The (ir)reality of the MingKwai typewriter
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The (ir)reality of the MingKwai typewriter
There's been a lot of hoopla about the famous Chinese author Lin Yutang's (1895-1976) purported MingKwai ("clear-quick") typewriter in the last few years. Fortunately, linguist Julesy popped the hallucinatory bubble about the proclaimed wonders of the MingKwai by grappling with the historical, theoretical, and practical aspects of the MingKwai: "The many myths about the Chinese typewriter" (9/7/25).
Now, in a new video that I just learned about two days ago, we get inside a replica of the MingKwai and can see how incredibly complex its innards are:
This video is fairly professionally filmed by the somewhat controversial HTX Studio. The content creator claims that it was first released in March 2023 and then goes on to say that, in January 2025 something incredible happened: the only MingKwai typewriter in existence was found in a basement in New York. It has now been acquired by the Stanford University library.
The title of this video is "We Built a Chinese Typewriter". Yes, they did, but it's not really viable. You'll never see it on the market. It's completely impractical, just a curiosity, at best a quirky documentation of a minor byway in the history of Chinese information technology. The video ends with a brief glimpse of the MingKwai accompanied by two unidentified individuals who are apparently its caretakers. HTX concludes: "We're eagerly awaiting their research findings."
When I first heard about the MingKwai typewriter half a century ago, I thought it was a sorrowful boondoggle. How could such a distinguished Chinese intellectual as Lin Yutang have such a poor understanding of the sinographic writing system that he could fantasize a Rube Goldberg typewriter like the MingKwai?
The HTX replica of the MingKwai, with its multiple extensions and extraneous electrification, makes it seem even more of a pipe dream than it really was.
Poor Lin Yutang! He bankrupted himself trying to make the morphosyllabic sinographic writing system behave like an alphabet.
David Moser, the author of A Billion Voices: China's Search for a Common Language (Penguin, 2016), who has as good a grasp of the quintessence of the Chinese writing system as anyone alive today, plus possesses a phenomenal sense of humor, is poised to anatomize the MingKwai. Should be fun, and extremely instructive.
Selected readings
- "Chinese Typewriter" (6/30/09)
- "Chinese typewriter, part 2" (4/17/11) — with memorable photos
- "The many myths about the Chinese typewriter" (9/7/25)
- "Chinese typewriter redux" (11/5/16) — this and the preceding two posts all talk about my favorite M. C. Hammer performance, "Chinese Typewriter Dance" ("U Can't Touch This")
- "Another chapter in the history of the Chinese typewriter" (8/14/21)
Julesy videos
- "'The insane effort to preserve this ancient script'"
- "The difficulty of borrowing in Chinese" (10/24/25)
- "The many myths about the Chinese typewriter" (9/7/25)
- "Fundamental Sinitic linguistic issues solved through analysis of Chinese rap" (8/13/25)
- "Tones and intonation in Sinitic languages" (53025)
- "The conundrum of singing with tones" (5/30/25)
- "Japanese lexical influence on other East Asian languages" (7/23/25)
- "Words, morphemes, collocations, characters" (7/23/25)
David Moser readings
- "The future of Chinese language learning is now" (4/5/14)
- "The impact of phonetic inputting on Chinese languages" (12/9/19) — includes this note: "In the not too distant future, David Moser will write a guest post exposing the fallacy of the assertion that Chinese characters were the source of predictive typing." Alas, DM's been too busy to complete this post that he began more than half a dozen years ago. BTW, note that the pinyin text quoted in this post does not have tones.
