February 15, 2018 • 64 mins
Where the technolingustic systems of the west meet the non-alphabetic written characters of the east, the Chinese typewriter emerges. It’s a story of technological innovation, linguistic imperialism and China’s 19th and 20th century struggle over national identity. Join Robert and Joe as they chat with Thomas S. Mullaney about his book 'The Chinese Typewriter: A History.'
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how stopworks
dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. We
are entering into Chinese New Year here, we're about to
enter the Year of the Dog, leaving behind the Year
(00:23):
of the Rooster. Yeah. So, you know, we we occasionally
touch on Chinese and Eastern topics throughout the year, but
this is always a good time to to really focus
on a couple of really good ones, and that's what
we have today. Yeah. So the Lunar New Year is
coming up on Friday, February, and this week we're doing
a couple of episodes related to Chinese culture and some
technological and scientific tie INDs. And so today's episode is
(00:48):
going to feature the bulk of it's going to be
an interview we did with the author of a book
about the history of the Chinese typewriter. The full title
of the book is The Chinese Typewriter, a History and
it's published by M I T Press in Yeah, it's
available wherever you get your books, so you can get
it in digital form or print. Now, Robert, you you
(01:11):
picked this book out, Well, what appealed to you about it. Well,
I basically received a release about it about this book
from Thomas S. Mulaney, who's Associate professor of Chinese History
at Stanford University and curator of the international exhibition Radical Machines, China,
Chinese and the Information Age. And I really hadn't thought
(01:32):
about this before, but I instantly thought, yeah, well, you
know the Chinese language, Mandarin, Chinese characters, how does that
fit into the information age? How has that fit into
the information age? And so I said, well, let's let's
get back to that. Let's let's read this book and
uh and see what it has to offer. And it
was a really mind blowing read. Yeah, really interesting and
(01:52):
thinking about the ways that technology formed the substrates on
which our languages evolved, and like, uh, this tension that's
constantly existing with information technology. Does the technology change the
way you use information? Or will the way you use
information shape the necessary features of technology? So we'll definitely
(02:14):
be discussing that with with Thomas Mullaney. But before we
get into that, I think we should just address the
issue behind the subject of the Chinese typewriter. Now, if
somebody isn't familiar with the written version of Chinese with
Chinese characters that it might not be immediately apparent to them.
Why the idea of a Chinese typewriter would be especially interesting. Yeah,
(02:38):
that's right, because you might just think, oh, well, we
have our letters, they have their letters wrong. Uh, Chinese
does not have an alphabet. Now, certainly you can you
can write Chinese and say opinion, which is a version
of our Roman alphabet with with with accent marks added
to let you know how the tones are to be pronounced.
(02:58):
But for the most part of any points that you
have this colonialism globalization of language that spreads around the world,
and it's based on that Roman alphabet. And then meanwhile
you have you have the Chinese with these these characters
that do not fit within that system. You can essentially
think of it as a system of pictograms, but they're
(03:18):
highly stylized pictures of what they represent. As many as
nine are compounds of a meaning element and a sound element.
So you can't just look at them and say, oh,
that's a river, that's a that's a robot, etcetera. They're
they're far more complex than that. And uh, I've read
that you need to know somewhere between twelve hundred and
(03:42):
fifteen hundred characters to get the basic gist of a
Chinese newspaper. But you need to know between two thousand
and three thousand characters to really get a sufficient understanding
of the information. Meanwhile, a well educated Chinese speaker in
today's world likely knows six thousand to eight thousand characters.
And if you're wondering, well, where does that stand in
(04:03):
terms of all the characters, Well, you can look at
some of the major Chinese lexicons out there and they're
numbering in the tens of thousands. One figure I saw
it was forty seven thousand Chinese characters. Now, that doesn't
necessarily mean that Chinese speakers would recognize forty seven thousand
characters when reading in the same way that you might read.
(04:24):
You know a book of specialized terminology that has specialized
words in English, and you wouldn't necessarily know what those
words mean, right, Yeah. I think of the thickest dictionary
English dictionary you've ever picked up, and think of all
the words that that instantly don't resonate with you, and
you'll have some sense of what we're looking at here.
But you do have this major difference in that in
(04:46):
a language like English, you can look at a word
and it's made out of letters that are familiar to you,
even if the word isn't familiar to you. So even
if you have no idea what our word means, you
could almost instantly transcribe the word on a typewriter, keyboard
or whatever with Chinese characters, not necessarily the case. That's right, uh.
(05:07):
And another thing I want to touch on here is
that in China you have eight major dialect groups, and
we call these dialects, but as Milani points out, there
as mutually distinct as Portuguese and French in some cases.
But Mandarin is the official language of course, but still
all these different dialects, they depend upon the Chinese character system.
So so whether you're talking about Mandarin or Cantonese, Uh,
(05:30):
it's the same characters, but in practice Cantonese ads I
think about three thousand specialized characters. On top of that,
but think about the unifying influence of having characters like that.
So you can have a country that is, you know,
it's considered a people, the Chinese people of the Chinese country,
and they share a government and in a sense they
share a language because they have these shared characters, even
(05:53):
though they speak very very distinct oral languages. That's right.
And then you enter this age where your internal system
of communication, written communication is at odds with the with
what's really becoming kind of a global standard. And it's
that tug of war that most of Mulaney's book focuses on.
All right, than, Robert, are you ready to go to
(06:14):
our interview with Thomas Laney. Let's do it, all right, Tom,
thank you for joining us on stuff to blow your mind.
It's it's a pleasure to be here. Well, we have
been reading your book, The Chinese Typewriter, A History. I
suppose the first question I have for you here today
is when you talk to people about your book, do
you encounter any of the key historic reactions to and
(06:37):
prejudices against just the idea the notion of a Chinese typewriter.
I would say all the time. It's what. One of
the things that was at first surprising and then I
and then I had more time to think about it
over the course of working on the book, was that
the consistency with which people would imagine in their minds
(07:02):
I what they assumed or expected a Chinese typewriter to
look like and um in essence, regardless of where I
was in the US or in Europe or An Asia,
including China. In many cases, the assumption kind of led
someone to the same expectation, which was a massive machine
(07:24):
with thousands of keys on this gigantic keyboard. And what's
surprising about this is that people arrive at this conclusion
without necessarily or almost never having seen such an image.
They just sort of created algorithmically in their mind. And
(07:47):
I think what I came to the kind of the
conclusion of is that the the what's going on in
in our minds when we when we think about a
Chinese typewriter, it's a kind of it's like a mental algorithm.
It's a it's a it's a very short computer program
that runs in our mind and it goes something like this. Well,
(08:09):
I know that by definition, a typewriter is a machine
with a keyboard and keys. I know that there is
one key per letter. I know that Chinese doesn't have
letters that has characters, and I know that there are
tens of thousands of characters where I've heard that. Ergo,
I've reached the conclusion about what in my mind's I
(08:29):
a Chinese typewriter looks like um. And in the book,
what I tried to do is say, now there is
a total equation set up between keyboards, keys and typewriters.
There's no such thing as a typewriter without keys in
in the market, uh, and also in our imagination. But
if we go back early enough in the history of
(08:51):
the typewriter, including the Western typewriter, we very quickly get
into this you know, sort of amazing and very verse,
kind of Jurassic ecology of typewriters, many different types of typewriters,
including typewriters that had no keys or keyboards themselves. And
that in essence, the Chinese typewriter, which is a key
(09:14):
which is a typewriter that has no keyboard and no keys,
is a descendant of a sort of early early species
of typewriter that in the West died out, the typewriter
with no keyboard, but in China, um, you know, lived
on and continued. It's it's it's it's evolution. Um. And
(09:34):
so now, when when the two meet again in the
year nineteen s two, Uh, when someone from the descendants
of the keyboard typewriter looks over and sees the descendants
of the non keyboard typewriter. They don't know what to
make of it. They don't know what they're looking at.
So there's a concept you talk about in the book
(09:55):
that you call the techno linguistic dimensions of a language.
And I was wondering if you could explain a little
bit about what you mean by the techno linguistic dimensions
of a language. And so, for example, what are some
of the techno linguistic aspects of modern American English? Has
a point of reference for our listeners, And then how
(10:17):
how do those same types of techno linguistic dimensions inform
the creation of the Chinese typewriter in history? In essence,
the techno linguistic dimension is every part of writing text
technology that is essential for writing to work and for
(10:41):
text technologies to function, but that are not uh simply
superficially on the page or on the screen the stuff
we read. And so, to give an example, I remember
earlier when I was in the early stages of working
on this project. I am a big believer in kind
of practice based theory. So take classes and things and
(11:04):
really try to understand the processes and machines you're thinking about,
because insight will emerge in that and so I I
enrolled in this intensive letter press practicum, so movable type
type setting and for for English, because I wanted to
step into you know, this space that there are obviously
(11:26):
many many practitioners of even today, but certainly over history,
and just see what it looks like. And there was one.
