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On a bright fall morning at Stanford, Tom Mullaney is telling me what's wrong with QWERTY keyboards. Mullaney is not a technologist, nor is he one of those Dvorak keyboard enthusiasts. He's a historian of modern China and we're perusing his exhibit of Chinese typewriters and keyboards, the curation of which has led Mullaney to the conclusion that China is rising ahead technologically while the West falls behind, clinging to its QWERTY keyboard.
Now this was and still is an unusual view because Chinese—with its 75,000 individual characters rather than an alphabet—had historically been the language considered incompatible with modern technology. How do you send a telegram or use a typewriter with all those characters? How do you even communicate with the modern world? If you're a Cambridge-educated classicist enamored with the Greeks, you might just conclude Chinese script is "archaic." Long live the alphabet.
But, Mullaney argues, the invention of the computer could turn China's enormous catalog of characters into an advantage.
His argument is [...] about our relationship to computers, not just as physical objects but as conduits to intangible software. Typing English on a QWERTY computer keyboard, he says, "is about the most basic rudimentary way you can use a keyboard." You press the "a" key and "a" appears on your screen. "It doesn't make use of a computer's processing power and memory and the cheapening thereof." Type "a" on a QWERTY keyboard hooked up to a Chinese computer, on the other hand, and the computer is off anticipating the next characters. Typing in Chinese requires mediation from a layer of software that is obvious to the user.
[...] The Chinese way of inputting text—the software-mediated way—will win out, says Mullaney. Actually, it's already won out. Our mobile phones now have predictive text and autocomplete. It took the constraint of mobile to get Westerners to realize the limits of the simple what-you-type-is-what-you-get keyboard. But even then, you could only get Americans to go so far.
Read more at The Atlantic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @07:35PM (1 child)
I made an attempt to learn Chinese many years ago.
It reminded me of the Star Trek episode, Darmok and Jilad (spelling may be incorrect.)
It felt like Chinese was a language of metaphors. Without a lifetime of cultural background and symbolism, true meanings are hopelessly lost.
The specificity of western languages seem like a huge advantage over the suggestiveness of Chinese when it comes to engineering and science. And the opposite when it comes to poetry and literature. But then, I know nothing of Chinese literature.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 04 2019, @07:18PM
How did you set your expectations? Is that why Chinese never set well with you? The set of characters is too large, or the meaning you set on was too often in the wrong set?
"The word with the most meanings in English is the verb 'set', with 430 senses listed in the Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, published in 1989. The word commands the longest entry in the dictionary at 60,000 words, or 326,000 characters."