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Julesy tells it like it is: "The Impossible Chinese Typewriter"

In less than 20 minutes, Julesy gives us a more accurate and complete introduction to the history, nature, and workings of the Chinese typewriter than a couple of recent authors specializing on the Chinese typewriter do in hundreds of pages.  Unfortunately, they have reaped an enormous amount of publicity, which means that the American public (and the English-speaking public worldwide) have gotten a terribly distorted understanding of what the Chinese typewriter is all about.  (See J. Marshall Unger, "Triple review of books on characters and computers" [8/23/24].  Although the book by Uluğ Kuzuoğlu is not exclusively about the typewriter, he has the most sensible things to say about the Chinese writing system and information processing that are relevant to Chinese typewriting.)  Therefore, one can only hope that this concentrated video presentation by Julesy will dispel the misapprehensions of the popular publications about the Chinese typewriter of recent years.

It's nice to have Julesy making these excellent videos about Chinese language and script.  I usually agree with practically everything she says, and the bulk of this presentation is no different, except for the rushed ending (I think she wanted to finish within 20 minutes; she's a real pro, and completes the video with 4 seconds to spare!).

During the last two minutes, she says that, in the 1800s and 1900s, when so many revolutions in communications and information processing were taking place — telegraph, typewriter, and computer, all of them tailored to the alphabet — many people believed that the Chinese writing system was inimical to such modern developments and that it was on its way out.  We have had numerous posts about script reformers who advocated that, unless characters be dropped altogether in favor of the phoneticization (Latin-based) of Chinese writing, the country would completely perish in the modern world, and Julesy alludes to that trend in her closing remarks.

Here's her final sentence:  "But it's those, like the protagonists of today's story, firm believers of the Chinese language, that helped Chinese characters survive to this very day, and, for that, I couldn't be more grateful."  I think she's being disingenuous, particularly in the concluding clause, both because it runs counter to the rest of what she carefully lays out in this video and the sum total of the rest of what she says in her videos, as well as because of the slightly evasive way she says it.

In fact, it amounts to an affirmation of the profound truism that William Hannas pointed out in his linguistic treatises (see in the "Selected readings" below), namely, that the makeshift computerization of Chinese characters bought time for them to survive beyond what the script reformers had projected.  In other words, computers ironically staved off the ultimate demise of the antiquated, archaic logographic writing system of sinographs (cf. Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Tangut syllabographs, Vietnamese Chữ Nôm, etc.).

Lin Yutang (1895-1976) was an outstanding writer and brilliant humorist, but his vaunted MingKwai (míngkuài 明快 ["clear and quick"], a reputation to which Lin ardently aspired for it, but was light years away from ever achieving) typewriter was doomed from the start.  Existentially and conceptually, the Chinese writing system, with all of the stupendous challenges and obstacles it presents to mechanical simplification so eloquently and elegantly pointed out by Julesy in this video, simply cannot be effectively and efficiently reduced to an object the size of a Remington or Olivetti typewriter.  The MingKwai typewriter weighs 50 pounds (NYT {7/24/25]) and measures 36 cm × 46 cm × 23 cm (14.2 in × 18.1 in × 9.1 in) (source).  It was a clunker.  A portable Remington typewriter, depending on the model, weights from less than 16 pounds to 20-25 pounds, while a desktop model might weigh around 30 pounds, and they were solid and steady.

When I went to college, my father gave me the precious gift of an Olivetti portable typewriter that weighed 8.2 pounds and measured 27x37x8 cm.  It was a thing of beauty.  I carried it with me up into the mountains of Nepal for two years, then across the seas to Taiwan for two years, then to graduate school in Boston.  I kept using it until I got an Apple Macintosh Portable in 1989.  It was heavy, especially with its big battery, weighing about twice as much as the Olivetti, but I took it with me even into the deserts of Central Asia.  I'll never forget crossing the sandy border between Kazkhstan and China, with miles of barbed wire and a guard with a machine gun accompanying the passengers on the small public bus I took from Almaty to Ürümqi, clutching that big, black computer case all the way.

Lin bankrupted himself over the MingKwai, but its sole useful legacy was to promote separation of lookup and entry from clumsy methods such as radicals plus residual strokes and total stroke counts and replace them with a more spelling-like analysis of different types of strokes.  That was only a stopgap at best.  The verdict is already in.  The vast majority of entry, lookup, ordering, and grouping / organizing of character-based material is done through romanization.

A byproduct of Lin's research on the MingKwai typewriter, whose finding system is based on the principles he developed for the designation of individual characters:  top left, bottom right (that's a simplification of the many other niceties for mastering the system) was his Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage (1972).  In terms of content, translation equivalents, grammar, usage notes, sensitivity to colloquialisms, semantics, and so forth, this is a good dictionary, as one would expect from a highly educated bilingual linguist.  It incorporated a lot of the invaluable scholarship that went into the superb Gwoyeu Tsyrdean 國語辭典 (Dictionary of the National Language), comp. Wang Yi (1937-1945), which I still frequently use.  Despite its strengths in other respects, almost no one took the trouble to learn the two-corner "Instant Index System", relying instead on the supplementary alphabetical list of characters that was published in 1976. 