I mean, it's an amazing I took it at the
San Francisco Center for the book. It was just absolutely
tremendous um. But there's one thing in particular that stayed
with me, which is seems might seem incidental to someone
who is in that world for a long time, and
(11:47):
that is when when you or I looked at a
printed poster or a book or an article or whatever
it is, uh, and we see the you know, the
text block in the middle of the page each and
then we see the margins, the one inch margins on
the left and right to the top and bottom. I
would venture to guess that you, as as I, we
(12:08):
see emptiness, we see space. We see there is nothing there. Yes,
there's paper, but that's not where the text is. And
so if you, if you just stopped there, it would
be easy to imagine that that it really is made
up of nothingness. There's nothing there that's not where language happens,
and so forth. When you when you go through the
(12:28):
process of learning, in this case letter press, UH, you
realize that you actually have to build emptiness. You have
to build a space on the page quite literally, with
pieces of metal. So if you want there to be
spacing between the lines, you need you need letting union.
This is not just a digital term in our you
(12:49):
know abe platform. This is a this is a thin
sliver of metal whose whose dimensionality will will give you
so much space between the lines. And then you use
these various sized pieces of wood uh sometimes referred to
as furniture, that you build up around the block of
text that you're going to situate on the page. You
(13:11):
lock it in there really tight with these things called
coins that you kind of put in place, and then
kind of jack into position and hold it onto the
the type bed so it doesn't wiggle around when you're
printing UM. And then and then you put you know,
you you ink it, and you pull the paper through
and then it comes out on the other side, and
there you have it, a text block with one inch
margins and some much space and emptiness and so much
(13:35):
text like black on white, and suddenly your view of space,
or at least for me, the view of space changed radically.
It takes a lot of stuff to make nothing happen.
It takes a lot of And these and these pieces
of wooden furniture they don't have writing on them. I
can't read a piece of these, you know, these wooden blocks. Um,
(13:55):
So they're not operating in the same kind of heuristic
interpretive space as the actual Let's say it's a poem
by a you know, or or an essay or a
broadside that I can read and think about and debate,
and maybe it's a love letter or a wedding invitation.
All of this stuff that's so full of meaning in
the classic sense of the word. Well, there's all of
this meaninglessness, like these wooden pieces of things, like these,
(14:18):
these flats of metal that have to be you know,
for letting. Um, there's all of this meaninglessness that goes
into making that meaning work, whether whether it's a wedding
invitation or you know, or or an iconoclastic essay. Um
that would that metal is for me, part of this
(14:41):
admittedly very large category of techno linguistic It's all of
the the stuff, but also also all of the mental models,
categorization systems, workflows and processes and things that go into
making something work on the page. Experts, practition in ners.
People in these industries they know these things. I mean,
(15:03):
it's second nature for them. So it's it's not as
if I've discovered the Lost City of Atlantis. But um,
if they do their job well and and if they
succeed in their goal, their goal is to keep that
stuff invisible. You know, you don't want you don't want
a badly printed poem that kind of show, you know, something,
(15:24):
maybe maybe to get some ink gout on one of
those pieces of wood and an accidentally in the page. Well,
that's failure, you know that. That means it didn't work out.
You want that techno linguistic stuff to remain invisible. Um.
And but as for myself, as an historian of language change,
of text technologies, of especially of a family of text
(15:50):
technologies on the Chinese side, that, as I argue in
the book, has had been placed in this very asymmetric
unequal position in the global history of information technology. We
as the storians of information technology, we we really do
need to pay attention to that meaninglessness. Because oftentimes it's
(16:11):
in the space of the meaninglessness, not the not the
stuff that's on the page, the poem itself, where the
action is. Sometimes it is, but it's it's not necessarily
in the poem where the actions it might actually be
in the stuff around the poem that makes that poem
printapal transmittable, sabable in the first place. An example from
(16:34):
Asia that I really like to show actually comes from Japan.
There's this there's this wonderful YouTube video that shows a
turn of the century Japanese automaton, a calligraphy automaton. It
is constructed to look um like a Chinese woman with
(16:59):
a brush in hand, and when the gears move uh,
the the automaton composes a really beautifully wrought Chinese character
Kanji character. And the video shows I think it's newscasters.
It's part of a news broadcast in Japan contemporary maybe
(17:19):
a few years ago, showing people you know, like looing
and eyeing about this, and everyone is paying attention to
what's happening on the page, the character and what it
looks like as it comes out. But then in the back,
in the sort of the end of the video and
also behind the automaton for me, is where the actual
(17:40):
action is. They show the carefully carved series of really
woobily and wobbily wooden camshafts that are tucked away in
the back of the base of the automaton that when
this kind of it's kind of hard to describe. When
(18:01):
they's guiding almost almost like almost like a record a
record player, arm and needle is is tracing over these
camshafts as they turn. It's translating the machine is translating
the shape of those camshafts into the movement of the automaton,
(18:21):
which is then producing this perfect character on the page.
For me, those wooden camshafts uh at the construction of them,
the figuring out what shape each one needs to be
and what sequence and how do we build this device
that translates it into a character that to me is
actually the location of language. But if we were to
(18:43):
take those camshafts, you know, disassemble the machine, and I
just hand you a bunch of they look like you know,
they look like wooden plates, but they're not perfectly circular.
They've got a wobbly, wobbly kind of edge. If I
just handed them to you and said, what character is this? What? What? What?
What Japanese character is this? You couldn't read it. The
(19:04):
only way that it produces that character is in this
careful sequence. Um. So this is this is for me
at least, this is really interesting. Those those wooden camshafts,
you know, crafted by hand and at the you know,
in the late nineteenth late late nine or twentieth century. These, Um,
these camshafts are not a representation of that character, of
(19:27):
that Japanese character that comes out the other side. They
quite literally are that character when assembled in a particular sequence.
So that's that's to me is the techno linguistic. It
is this vast space of expert action and care and
attention and practice. Um. But it's not something you can
(19:51):
just simply read, uh, in a naked eye sense, the
way that we might be able to read an essay
or a poem and debate about it. But all of
this meaning business, this uninterpretability is what makes language work.
Without it, language just ceases to function in any language, Chinese, English, Japanese,
you name it. That explanation almost makes me think of
(20:13):
like the base pairs or the gene, the generator phenotype
in an animal that we only interact with the external
phenotype unless you're a genetic engineer researcher, but that the
thing in the external world is literally generated by this,
you know, behind the scenes code. I think that's right.
I think, I mean, I think that it's it's uh,
(20:35):
it's something that if you were just you just look
at it at the face of it, and this is true.
And you know, this is true in the realm of
certainly in the realm of early computing and contemporary computing.
The you know, if we we experience our MacBook prose
the way that we do because of the success of
a series of engineers and product designers who went out
(20:57):
of their way to conceal as much as possible what's
really going on. So when I type the letter, when
I when I depressed the key that has the symbol
that I recognize as F or G or H on it,
and then it appears on the screen. It happened so
fast that I can kind of live inside the fantasy,
(21:18):
live inside the fiction that in essence, this thing is
just like a digital typewriter. It's just I push it,
it translated some motion and then it put printed it
on the page. But of course that's not how it works.
I mean, there's there's all of these translations going on
to get from point A to point double Z. There's
there's regulations and coding standards and and then quite literally
(21:41):
you know, physical logic gates and and um. But and
so that space. If you were just to take away
the key that says F and take away the screen,
that that basically all the screen is doing is showing
you that the bit stream worked. But in men Gin,
what it looks like if you take away the screen
(22:02):
and take away the symbols on the keys, what exactly
is the letter s at that point? It's still there.
