Triple review of books on characters and computers
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Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-fifty-fourth issue: "Handling Chinese Characters on Computers: Three Recent Studies" (pdf), by J. Marshall Unger (August, 2024).
Abstract
Writing systems with large character sets pose significant technological challenges, and not all researchers focus on the same aspects of those challenges or of the various attempts that have been made to meet them. A comparative reading of three recent books—The Chinese Computer by Thomas Mullaney (2024), Kingdom of Characters by Jing Tsu (2022), and Codes of Modernity by Uluğ Kuzuoğlu (2023)—makes this abundantly clear. All deal with the ways in which influential users of Chinese characters have responded to the demands of modern technology, but differ from one another considerably in scope and their selection and treatment of relevant information long known to linguists and historians.
Keywords: touch-typing, computerization, Sinitic languages, politics of script reforms, national language
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All issues of Sino-Platonic Papers are available in full for no charge.
To view our catalog, visit http://www.sino-platonic.org/
Selected readings
- "Sinographic inputting: 'it's nothing' — not" (2/22/21) — with lengthy bibliography
- Victor H. Mair and Yongquan Liu, eds., Characters and Computers (Amsterdam, Oxford, Washington, Tokyo: IOS, 1991)
DCA said,
August 25, 2024 @ 9:58 am
Very interesting–I now know which book to read, or not, for more.
Mullaney's description of "high-speed hypographic input" being faster for Chinese than English is ridiculous, though technically redeemed by the parenthetical (using QWERTY). If you want to look at high-speed transcription of English, you need to consider another hypographic system, namely the stenotype used by court reporters. Note though that Unger's "fewer keys better", while true for speed, is far from true for usefulness–stenotype has fewer keys than QWERTY but is notoriously difficult to learn. It may take 1000 hours to produce a good touch typist in English, but what matters more is how many hours it takes to learn to use the keyboard at all. I'd say that for this, minimizing hypographia is what matters, and the 47-character keyboard does that, since it is only the shift key that is so used.
Philip Taylor said,
August 25, 2024 @ 12:02 pm
I was taught touch-typing by my first employer (Post Office Cable & Wireless Services Ltd, a branch of the GPO ["General Post Office"]), and we were allowed nothing like 1000 hours to become proficient touch typists — a few tens of hours at most.