The four-corner method or four-corner system (sì jiǎo hàomǎ jiǎnzì fǎ 四角號碼檢字法 ["four corner code lookup character method"]) is a character-input (and finding) method used for encoding Chinese characters into either a computer or a manual typewriter, using four or five numerical digits per character. 

The four-corner method was invented in the 1920s by Wang Yunwu, the editor in chief at Commercial Press Ltd, preceding Lin Yutang's MingKwai typewriter and his Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage.  Its original purpose was to aid telegraphers in looking up Chinese telegraph code numbers in use at that time from long lists of characters. This was mentioned by Wang Yunwu in an introductory pamphlet called Four-Corner Method, published in 1926. Cai Yuanpei and Hu Shih wrote introductory essays for this pamphlet.

The four-corner method itself was inspired by the seminal study and system of Russian Orientalist, Sinologist, and scholar of Japanese Studies, Otto Julius Rosenberg (1888-1919) on a system of classification of Chinese characters by the shapes of their strokes at the top left and bottom right corners. Based on ideas of Russian Sinologist and Buddhologist Vasily Vasilyev (1818-1900), Rosenberg developed a method of classification of Chinese and Japanese characters. He published the results of his research in a dictionary in English and Japanese and which formed the basis of the so-called "Four Corner Method", which is still employed today in the creation of Chinese and Japanese dictionaries. This volume is extremely rare and, according to the world's largest bibliographic database, WorldCat, it is only found in six libraries worldwide. While a graduate student, I was privileged to use a copy held by the Harvard-Yenching Library.

For more information about Otto Rosenberg, see John [S.] Barlow, "The Mysterious Case of the Brilliant Young Russian Orientalist… – part 3 and finish", Bulletin of the IAO (International Association of Orientalist Librarians), Vol. 44 (2000).  Barlow, a medical doctor with a deep interest in brain research with a focus on electrophysiological function, practicing what he preached about Chines lexicography, compiled this very impresive dictionary: A Chinese-Russian-English Dictionary Arranged by the Rosenberg Graphical System (Mudrov's Chinese-Russian Dictionary with an English Text and Appendices) (Honolulu:  University of Hawaii Press, 1995), xxiii, 830 pp.

The Rosenberg lookup system was also adopted by the monumental Chinese-Russian dictionary in 4 large volumes (1983-84) edited by Ilya Mikhailovich Oshanin.  The first volume contains three huge indices for looking up the characters by Kangxi radicals and residual strokes, by the four-corner method, and pinyin, in addition to the shape-based stroke system of Rosenberg, the key to which is found on each page of the other three large volumes which contain approximately 250,000 terms.  If I can't find a colloquial or classical term in one of the other dictionaries that I usually rely on, this is where I turn next.

Thus, Lin Yutang's MingKwai was the heir to a Russian lexicographical ordering system for Chinese characters that is still in use today, but not in China.

 

Selected readings

Julesy videos

• "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)

Previous Language Log posts on the Chinese typewriter

• "Chinese Typewriter" (6/30/09)
• "Chinese typewriter, part 2" (4/17/11) — featuring the old Chinese typewriter at the University of Kansas
• "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)

The Chinese writing system

• "How many more Chinese characters are needed?" (10/25/16)
• "Writing characters and writing letters" (11/7/18)
• "Sinological suffering" (3/31/17) — the agony of looking up characters in a Chinese dictionary; see especially my remarks about the Russian lookup system in the  Bol'shoi Kitaisko-Russkii Slovar'.
• Victor H. Mair, "The Need for an Alphabetically Arranged General Usage Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese: A Review Article of Some Recent Dictionaries and Current Lexicographical Projects" (pdf), Sino-Platonic Papers, 1 (February, 1986), 1-31.
• "Grids galore" (11/19/23) — brilliant post that is essential for anyone who wants to understand the nature and construction of Chinese characters, though many of the comments wander off in aimless / fruitless directions.
• J. Marshall Unger, "Handling Chinese Characters on Computers:  Three Recent Studies", Sino-Platonic Papers, 354 (August, 2024), 1-18.  (free pdf) — of the three books reviewed by the author, the one by Uluğ Kuzuoğlu gives the clearest headed account Sinographic issues related to the Chinese typewriter.
• ________, Ideogram:  Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning (Honolulu:  University of Hawai'i Press, 2004)
• William C. Hannas, Asia’s Orthographic Dilemma (Honolulu, Hawai’i: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997),
• ________, The Writing on the Wall: How Asian Orthography Curbs Creativity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).

September 7, 2025 @ 7:01 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Romanization, Spelling, Typography, Writing systems

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