If you were to push the button and the computers
on it would still be doing what it's supposed to
be doing. But the the the kind of circuit of
interpretation that the human needs would not be complete. I
(22:22):
would not know whether or not I what letter I
had had had type. So what I'm interested in I
mean not to the exclusion of the surface parts of language,
but I think I want to include the spaces of
language which, like the genotype phenotype relationship, are happening in
this completely dark room. Um, you know, how how do
(22:48):
we think about the genotype without recourse to the phenotype
might be one way to put it, but I'm not
sure if that gets us any any further. All Right,
we're gonna take a quick break and when we come
back more with Thomas Mullaney. Alright, we're back, so too
many Westerners Mandarin Chinese present certain challenges. Chinese characters present
(23:10):
certain challenges, to say the least. But can you explain
some of the challenges that Chinese characters were seen to
pose to China itself in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Definitely,
there were there were many, um many that I would say,
many problems that were that that were sort of deservedly
laid at the feet of Chinese character writing, and some
(23:33):
that I think a sober analysis of history would say
it was an unfair thing to blame characters for. Um So,
I mean there's a there's a sort of it, there's
a series. One of them would certainly be that in
the late nineteenth century into the early twenty century, China
(23:54):
is undergoing, like many polities on Earth around this time,
is undergoing a uh a transition, and it's an uneasy one,
a transition between one form of organizing political power and
state craft so and it's kind of wrapped up in
the nutshell of the word empire U two a republic
(24:19):
and so you know, this is this This takes a
revolution to happen. It takes it arguably takes a civil
war to complete this transition. But one part of this
transition was a radical reconceptualization of where legitimacy for state
uh state rulers derives it, not the shift from the
(24:42):
derivation from heaven of the right to rule to a
a shift at least in people, you know, in the
argument to the people, whatever this word means. Well, one
of the issues, and this is this happens in many
of these sort of empire to nation state transitions, is
that people say, well, we need more of our people
(25:02):
to be involved or part of this political enterprise that
we're in where they're no longer subjects. They should now
be educated, literate, participating, economically participating, politically participating actors. And
one of the major barriers, and this is the argument
that's being made at the turn of the century, is
(25:24):
that Chinese character based writing places people in China at
such a comparative disadvantage to those in alphabetic contexts and
UM and so there's many, many reformers, education reformers, political
reformers that are are making this case. Some of them,
(25:47):
a very small number of them, I say, would arrive
at the extreme notion that what the solution to this
problem is simply getting rid of characters altogether and replacing
them with another scripted. A great many more within society
try to figure out new techniques, new pedagogies by which
(26:08):
to introduce more Chinese students and readers to what they
understood is the core vocabulary, the basics of Chinese. And
there's a lot of a lot of stuff that was
surrounding issues of literacy. For for a number of the
actors that I deal with in my in my book,
they care about they care about mass education, mass literacy,
(26:32):
uh very much. But they also care about things like
how do you design a card catalog system for books
in Chinese for our new public libraries that we're designing.
So if I walk up to a card catalog and
I want to find a book by a particular author
or particular title, what is the best way to sequence
(26:57):
or organized Chinese character writing so that someone can find
it as quickly as possible. They're often again comparing with
the alphabets. They say, look, how easy the alphabet. It's
a through z. There's no ambiguity about where you put,
you know, Alfred versus um Zimbabwe doesn't mean it's very simple.
In Chinese, there is no one set way of organizing dictionaries,
(27:23):
phone books and nameless and so forth. Until the nineteen twenties.
There is a kind of knock them down, knock em
sackem uh debate, which which involves library scientists and mass
education people, and it's like a full blown kind of
press event where they argue with one another about the
(27:46):
best way to organize telephone books and library card catalogs
and the indexes of books and name registers and all
of these things. Uh, and they they are coument is
made that because we because Chinese doesn't have a self
evident A through Z sequence, and because modern capitalist economies
(28:12):
and also modern republican states really require fast information retrieval,
we are that China is operating in kind of slow
motion as compared to the rest of the world, because
every time we need to recall a file from a database,
it takes us a few seconds longer than it does
(28:33):
to recover an equivalent from somewhere in the alphabetic world.
And if you take those thousands, tens of thousands, millions
of acts of information retrieval, and if each one of
them takes a few seconds longer then their counterpart, and
you add them all up, and suddenly we are we're
kind of operating in this slow motion um as compared
(28:56):
to the rest of the world. So it's a really
fascinating idea about that these theorists had about where China's
problems were coming from. Some people were arguing at the
scale of of war and scaling it, and arguing at
the scale of empire and colonialism. But there's this subset
of people who are arguing that in essence, China's problems
(29:17):
are derived from millions of like tiny increments of delay,
and that it's our job as reformers, as Chinese reformers,
to find a way to close that gap and speed
up the language so that we can operate in a
global you know, a global economy and so forth. Um. So,
there's there's probably twenty more examples of critiques of of
(29:40):
Chinese character writing, but that's probably a nice diet one
that is operating at the space of you know, the
ability to read and debate and argue and engage in
interpretation and read those poems and read essays. And then
the other side, which I think is more along the
lines of the techno linguistic discussion in in the book,
(30:01):
which is people fighting over how to organize this language
in space and time. So that's really interesting. It makes
me think about, um, the way that you talk about
the two different approaches to making Chinese characters compatible with
modern labor saving technology like the typewriter, but not just
(30:23):
the typewriter, these other things you mentioned card catalogs and everything,
and they're essentially two ways to go about it you
mentioned in the book. You can try to adapt the
technology to the language, like maybe Remington tried to do
in the example you give where they have this phonetic
alphabet for Chinese on their typewriter but no one would
use it. Or you could adapt the technology to the language. Um,
(30:49):
what are some examples you see of of the most
or maybe not most successful, but the major efforts in
both of these camps through the twentieth century. I think
that's exactly right. And and so these putting these attempts
to the debate for many was you know, who has
(31:09):
to change. Is it is it Remingtons that has to
come and meet Chinese or is it Chinese that needs
to meet Remington's. And the way that the history plays out,
and also the way it's still playing out is uh
that these two are locked in a a kind of
never ending a never ending cycle and never ending dialectic
(31:32):
that is still playing its way out, is playing itself out.
And so the example from the book that you mentioned
of basically just trying to bring the language into a
Remington's more or less with the Remington more or less
untouched is the case of the Chinese phonetic alphabet UM,
and it just simply doesn't It doesn't take off, it
(31:57):
doesn't work. Remington and many other companies have fun to
mentally misunderstood what the Chinese phenetic alphabet was supposed to do.
What it was made to do, UM since it was
invented by Chinese linguists, but it was never meant to
replace Chinese character based writing. But they kind of harbored
this dream that, yeah, maybe that's not why it was invented,
but we all know that Chinese characters will eventually disappear,
(32:20):
and we're hoping that this is the thing that puts
the final nail in the costant, which is not what happened,
but it's it's it's in the tension between those two,
those two more simple means of trying to solve the puzzle.
And one of the reformers put it really clearly when
he said that Chinese characters have are innocence, Chinese characters
(32:45):
are innocent, or Chinese characters have committed no crime. And
he goes on to say, this is an overseas Chinese
students in the nineteen who goes on to become an
engineer and and to develop the prototype of the first
mass manufacturer type writer for Chinese. And he says, and
more or less, any engineer worth the title would never
(33:09):
want or never expect the world to change to make
their job easier, Like that's not the engineer's role in existence.
It is to take the world as it is, or
at least start from that advantage point and then try
to think outside of preconceptions to to meet the world
where it is. So in this case, the Chinese language
(33:33):
can take part in the information in this newest iteration
of the information revolution um and the maybe one place
that is a good example of an attempt to meet
each other halfway was an experimental Chinese typewriter. It was
never mass manufactured, but it was fully conceived and prototyped
(33:58):
by another or overseas Chinese students who was working at
n y U in the nineteen teens. Uh and he
he develops a prototype Chinese typewriter in which the goal
was to figure out how to quote unquote spell Chinese
(34:22):
piece by piece on the page. And I put spell
in in scare quotes because he did not mean phonetically.
He did not mean okay. Instead of writing the two
characters for Baiting the city of Baiting, I mean the
righte b I J. He didn't mean that. What he
meant was, can we uh, can we subdivide all Chinese
(34:46):
characters into existence and discover the underlying, repeating modular shapes,
these little pieces of characters that continually show up in
every character that exists. And if we can reduce Chinese
to a set of these modular shapes and then put
(35:07):
those shapes onto UH keys or onto type bars, or
in this case, he makes it into a cylinder that's
inside the machine, then one could fit tens of thousands
of characters onto a machine. UH simply by shattering them
into pieces, and then the user would have to sit
(35:29):
down at the machine and compose the desired character module
by module. And so its it. It's it's a it's
an incredible idea, and it it's related to the Western
alphabetic notion of spelling a word. You know, the word
cat is not on our typewriter. We just we have
(35:49):
C and A and T, and therefore we do have
cat on our typewriter. It's the same kind of concept
that abandoning or leaving behind the phenetic part of that
and just saying okay, we're not hearing about the sound
of it. We care about the ability to build up
something on the page. So this if you, if you,
if you look at this, it's this is neither trying
(36:12):
to take the typewriter and make it serve or subordinated
to the Chinese writing. It's still it's still trying to
build a machine that looks like a Western typewriter. But
at the same time, it's also not simply taking Chinese
writing and subordinating it to uh to a Remington's. It's
(36:33):
trying to meet the problems somehow halfway and in an
essence saying okay, both parties are going to have to
give something up. I don't know if that's the right word,
or are going to have to be willing to really
uh reimagine what you consider to be canonical first principles.
So in Chinese, we have to give up the idea
(36:55):
that the character is the base of our language. But
the character is the fundamental unit of our language. It
isn't we're going to in this machine. It's going to
be the pieces of characters that are the fundamental units.
And if people are willing to accept that I learned
how to use this machine in this way, then you
can have all the characters you want. If you're unwilling
to think that way, that's another that's another issue. And
(37:18):
then in the on the you know, visa VI the
I mean this is sort of a diplomatic negotiation metaphor,
but visa VI the remington you know, delegation saying to them, listen,
you know, you're going to have to give up on
the idea of of of of sound and phonetics and
the sounding out of words. That's that's not how this
(37:40):
machine works. Um. It's these symbols are not going to
be letters of any alphabets, Uh, technically speaking, it's not
an alphabet we're talking about. It's a set of modular shapes.