- LL comment of 1/7/21
- LL comment of 4/18/17
- "Sinological suffering" (3/31/17)
- "Backward Thinking about Orientalism and Chinese Characters" (5/16/16)
- "Mao and Chinese Character Reform: Revisionist History on CCTV" (11/7/23)
- "WeChat COVID-19 ditty" (4/23/20)
- "Is there no / any longer a reason / need to learn a foreign language?" (7/14/23) — also here, in China Heritage
- "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard", Pinyin.info — with links to a Chinese translation in traditional and simplified characters; has been read by millions
- David Moser, "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard" (html), pinyin.info, readings; (简体字：为什么中文这么TM难？) (繁體字：為什麼中文這麼TM難？); from Schriftfestschrift: Essays on Writing and Language in Honor of John DeFrancis on His Eightieth Birthday (Sino-Platonic Papers (pdf) No. 27, August 1991), edited by Victor H. Mair. — a fuller citation
- "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard", Languagehat (6/23/19)
- David Moser, A Billion Voices: China's Search for a Common Language (Penguin, 2016)
- DM online
[Thanks to Thomas Shaw]
Evan Hess said,
October 17, 2025 @ 12:38 pm
Well, that explains where Lin's quirky Instant Index System comes from. He used it in his Chinese-English dictionary fifty years ago. It was by far the most comprehensive C-E dictionary at the time, but I wasted so much time trying to look up characters in it trying to follow that system. It was not at all instant. It was quicker to try to guess a character's pronunciation and look it up in the dictionary's quirky Romanized index. There's a lesson somewhere there for lexicographers.
Victor Mair said,
October 17, 2025 @ 5:15 pm
@Evan Hess,
Good observations!
For more on Lin Yutang's so-called Instant Index system and its Russian lexicographical predecessor, see this post: "The many myths about the Chinese typewriter" (9/7/25).
AntC said,
October 17, 2025 @ 8:53 pm
@0:10 "using [a QWERTY] typewriter seems almost identical to using a modern computer".
Emmmm wot? Surely the other way round! There's a very reasonable question: what if electronic(-mechanical) keyboards (say a golfball style [**]) had arrived before mechanical typewriters — then would we have the QWERTY layout, or Dvorak, or something completely other?
[**] I see the first mechanical golfball-ish machines were late C19th. The Blickensderfer used the catchily-titled DHIATENSOR layout.
What if MingKwai had known of those designs?
Victor Mair said,
October 17, 2025 @ 9:16 pm
Interesting surmise, AntC, but you'd need to have a mighty big golf gall and would still face the problem of entry method (i.e., hard to order and locate the thousands of different characters) supposing that you could squeeze them on to the ball.
Peter Cyrus said,
October 18, 2025 @ 4:31 am
Would one of you comment on the effect that computerized word processing in Chinese characters – only available for half a century – has had on the language situation and the orthography?
I can imagine that the popularity of pinyin for text entry, in contrast with graphical methods like Cangjie or Wubi, has promoted the spread Standard Chinese where non-standard varieties might have been more common beforehand.
If someone is typing from a text – copying, citing, or the like – is it easier to use Cangjie or Wubi than pinyin?
Are speech-to-text systems widely used? Do they make it harder or easier to dictate non-standard Chinese?
Victor Mair said,
October 18, 2025 @ 7:48 am
@Peter Cyrus
Your questions are wonderful, and I hope that scholars like William C. Hannas, J. Marshall Unger, and Uluğ Kuzuoğlu will respond to them.
AntC said,
October 18, 2025 @ 4:29 pm
@Peter Are speech-to-text systems widely used? Do they make it harder or easier to dictate non-standard Chinese?
Now that everybody has smart-phones, speech-to-text is used widely on messaging apps. (Although sometimes that's voice-messaging.) The tools often pick the wrong character for homophones. Recipients are well used to mentally turning the character back to its sound (ignoring its meaning — or even using text-to-speech at the receiving end), so they don't get tripped up by the 'wrong' character. OTOH if (like me) you're having to translate the text, the English often seems to be gibberish.
The s-to-t I've seen in action in Taiwan is very fussy that you use 'proper' mainland Putonghua pronunciation. They don't tolerate Taiwanese (Hokkien) nor even Taiwan-specific slang. You often see people needing to try several times to generate the message.
We've had many posts on LLog on related themes. Including examples of pasted-up notices where people have used s-to-t that's selected the wrong homophone, with often hilarious results.
Jerry Packard said,
October 19, 2025 @ 6:40 am
My first exposure to a Chinese typewriter was as an undergrad at UMass, where said machine had a column-row layout that was indexed for a pointer that you’d mechanically vector into place before pushing down a big handle ‘ka-chunk’ that typed out the character you found. It could type out about 2-3 characters a minute.