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After coming face to face with the unavoidable debacles inherent in mechanical Chinese typewriters (not to mention many other pitfalls of the writing system), Language Log readers will not be surprised to learn that sinographs were not well suited for telegraphy:

The only slight blemish in Julesy's latest exposure of the truths about the Chinese script is that she titled it "Why Morse Code Didn’t Work for Chinese — and the Genius Fix".  When it came to scientific, efficient telegraphy, not even a genius could fix the hyper complicated, archaic characters.

As a Boy Scout, I learned Morse Code, and I think I even got a merit badge in telegraphy.  I'll never forget the meaning of | … — … |.

When I first started going to the Chinese mainland in the 80s, I was intrigued by how the Chinese telegraph worked.  Because I had to travel around by train quite a bit and even had to send a few telegraphs myself, I had ample opportunity to observe how the operators worked.

I was aware that each "common" Chinese character had an arbitrarily assigned unique four-digit code, ranging from 0000 to 9999.  It didn't take long for me to realize that it was humanly impossible to memorize such a system, so I observed carefully how the telegraph operators dealt with such an incredibly refractory method.  Because they routinely had to send so many telegrams, they soon memorized the four-digit codes for the most frequent characters.  Beyond the top fifty or so characters, however, they had to look up the codes in a well-thumbed, dog-eared manual, and you could hear them shouting to each other questions like "What's the code number for yíng 贏 ('win')?"

That reminds me of the time when I went to observe the working habits of the Chinese typists at the United Nations. They too had to look up less frequent characters in their handbooks.    Their main fonts only had about two thousand lead characters, but they still had to consult with colleagues for the location of less frequent characters.  For least frequent characters, they would have to get into supplementary type cases, and that often took a lot of hunting and pecking.  For characters that were not in their main font and supplementary type cases, they would have to write in the missing characters by hand, and that happened fairly frequently.

The situation was a little bit like memorizing PLU (price look-up) codes / PLU numbers / PLUs / produce codes nowadays.  The most capable cashiers store the PLU codes in their brains, but changing products mean they have to keep getting used to new codes.  The big difference, however, is that it's easy for them to look up the PLUs electronically via alphabetical and visual indices.  It's so simple that even customers without any training can do it easily.

Premier Zhou Enlai (1898-1976) used to travel a lot in the performance of his diplomatic duties.  I have heard repeatedly from numerous sources that Chinese telegraphy was the most costly part of his travel expenses.

Incidentally, if you're curious about the meaning of the two characters on the cover page of Julesy's current video, they are juémì 绝密 ("top secret") — that's for people who cannot yet see the core defects of the Sinographic writing system.

Selected readings

• "Morse Code for China", by Al Williams, Hackaday (11/13/25)
• "The many myths about the Chinese typewriter" (9/7/25)
• "Flag codes: another type of Hong Kong resistance writing" (10/5/20)

[Thanks to Leslie Katz]

November 13, 2025 @ 6:59 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Alphabets, Typing, Typography

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