But we can we can still you know, think of
the of the type R. We but there. But you
don't have to give up on your idea of a
typewriter as you know it more or less. It's kind
(38:01):
of the typewriter, you know. Um, and this this, this
machine in its day and age, uh, doesn't win the day,
It doesn't gain mass manufacturing support. But arguably this idea
of how to treat characters, how to quote unquote fit
them into digital spaces, is very much alive and well
(38:22):
even today. Um. In fact, it's kind of made a
comeback as one of the dominant ways of thinking of writing.
When when typeface designers those you know, when practitioners are
companies that are building a font, a digital font for Chinese,
they often the team that builds a Chinese funt often
thinks in these terms. They don't think, Okay, I'm gonna
(38:43):
draw every Chinese character from scratch, which would take you know,
would take years and years. I'm gonna scan them and
I'm going to create my basier curves and I'm going
to do all this sort of stuff. They say, what
are the pieces and modules that make up characters. Let's
let's focus to a certain extent at that level, and voila.
(39:04):
The work that we did on this piece has a
multiplier effect because this module shows up in fifty other characters,
or a hundred characters, or a thousand characters. So that's
that's one of the I mean, that's that's the fascinating
thing about history in general, but history of information technology
in particular is it is completely nonlinear, and something that
was laughed off the stage eighty years ago can suddenly
(39:27):
in a different ecology be the way to to do something. Um. Yeah,
and so I think that's that might be a good example.
That's that's that's the story of the Young the Young
overseas Chinese student. I deal with um in the early
part of the book. I love in the book how
you you explore this, uh, this sort of middle path
is attempt to find this compromise, and at one point
(39:48):
you compare it to aryptis and so the sea monster
in the whirlpool. Uh. I love this exploration of how
on on one end you don't want the machine to
change or limit the language and the culture, but then
On the other side, there's this reluctance to create something
(40:09):
that will look like the monster machine that some are
expecting a Chinese typewriter to be. I like thinking in
terms of agony, I think, and what I mean by
agony is something to the extent of I don't know.
Imagine you're an international trans oceanic pilot and and you
(40:30):
know you've got three passengers on board, and you know
you're you're going over the sea, and maybe you maybe
under certain circumstances, if you chose, you could just hit something.
You know, you don't feel well, whatever, you just hand
over controls to your copilot. Short of these two people, uh,
there's no one else to hand over controls too. There
(40:51):
is the space of having to stay within a condition
of anxiety, contradiction, irresolvability, and in essence those it's it's
that kind of staying in ambiguity, staying in uncertainty that
is probably the shared characteristic among the actors in the book.
(41:15):
In a certain sense, that's intentional, and it's also trying
to make an intervention because there are other actors, much
more famous actors in Chinese history who receive you know,
the Lion's share of attention when it comes to questions
of the Chinese language and modernity and technology and stuff. Um.
And these are these are figures that I talked about
in the introduction of the book. Who made these really
(41:38):
sweeping iconoclastic statements that we should just get rid of
characters altogether and use English or use French or use esperanto.
And they sound so iconoclastic and sexy and rebellious, and
really their naives the statements that they're making are completely
ridiculous at one level, uh, simplistic and in many ways naive. Um.
(42:02):
I mean, clearly, there are societies on Earth that have
undertaken massive transformations in their orthographies. But the idea that
China as a whole was going to just cut ties
with writing uh and uh was it sounds good on paper,
It gets the attention certainly of contemporaries and even more
(42:22):
so uh uh scholars of of China after the fact.
But what it what it obscures is that, hey, those
guys didn't win. You know, Chinese characters are with us,
Chinese I t is booming, you know. So the prognosis
that they were giving in the years twenty did not
(42:44):
pan out. And yet we still teach there, We still
assigned their essays in all of our classes. There is
this other kind of motley crew of individuals um you know,
most of them Chinese or Chinese descent, but also engineers
and linguists and entrepreneurs around the world. They're stuck and
they understand that they're stuck. We can't We're not going
(43:04):
to just get rid of Chinese and go the alphabet
and therefore we can all buy IBM s and that's
the you know, that's the benefit of us severing this.
We're not going to do that. But we want IBM s.
We want mainframes, we want microcomputers, we want telegraphy, we
want these things. Or in a more selfish way, we
want to be the company that gives this to the
(43:27):
Chinese market because we want to make money. You know,
that's that's there as well. But they're staying in this
space of agony between where there's no way out. They
have to stay in this and think in that space.
You know, I often don't think in terms of historical
success or like where's the you know, where's the when
did the strings come in? And when does when are
(43:47):
the lovers reunited? But the lovers reunited is in essence
at the end of the book because the practice and
the concept of input that is in that is is
baked in in an early form into the Utag's experimental
Ninettes typewriter. Than being quiet, that way of building a
(44:09):
typewriter is something that is born out of that that tension,
that that agony, that irresolvability that all of these individuals
are living in for for decades. I mean, arguably, I
mean not just any one individual, but as a cast
of characters, there are people that are living in that
(44:29):
space for a century and an ass. They're not giving
into easy, iconoclastic, flashy uh in statements, but neither are
they saying, well, I guess we should pack it up
and go home. We can't take part in the global
this new iteration of the global information revolution. They're just
staying in that space. And so I have admiration, not
(44:51):
not not because of what they build or that they
made money here, that they're you know, in a sort
of romantic sense, but that staying and that kind of
space is not a very rewarding thing. Um And but
you know, dozens and dozens, it's not hundreds of people
in the story are really in that space and that's
(45:13):
the that's that's where. And also, just to bring it
back a little bit to the discussion of techno linguistic
the techno linguistic space is where these this motley crew
is focusing most of their attention. They're saying to themselves
to the world, Okay, we want to keep Chinese characters.
(45:34):
What does that mean? Exactly what that means is that
when we pick up a book in twenty years in China,
we want to see Chinese characters. When someone sits down,
goes to the telegraph the post office and wants to
send a telegram, we wanted that the sender can write
this out in Chinese and that the recipient when they
receive it, can receive something in Chinese with Chinese characters
(45:56):
in it. Like, let's be very specific about what we
mean about preserve being the language. And then and then then,
and then the next kind of collective statement out of
their mouth is, Okay, what are we willing to blow
up and totally dismantle and rebuild in radical new ways
in order to achieve that effect? H and the stuff
(46:17):
that they're willing to blow up and build and be
iconoclastic with regards to is mainly the stuff that is
I use this metaphor in the book. It's like it's
under the street, it's in the sewage system, it's in
the walls and the electrical and the you know, the
air conditioning system. It's it's in the way that the
library card catalogs are organized. It's in the way that
(46:38):
we break down characters and we put them into pieces
inside a machine. It's lots and lots and lots of stuff.
But if we're successful, the user, let's say, or the
recipient of the message, won't necessarily have to worry about
that stuff. They'll still be able to experience the Chinese
character writing environment. Um. And it's not glorious work, you know.
(47:03):
It's it's not the space of poetry. It's the space
of the predecessor of arguing over the unicode, you know,
Unicode regulations and protocols and stuff. It's it's it's technical,
dogged work. But they're convinced, and ultimately they prove it
to be. So they're convinced that that's the place where
(47:23):
Chinese can be preserved and saved. All Right, we are
going to take a quick break and when we come back,
we will have more of our interview with Thomas mulaney. Alright,
we're back. Could you talk a little bit about the
relationship of politics and values to what could be written
on some historical incarnations of the Chinese typewriter, Like I'm
(47:45):
thinking of the machines with limited numbers of character slugs,
and how the inclusion and placement of the character slugs
could be influenced by anything. I guess whoever is designing it,
maybe Christian missionary zeal or Maoist ideology. And then is
a second part, do you think that's unique to the
history of the Chinese typewriter? Or there are are there
(48:07):
ways that politics and values influence what can be done
on other composition and printing devices, even alphabetic ones. The
Chinese typewriter that ends up being mass manufactured and becomes
the quintessential model for Chinese typewriters is the common usage
(48:28):
Chinese typewriter and for this machine, in essence that the
compromise at play is, Okay, how do we fit all
tens of thousands of characters on this machine? The answer
is we don't. The answer is what we should be
doing is a rigorous almost proto digital humanities, distant reading
(48:49):
analysis of as big of a corpus of Chinese text
as possible. We should be counting the number of times
every single one of our characters appears, and then do
a frequency analysis, and based on that frequency analysis of
tens of thousands of characters, we should figure out what
(49:10):
is the what is the minimum number of characters that
we would need for the maximum amount of utility, all
with the understanding that in this mode we can't have
it all. We can't have all of our characters on
the machine. So the outcome of this is the common
usage machine, which by the midpoint of the twentieth century
gives the user a trade bed with two thousand four
(49:34):
characters on it, so roughly, which is a small percentage
of the tens of thousands of characters that exist. But
as they figured out through these statistical analyzes, which are
all done by hand, uh, that these account for five
or more per cent of of everything that you're gonna
need it for. And then so now this raises um
(49:58):
interesting possibilities questions with regard to politics and politics of language, because, uh,
when once you start saying that not all characters get
on the machine, the question naturally emerges, well, who decides,
and what's the basis for deciding who's in and who's
out and if something is out, what does that do? Uh.
