represent each character in a language that the machine and its human operator could both understand". Zhi Bingyi's solution was to break each character up into at most four component parts, each of which could be alphabetised (via pinyin). This could be done for both characters and phrases.
Finally, in Chapter Seven - The Digital Sinosphere (2020) - Jing details efforts to unify the coding for Han characters under the Unicode initiative, and the battles involving China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan to have their characters recognised as the standard, rather than as variants.
Overall, Kingdom of Characters was an informative read but perhaps it was the challenge of condensing a century's worth of developments and characters into slightly over 200 pages, or trying to string together these myriad developments into some kind of coherent narrative arc, I found the book a bit of a struggle to get through.
In each chapter, Jing lays out how efforts over the decades to standardise, categorise and indeed, reshape the Chinese language so that it could plug into modern technologies of printing, data processing and telecommunications. From Wang's efforts to notarise Chinese speech, the book moves into efforts to establish a national language and standard tongue (initially, it looked like southern speakers would win given their numerical advantage but Wang managed to institute a one province one rule vote which gave the advantage to northern vernacular Mandarin-speaking provinces).
Chapter Two - Chinese Typewriters and America (1912) - details efforts to create an ideographic keyboard. While the Roman alphabet only has 26 letters which can be manipulated into endless permutations, how might one create a keyboard capable of producing thousands of Chinese characters which for centuries had been organised on the basis of anything from two to four hundred radicals?
Chapter Three - Tipping the Scale of Telegraphy (1925) - details efforts to try to encode the Chinese language as efficiently as possible for the purposes of telegraphy. Morse code's combinations of dots and dashes were meant to accommodate the letters of the alphabet and the numbers 0 to 9. To communicate in Chinese, the characters had to be translated into a combination of letters and numbers (which would then be translated in turn into dots and dashes), an extremely costly exercise both in terms of time, effort and message length. Moreover, assigning combinations of numbers and letters to Chinese characters meant that "there was no...meaningful correlation between characters and their codes...a Chiense sender would essentially have to grapple with his or her native language as a foreign code". Might the solution be to develop "an alphabetic capacity...from the Chinese script itself"?
Chapter Four - The Librarian's Card Catalog (1938) - then goes into efforts to reorganise the language for systematic and efficient use. We learn about Lin Yutang who proposed indexing characters by stroke and stroke order, and who created a keyboard that could produce Chinese characters.
Chapter Five - When "Peking" became "Beijing" (1958) - details China's efforts under Mao to simplify the Chinese script and to Romanise it, in order to lower the threshold for reading and writing Chinese characters for the masses. The challenge of Romanising the Chinese language, with all its homophones, is illustrated by Zhao Yuanren's 92-character parable about Sir Shi who had a wildlife fetish and mistakenly tried to eat ten lions made from stone. There are 31 different characters in the tale but when Romanised without tonal differentiators, basically goes "shi shi shi shi shi....". Wade-Giles, Latin New Script, New Romanization were some of the earlier efforts before pinyin was ratified by the National People's Congress in Feb 1958.
Chapter Six -Entering into the Computer (1979) - covers efforts to input the Chinese language into a computer, to "represent each character in a language that the machine and its human operator could both understand". Zhi Bingyi's solution was to break each character up into at most four component parts, each of which could be alphabetised (via pinyin). This could be done for both characters and phrases.
Finally, in Chapter Seven - The Digital Sinosphere (2020) - Jing details efforts to unify the coding for Han characters under the Unicode initiative, and the battles involving China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan to have their characters recognised as the standard, rather than as variants.
Overall, Kingdom of Characters was an informative read but perhaps it was the challenge of condensing a century's worth of developments and characters into slightly over 200 pages, or trying to string together these myriad developments into some kind of coherent narrative arc, I found the book a bit of a struggle to get through.