From the user's perspective in terms of what they write
(50:20):
so ay is that the politics are alive and well.
The the some of the One of my favorite examples there,
there's I guess two from the political realm, from the
perspective of early Chinese republicans, those who wanted to overthrow
the empire and sound a republic and revolutionaries. One of
the bad guys of Chinese history is the first Uh
(50:45):
de facto president of the republic after the revolution. UH.
This gentleman you and Chicai, who's a comes from a
military background, and he's understood as having betrayed the revolution
because shortly after the Revolution of nineteen eleven overthrows the
final dynasty in China establish as a republic. This this fella,
under the advising under the council of his of his
(51:10):
kind of entourage, decides to re establish empire and he
names himself an emperor UH. And it causes another more
or less kind of small scale civil war, and he
dies of a natural He dies a natural deaths and
then he leaves China, and this political vacuum that gives
rise to what's called the warlord period, where there's no
central authority. He's he's he's not a love he's not
(51:32):
a beloved figure by many revolutionaries. So it's interesting is
that when you get to trade beds of Chinese typewriters
in the early twenties, his name, the characters that make
up his name will are not on the trade bed.
They're kind of stuck in what's called the secondary usage
(51:53):
box of characters, which is a wooden box that contains
a few more thousand characters that the type is can
can can can can use. If they need a character
that's not on the trade bed, they just use a
pair of tweezers. They pluck it out of the wooden box,
they put it on the trade bed, and then they
go ahead and use it. You know, this could in
certain sense, this could be accidental. Not all the characters
(52:15):
in his name are as common as others, but some
are not uncommon um, but there is there are these
decisions that that the designers of these machines get to
make about what to include and whatnot, and often for
political reasons. So the same typewriter engineer who leaves this
man's name off the or the characters that make up
(52:35):
this man's name off the machine, puts his name hit
the characters that make his name onto the common usage
trade bed, even though the characters in his name are
very uncommon. So there's it's to me, that's kind of
like the nineteen eighties when computer programmers would leave little
messages in the common field of of of programs that
they were making. It's sort of it's sort of the
(52:57):
you know, the the designers prerogative to their signature as
they will. UM. A more extreme example comes from revolution,
the Communist revolution, and this one is a bit more subtle.
The so the trade bed, the two thousand characters that
the user has in front of him or her, they
(53:18):
are they're not. They're organized according to basically let's call
it dictionary organization, a way of organizing characters that would
have been familiar to anyone using them. But they were
also further subdivided into most most common characters, and those
were in the very center of the trade bed, and
then second most common characters, which were on the left
(53:39):
and right flank of this rectangular matrix. UM and the
idea quite simply was because you had to go from
one character to the next to the next to the next.
You want to group and cluster and clump together common
usage characters as close as possible. So you know, we
we we really want that center piece, that center part
(53:59):
of the trade bed to have as many of the
most frequent characters as possible. Well, in the nineteen twenties,
thirties forties, prior to the Communist Revolution, the character Mao,
which by itself means a follicle of hair like hair
on your head, is a very common character, and but
it's not the most common of characters, so it was
(54:21):
on the right flank of the trade bed. Well after
the revolution that character was promoted. Basically, it was moved
from the flanks of the machine to this center, most
most most common region. And for obvious reasons that this
is the surname of Malta Dong of chairman Mao, whose
(54:43):
name engineers rightly understood was going to be in lots
and lots and lots of texts, And so suddenly it
becomes easier for a type is faster for a type
of to produce his name. You know, the question often
comes I often encounter the question, do I think that
these dimensions cycle back into what the user is doing
(55:08):
and basically, you know, shape what it is that they're writing.
Does do our technologies shape what we write? And the answer,
I think, in a kind of first principles way is
undoubtedly yes. There it's it's it's undoubted that when you
create different levels of difficulty and and and time to
(55:30):
produce one word versus another word, that this kind of
an economics of energy send cycles back into how we
use those technologies. The real challenge is how do we
study that methodologically so that we don't simply, you know,
find in our in our research foregone conclusion. Um. That's
(55:51):
a very very very hard thing to think of as
in a story, and like how would I actually put
that hypothesis to the test um, you know, because then
you touch really build a research program that would allow
you to do that. One way that's possible is uh
is and it's a pretty it's it's actually pretty fun is.
In the nineteen fifties and sixties, Chinese typewriters were increasingly
(56:13):
used to publish books and articles. So someone would use
uh mimiograph paper produce a master copy of a text
and then with a mimiograph machine would create a run
those maybe anywhere from ten to a hundred fifty and
a hundreds. And this was a perfect kind of technology.
(56:34):
This is a niche that the typewriter plus mimiograph was
perfect for. Because if you're going to publish only a
hundred copies of a book, you don't want a printing press.
It's just too too much overhead for too little output.
But neither do you want to write that stuff by hand.
So anyway, on the in these books which I've amassed,
this collection of you can see that whenever the type
(56:57):
is encountered a word or a character or series that
was not on the machine, he or she would simply
skip ahead and leave spaces there and then write it
in by hand onto the memeo paper and then produce
the book. So you could actually see a which characters
were not on this person's machine, and how many, how
often or how willing the type ist was to do this,
(57:20):
to leave spaces and then enter a word. Um. Now,
the question would be is that over time are there
fewer of these handwritten insertions? Are there? Lets? Are there
more in handwritten insertions? And if there were fewer handwritten insertions,
over time. This is kind of building a research program
on the fly here. If there were fewer insertions over time,
(57:40):
it would be reasonable to hypothesize that that type ists
are using the strategy of basically synonym replacements. It's like, well,
I don't have that word which is not and then
let me just replace it with a synonym or leave
it out, uh, in favor of a character that is here.
Because we know that the typewriter itself ever changed size,
(58:00):
you only have two thousands five to deal with. It's
not as if they grew over time, and that's what
would account for the lack of insertions. So there's you'd
have to figure out how to actually submit this to
the acid bath of reason. But I do think that
on a first principles basis, it's undoubted that this that
this feedback loop exists. It's hard to imagine that it
(58:21):
could not exist. This is kind of silly, but I
kind of can't help but wonder if the availability of
emojis is shaping our language or the way we think,
Like what you have an emoji for and what you
don't have an emoji for. I think that's true, and
also animated gifts. If you think about someone who wants
to articulate something. I mean, think about Twitter and the
(58:44):
number of times that some political figure says something it's
so befuttling that instead of the person bothering to articulate,
what is it about this statement by said political figure
that is ridiculous or causes cognitive us an ins or
it's a contradiction, or it's illogical. Instead, it's a post
of two second clip of some famous actor, you know,
(59:09):
looking befuddled at the camera, and that's it. And that's
like as if that captures it. I think that's what
I'm getting in there with this, with economy of expression.
I mean, one is takes time and it's hard and
you have to and you're you're sticking your neck out
there to figure out how to put this into words.
And how do I get my feeling which is going
on in my mind that this is an illogical statement,
(59:32):
and how do I make the argument that it is.
That's that's like a that's an afternoon, you know, that's
a that's that's a that takes the whole day, a
whole week, a whole month to figure out how to
put it. And it's so fast and you've got to
get it out there, because there's going to be another
illogical statement any second now, so might as well just
take and now, of course the fact that these animated
gifts are preloaded into the technology. Let me just find
(59:55):
a preloaded one, uh that is spacious and and ambiguous
enough that I can encode my feeling in it, and
then I'll post that instead, and it takes me, you know,
all of five seconds. There's that dimension of it. So
that's one where it's cycling into expression and also the
capacity to express because it takes good you know, good
(01:00:15):
book isn't written, it's rewritten. A good writer is basically
a good editor is what they really are. And so
if you never learn how to edit and how to
revise and how to then can you become a good writer?
That's that's probably not, but it's open for question. I guess.
The other part is our chiveability. If someone takes the time,
(01:00:37):
even if they fail, you know, even if their argument
doesn't hold, if they take the time to express why
they found some statement theological or shocking or whatever it
might be, whatever the case might be, well it exists
in a textual form that can be attributed to a
person and a time and a place. How in the
world is an historian in the year to two thousand,
(01:00:59):
three hundred if exists going to cite Uh, I don't know.
The animated gifts a that was used seven hundred thousand
times in twenty different scenarios as as a way of
trying to articulate what people in the year whatever thought.
(01:01:20):
It almost you know, And these are the reverberations of
technologies of expression, technologies of writing that we don't have
to deal with, but of course someone will maybe. All right, Tom,
it looks like we're out of time here, but we
really appreciate you taking time out of your day to
chat with us. Uh really enjoyed the book. It's a
it's a great read for people that are interested in
(01:01:41):
Chinese history, history of technology, linguistic technology, linguistics itself. So
thanks for chatting with us. Yeah, thanks very much for
having me. I really appreciate it. Thanks a lot, all right,
so that you have it, Thanks again to Tom Us
mulaney for chatting with us about his book The Chinese Typewriter. Again,
(01:02:04):
it's out from M I T Press. You can get
that in print, you can get it as a digital
e book. However you like to consume your media. And
he's not stopping here. The next book in the series
is going to be The Chinese Computer. Oh yeah, and
he he teased it a little for us, kind of
off Mike, But it's gonna involve not only the some
(01:02:25):
of the the agencies that were involved in the first book,
but also UH like the US government and UH and
sort of the the the espionage world of the Cold
War as well. Yes, we will go deeper and deeper
into the realms of composition surrogacy. If you're curious what
that means, check back in with The Chinese Computer in
(01:02:45):
the future. In the meantime, be sure to head on
over to stuff double your mind dot com. That's where
you'll find all the podcast episodes, blog post links out
to various social media accounts, etcetera, and the on the
landing page. For this episode, we will be sure to
link out to a place where you can buy Milany's book,
as well as Molany's profile at Stanford. Thanks as always
(01:03:06):
to our excellent audio producers Alex Williams and try Harrison.
And if you want to get in touch with us
to let us know your feedback on this episode or
any other, or if you'd like to, you know, request
a topic for the future, something that interests you you
think might interest us and the other listeners as well.
You can email us at blow the Mind at how
stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands
(01:03:38):
of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com,
(01:04:00):
ros my fa
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how stopworks
dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. We
are entering into Chinese New Year here, we're about to
enter the Year of the Dog, leaving behind the Year
(00:23):
of the Rooster. Yeah. So, you know, we we occasionally
touch on Chinese and Eastern topics throughout the year, but
this is always a good time to to really focus
on a couple of really good ones, and that's what
we have today. Yeah. So the Lunar New Year is
coming up on Friday, February, and this week we're doing
a couple of episodes related to Chinese culture and some
technological and scientific tie INDs. And so today's episode is
(00:48):
going to feature the bulk of it's going to be
an interview we did with the author of a book
about the history of the Chinese typewriter. The full title
of the book is The Chinese Typewriter, a History and
it's published by M I T Press in Yeah, it's
available wherever you get your books, so you can get
it in digital form or print. Now, Robert, you you
(01:11):
picked this book out, Well, what appealed to you about it. Well,
I basically received a release about it about this book
from Thomas S. Mulaney, who's Associate professor of Chinese History
at Stanford University and curator of the international exhibition Radical Machines, China,
Chinese and the Information Age. And I really hadn't thought
(01:32):
about this before, but I instantly thought, yeah, well, you
know the Chinese language, Mandarin, Chinese characters, how does that
fit into the information age? How has that fit into
the information age? And so I said, well, let's let's
get back to that. Let's let's read this book and
uh and see what it has to offer. And it
was a really mind blowing read. Yeah, really interesting and
(01:52):
thinking about the ways that technology formed the substrates on
which our languages evolved, and like, uh, this tension that's
constantly existing with information technology. Does the technology change the
way you use information? Or will the way you use
information shape the necessary features of technology? So we'll definitely
(02:14):
be discussing that with with Thomas Mullaney. But before we
get into that, I think we should just address the
issue behind the subject of the Chinese typewriter. Now, if
somebody isn't familiar with the written version of Chinese with
Chinese characters that it might not be immediately apparent to them.
Why the idea of a Chinese typewriter would be especially interesting. Yeah,
(02:38):
that's right, because you might just think, oh, well, we
have our letters, they have their letters wrong. Uh, Chinese
does not have an alphabet. Now, certainly you can you
can write Chinese and say opinion, which is a version
of our Roman alphabet with with with accent marks added
to let you know how the tones are to be pronounced.
(02:58):
But for the most part of any points that you
have this colonialism globalization of language that spreads around the world,
and it's based on that Roman alphabet. And then meanwhile
you have you have the Chinese with these these characters
that do not fit within that system. You can essentially
think of it as a system of pictograms, but they're
(03:18):
highly stylized pictures of what they represent. As many as
nine are compounds of a meaning element and a sound element.
So you can't just look at them and say, oh,
that's a river, that's a that's a robot, etcetera. They're
they're far more complex than that. And uh, I've read
that you need to know somewhere between twelve hundred and
(03:42):
fifteen hundred characters to get the basic gist of a
Chinese newspaper. But you need to know between two thousand
and three thousand characters to really get a sufficient understanding
of the information. Meanwhile, a well educated Chinese speaker in
today's world likely knows six thousand to eight thousand characters.
And if you're wondering, well, where does that stand in
(04:03):
terms of all the characters, Well, you can look at
some of the major Chinese lexicons out there and they're
numbering in the tens of thousands. One figure I saw
it was forty seven thousand Chinese characters. Now, that doesn't
necessarily mean that Chinese speakers would recognize forty seven thousand
characters when reading in the same way that you might read.
(04:24):
You know a book of specialized terminology that has specialized
words in English, and you wouldn't necessarily know what those
words mean, right, Yeah. I think of the thickest dictionary
English dictionary you've ever picked up, and think of all
the words that that instantly don't resonate with you, and
you'll have some sense of what we're looking at here.
But you do have this major difference in that in
(04:46):
a language like English, you can look at a word
and it's made out of letters that are familiar to you,
even if the word isn't familiar to you. So even
if you have no idea what our word means, you
could almost instantly transcribe the word on a typewriter, keyboard
or whatever with Chinese characters, not necessarily the case. That's right, uh.
(05:07):
And another thing I want to touch on here is
that in China you have eight major dialect groups, and
we call these dialects, but as Milani points out, there
as mutually distinct as Portuguese and French in some cases.
But Mandarin is the official language of course, but still
all these different dialects, they depend upon the Chinese character system.
So so whether you're talking about Mandarin or Cantonese, Uh,
(05:30):
it's the same characters, but in practice Cantonese ads I
think about three thousand specialized characters. On top of that,
but think about the unifying influence of having characters like that.
So you can have a country that is, you know,
it's considered a people, the Chinese people of the Chinese country,
and they share a government and in a sense they
share a language because they have these shared characters, even
(05:53):
though they speak very very distinct oral languages. That's right.
And then you enter this age where your internal system
of communication, written communication is at odds with the with
what's really becoming kind of a global standard. And it's
that tug of war that most of Mulaney's book focuses on.
All right, than, Robert, are you ready to go to
(06:14):
our interview with Thomas Laney. Let's do it, all right, Tom,
thank you for joining us on stuff to blow your mind.
It's it's a pleasure to be here. Well, we have
been reading your book, The Chinese Typewriter, A History. I
suppose the first question I have for you here today
is when you talk to people about your book, do
you encounter any of the key historic reactions to and
(06:37):
prejudices against just the idea the notion of a Chinese typewriter.
I would say all the time. It's what. One of
the things that was at first surprising and then I
and then I had more time to think about it
over the course of working on the book, was that
the consistency with which people would imagine in their minds
(07:02):
I what they assumed or expected a Chinese typewriter to
look like and um in essence, regardless of where I
was in the US or in Europe or An Asia,
including China. In many cases, the assumption kind of led
someone to the same expectation, which was a massive machine
(07:24):
with thousands of keys on this gigantic keyboard. And what's
surprising about this is that people arrive at this conclusion
without necessarily or almost never having seen such an image.
They just sort of created algorithmically in their mind. And
(07:47):
I think what I came to the kind of the
conclusion of is that the the what's going on in
in our minds when we when we think about a
Chinese typewriter, it's a kind of it's like a mental algorithm.
It's a it's a it's a very short computer program
that runs in our mind and it goes something like this. Well,
(08:09):
I know that by definition, a typewriter is a machine
with a keyboard and keys. I know that there is
one key per letter. I know that Chinese doesn't have
letters that has characters, and I know that there are
tens of thousands of characters where I've heard that. Ergo,
I've reached the conclusion about what in my mind's I
(08:29):
a Chinese typewriter looks like um. And in the book,
what I tried to do is say, now there is
a total equation set up between keyboards, keys and typewriters.
There's no such thing as a typewriter without keys in
in the market, uh, and also in our imagination. But
if we go back early enough in the history of
(08:51):
the typewriter, including the Western typewriter, we very quickly get
into this you know, sort of amazing and very verse,
kind of Jurassic ecology of typewriters, many different types of typewriters,
including typewriters that had no keys or keyboards themselves. And
that in essence, the Chinese typewriter, which is a key
(09:14):
which is a typewriter that has no keyboard and no keys,
is a descendant of a sort of early early species
of typewriter that in the West died out, the typewriter
with no keyboard, but in China, um, you know, lived
on and continued. It's it's it's it's evolution. Um. And
(09:34):
so now, when when the two meet again in the
year nineteen s two, Uh, when someone from the descendants
of the keyboard typewriter looks over and sees the descendants
of the non keyboard typewriter. They don't know what to
make of it. They don't know what they're looking at.
So there's a concept you talk about in the book
(09:55):
that you call the techno linguistic dimensions of a language.
And I was wondering if you could explain a little
bit about what you mean by the techno linguistic dimensions
of a language. And so, for example, what are some
of the techno linguistic aspects of modern American English? Has
a point of reference for our listeners, And then how
(10:17):
how do those same types of techno linguistic dimensions inform
the creation of the Chinese typewriter in history? In essence,
the techno linguistic dimension is every part of writing text
technology that is essential for writing to work and for
(10:41):
text technologies to function, but that are not uh simply
superficially on the page or on the screen the stuff
we read. And so, to give an example, I remember
earlier when I was in the early stages of working
on this project. I am a big believer in kind
of practice based theory. So take classes and things and
(11:04):
really try to understand the processes and machines you're thinking about,
because insight will emerge in that and so I I
enrolled in this intensive letter press practicum, so movable type
type setting and for for English, because I wanted to
step into you know, this space that there are obviously
(11:26):
many many practitioners of even today, but certainly over history,
and just see what it looks like. And there was one.
I mean, it's an amazing I took it at the
San Francisco Center for the book. It was just absolutely
tremendous um. But there's one thing in particular that stayed
with me, which is seems might seem incidental to someone
who is in that world for a long time, and
(11:47):
that is when when you or I looked at a
printed poster or a book or an article or whatever
it is, uh, and we see the you know, the
text block in the middle of the page each and
then we see the margins, the one inch margins on
the left and right to the top and bottom. I
would venture to guess that you, as as I, we
(12:08):
see emptiness, we see space. We see there is nothing there. Yes,
there's paper, but that's not where the text is. And
so if you, if you just stopped there, it would
be easy to imagine that that it really is made
up of nothingness. There's nothing there that's not where language happens,
and so forth. When you when you go through the
(12:28):
process of learning, in this case letter press, UH, you
realize that you actually have to build emptiness. You have
to build a space on the page quite literally, with
pieces of metal. So if you want there to be
spacing between the lines, you need you need letting union.
This is not just a digital term in our you
(12:49):
know abe platform. This is a this is a thin
sliver of metal whose whose dimensionality will will give you
so much space between the lines. And then you use
these various sized pieces of wood uh sometimes referred to
as furniture, that you build up around the block of
text that you're going to situate on the page. You
(13:11):
lock it in there really tight with these things called
coins that you kind of put in place, and then
kind of jack into position and hold it onto the
the type bed so it doesn't wiggle around when you're
printing UM. And then and then you put you know,
you you ink it, and you pull the paper through
and then it comes out on the other side, and
there you have it, a text block with one inch
margins and some much space and emptiness and so much
(13:35):
text like black on white, and suddenly your view of space,
or at least for me, the view of space changed radically.
It takes a lot of stuff to make nothing happen.
It takes a lot of And these and these pieces
of wooden furniture they don't have writing on them. I
can't read a piece of these, you know, these wooden blocks. Um,
(13:55):
So they're not operating in the same kind of heuristic
interpretive space as the actual Let's say it's a poem
by a you know, or or an essay or a
broadside that I can read and think about and debate,
and maybe it's a love letter or a wedding invitation.
All of this stuff that's so full of meaning in
the classic sense of the word. Well, there's all of
this meaninglessness, like these wooden pieces of things, like these,
(14:18):
these flats of metal that have to be you know,
for letting. Um, there's all of this meaninglessness that goes
into making that meaning work, whether whether it's a wedding
invitation or you know, or or an iconoclastic essay. Um
that would that metal is for me, part of this
(14:41):
admittedly very large category of techno linguistic It's all of
the the stuff, but also also all of the mental models,
categorization systems, workflows and processes and things that go into
making something work on the page. Experts, practition in ners.
People in these industries they know these things. I mean,
(15:03):
it's second nature for them. So it's it's not as
if I've discovered the Lost City of Atlantis. But um,
if they do their job well and and if they
succeed in their goal, their goal is to keep that
stuff invisible. You know, you don't want you don't want
a badly printed poem that kind of show, you know, something,
(15:24):
maybe maybe to get some ink gout on one of
those pieces of wood and an accidentally in the page. Well,
that's failure, you know that. That means it didn't work out.
You want that techno linguistic stuff to remain invisible. Um.
And but as for myself, as an historian of language change,
of text technologies, of especially of a family of text
(15:50):
technologies on the Chinese side, that, as I argue in
the book, has had been placed in this very asymmetric
unequal position in the global history of information technology. We
as the storians of information technology, we we really do
need to pay attention to that meaninglessness. Because oftentimes it's
(16:11):
in the space of the meaninglessness, not the not the
stuff that's on the page, the poem itself, where the
action is. Sometimes it is, but it's it's not necessarily
in the poem where the actions it might actually be
in the stuff around the poem that makes that poem
printapal transmittable, sabable in the first place. An example from
(16:34):
Asia that I really like to show actually comes from Japan.
There's this there's this wonderful YouTube video that shows a
turn of the century Japanese automaton, a calligraphy automaton. It
is constructed to look um like a Chinese woman with
(16:59):
a brush in hand, and when the gears move uh,
the the automaton composes a really beautifully wrought Chinese character
Kanji character. And the video shows I think it's newscasters.
It's part of a news broadcast in Japan contemporary maybe
(17:19):
a few years ago, showing people you know, like looing
and eyeing about this, and everyone is paying attention to
what's happening on the page, the character and what it
looks like as it comes out. But then in the back,
in the sort of the end of the video and
also behind the automaton for me, is where the actual
(17:40):
action is. They show the carefully carved series of really
woobily and wobbily wooden camshafts that are tucked away in
the back of the base of the automaton that when
this kind of it's kind of hard to describe. When
(18:01):
they's guiding almost almost like almost like a record a
record player, arm and needle is is tracing over these
camshafts as they turn. It's translating the machine is translating
the shape of those camshafts into the movement of the automaton,
(18:21):
which is then producing this perfect character on the page.
For me, those wooden camshafts uh at the construction of them,
the figuring out what shape each one needs to be
and what sequence and how do we build this device
that translates it into a character that to me is
actually the location of language. But if we were to
(18:43):
take those camshafts, you know, disassemble the machine, and I
just hand you a bunch of they look like you know,
they look like wooden plates, but they're not perfectly circular.
They've got a wobbly, wobbly kind of edge. If I
just handed them to you and said, what character is this? What? What? What?
What Japanese character is this? You couldn't read it. The
(19:04):
only way that it produces that character is in this
careful sequence. Um. So this is this is for me
at least, this is really interesting. Those those wooden camshafts,
you know, crafted by hand and at the you know,
in the late nineteenth late late nine or twentieth century. These, Um,
these camshafts are not a representation of that character, of
(19:27):
that Japanese character that comes out the other side. They
quite literally are that character when assembled in a particular sequence.
So that's that's to me is the techno linguistic. It
is this vast space of expert action and care and
attention and practice. Um. But it's not something you can
(19:51):
just simply read, uh, in a naked eye sense, the
way that we might be able to read an essay
or a poem and debate about it. But all of
this meaning business, this uninterpretability is what makes language work.
Without it, language just ceases to function in any language, Chinese, English, Japanese,
you name it. That explanation almost makes me think of
(20:13):
like the base pairs or the gene, the generator phenotype
in an animal that we only interact with the external
phenotype unless you're a genetic engineer researcher, but that the
thing in the external world is literally generated by this,
you know, behind the scenes code. I think that's right.
I think, I mean, I think that it's it's uh,
(20:35):
it's something that if you were just you just look
at it at the face of it, and this is true.
And you know, this is true in the realm of
certainly in the realm of early computing and contemporary computing.
The you know, if we we experience our MacBook prose
the way that we do because of the success of
a series of engineers and product designers who went out
(20:57):
of their way to conceal as much as possible what's
really going on. So when I type the letter, when
I when I depressed the key that has the symbol
that I recognize as F or G or H on it,
and then it appears on the screen. It happened so
fast that I can kind of live inside the fantasy,
(21:18):
live inside the fiction that in essence, this thing is
just like a digital typewriter. It's just I push it,
it translated some motion and then it put printed it
on the page. But of course that's not how it works.
I mean, there's there's all of these translations going on
to get from point A to point double Z. There's
there's regulations and coding standards and and then quite literally
(21:41):
you know, physical logic gates and and um. But and
so that space. If you were just to take away
the key that says F and take away the screen,
that that basically all the screen is doing is showing
you that the bit stream worked. But in men Gin,
what it looks like if you take away the screen
(22:02):
and take away the symbols on the keys, what exactly
is the letter s at that point? It's still there.
If you were to push the button and the computers
on it would still be doing what it's supposed to
be doing. But the the the kind of circuit of
interpretation that the human needs would not be complete. I
(22:22):
would not know whether or not I what letter I
had had had type. So what I'm interested in I
mean not to the exclusion of the surface parts of language,
but I think I want to include the spaces of
language which, like the genotype phenotype relationship, are happening in
this completely dark room. Um, you know, how how do
(22:48):
we think about the genotype without recourse to the phenotype
might be one way to put it, but I'm not
sure if that gets us any any further. All Right,
we're gonna take a quick break and when we come
back more with Thomas Mullaney. Alright, we're back, so too
many Westerners Mandarin Chinese present certain challenges. Chinese characters present
(23:10):
certain challenges, to say the least. But can you explain
some of the challenges that Chinese characters were seen to
pose to China itself in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Definitely,
there were there were many, um many that I would say,
many problems that were that that were sort of deservedly
laid at the feet of Chinese character writing, and some
(23:33):
that I think a sober analysis of history would say
it was an unfair thing to blame characters for. Um So,
I mean there's a there's a sort of it, there's
a series. One of them would certainly be that in
the late nineteenth century into the early twenty century, China
(23:54):
is undergoing, like many polities on Earth around this time,
is undergoing a uh a transition, and it's an uneasy one,
a transition between one form of organizing political power and
state craft so and it's kind of wrapped up in
the nutshell of the word empire U two a republic
(24:19):
and so you know, this is this This takes a
revolution to happen. It takes it arguably takes a civil
war to complete this transition. But one part of this
transition was a radical reconceptualization of where legitimacy for state
uh state rulers derives it, not the shift from the
(24:42):
derivation from heaven of the right to rule to a
a shift at least in people, you know, in the
argument to the people, whatever this word means. Well, one
of the issues, and this is this happens in many
of these sort of empire to nation state transitions, is
that people say, well, we need more of our people
(25:02):
to be involved or part of this political enterprise that
we're in where they're no longer subjects. They should now
be educated, literate, participating, economically participating, politically participating actors. And
one of the major barriers, and this is the argument
that's being made at the turn of the century, is
(25:24):
that Chinese character based writing places people in China at
such a comparative disadvantage to those in alphabetic contexts and
UM and so there's many, many reformers, education reformers, political
reformers that are are making this case. Some of them,
(25:47):
a very small number of them, I say, would arrive
at the extreme notion that what the solution to this
problem is simply getting rid of characters altogether and replacing
them with another scripted. A great many more within society
try to figure out new techniques, new pedagogies by which
(26:08):
to introduce more Chinese students and readers to what they
understood is the core vocabulary, the basics of Chinese. And
there's a lot of a lot of stuff that was
surrounding issues of literacy. For for a number of the
actors that I deal with in my in my book,
they care about they care about mass education, mass literacy,
(26:32):
uh very much. But they also care about things like
how do you design a card catalog system for books
in Chinese for our new public libraries that we're designing.
So if I walk up to a card catalog and
I want to find a book by a particular author
or particular title, what is the best way to sequence
(26:57):
or organized Chinese character writing so that someone can find
it as quickly as possible. They're often again comparing with
the alphabets. They say, look, how easy the alphabet. It's
a through z. There's no ambiguity about where you put,
you know, Alfred versus um Zimbabwe doesn't mean it's very simple.
In Chinese, there is no one set way of organizing dictionaries,
(27:23):
phone books and nameless and so forth. Until the nineteen twenties.
There is a kind of knock them down, knock em
sackem uh debate, which which involves library scientists and mass
education people, and it's like a full blown kind of
press event where they argue with one another about the
(27:46):
best way to organize telephone books and library card catalogs
and the indexes of books and name registers and all
of these things. Uh, and they they are coument is
made that because we because Chinese doesn't have a self
evident A through Z sequence, and because modern capitalist economies
(28:12):
and also modern republican states really require fast information retrieval,
we are that China is operating in kind of slow
motion as compared to the rest of the world, because
every time we need to recall a file from a database,
it takes us a few seconds longer than it does
(28:33):
to recover an equivalent from somewhere in the alphabetic world.
And if you take those thousands, tens of thousands, millions
of acts of information retrieval, and if each one of
them takes a few seconds longer then their counterpart, and
you add them all up, and suddenly we are we're
kind of operating in this slow motion um as compared
(28:56):
to the rest of the world. So it's a really
fascinating idea about that these theorists had about where China's
problems were coming from. Some people were arguing at the
scale of of war and scaling it, and arguing at
the scale of empire and colonialism. But there's this subset
of people who are arguing that in essence, China's problems
(29:17):
are derived from millions of like tiny increments of delay,
and that it's our job as reformers, as Chinese reformers,
to find a way to close that gap and speed
up the language so that we can operate in a
global you know, a global economy and so forth. Um. So,
there's there's probably twenty more examples of critiques of of
(29:40):
Chinese character writing, but that's probably a nice diet one
that is operating at the space of you know, the
ability to read and debate and argue and engage in
interpretation and read those poems and read essays. And then
the other side, which I think is more along the
lines of the techno linguistic discussion in in the book,
(30:01):
which is people fighting over how to organize this language
in space and time. So that's really interesting. It makes
me think about, um, the way that you talk about
the two different approaches to making Chinese characters compatible with
modern labor saving technology like the typewriter, but not just
(30:23):
the typewriter, these other things you mentioned card catalogs and everything,
and they're essentially two ways to go about it you
mentioned in the book. You can try to adapt the
technology to the language, like maybe Remington tried to do
in the example you give where they have this phonetic
alphabet for Chinese on their typewriter but no one would
use it. Or you could adapt the technology to the language. Um,
(30:49):
what are some examples you see of of the most
or maybe not most successful, but the major efforts in
both of these camps through the twentieth century. I think
that's exactly right. And and so these putting these attempts
to the debate for many was you know, who has
(31:09):
to change. Is it is it Remingtons that has to
come and meet Chinese or is it Chinese that needs
to meet Remington's. And the way that the history plays out,
and also the way it's still playing out is uh
that these two are locked in a a kind of
never ending a never ending cycle and never ending dialectic
(31:32):
that is still playing its way out, is playing itself out.
And so the example from the book that you mentioned
of basically just trying to bring the language into a
Remington's more or less with the Remington more or less
untouched is the case of the Chinese phonetic alphabet UM,
and it just simply doesn't It doesn't take off, it
(31:57):
doesn't work. Remington and many other companies have fun to
mentally misunderstood what the Chinese phenetic alphabet was supposed to do.
What it was made to do, UM since it was
invented by Chinese linguists, but it was never meant to
replace Chinese character based writing. But they kind of harbored
this dream that, yeah, maybe that's not why it was invented,
but we all know that Chinese characters will eventually disappear,
(32:20):
and we're hoping that this is the thing that puts
the final nail in the costant, which is not what happened,
but it's it's it's in the tension between those two,
those two more simple means of trying to solve the puzzle.
And one of the reformers put it really clearly when
he said that Chinese characters have are innocence, Chinese characters
(32:45):
are innocent, or Chinese characters have committed no crime. And
he goes on to say, this is an overseas Chinese
students in the nineteen who goes on to become an
engineer and and to develop the prototype of the first
mass manufacturer type writer for Chinese. And he says, and
more or less, any engineer worth the title would never
(33:09):
want or never expect the world to change to make
their job easier, Like that's not the engineer's role in existence.
It is to take the world as it is, or
at least start from that advantage point and then try
to think outside of preconceptions to to meet the world
where it is. So in this case, the Chinese language
(33:33):
can take part in the information in this newest iteration
of the information revolution um and the maybe one place
that is a good example of an attempt to meet
each other halfway was an experimental Chinese typewriter. It was
never mass manufactured, but it was fully conceived and prototyped
(33:58):
by another or overseas Chinese students who was working at
n y U in the nineteen teens. Uh and he
he develops a prototype Chinese typewriter in which the goal
was to figure out how to quote unquote spell Chinese
(34:22):
piece by piece on the page. And I put spell
in in scare quotes because he did not mean phonetically.
He did not mean okay. Instead of writing the two
characters for Baiting the city of Baiting, I mean the
righte b I J. He didn't mean that. What he
meant was, can we uh, can we subdivide all Chinese
(34:46):
characters into existence and discover the underlying, repeating modular shapes,
these little pieces of characters that continually show up in
every character that exists. And if we can reduce Chinese
to a set of these modular shapes and then put
(35:07):
those shapes onto UH keys or onto type bars, or
in this case, he makes it into a cylinder that's
inside the machine, then one could fit tens of thousands
of characters onto a machine. UH simply by shattering them
into pieces, and then the user would have to sit
(35:29):
down at the machine and compose the desired character module
by module. And so its it. It's it's a it's
an incredible idea, and it it's related to the Western
alphabetic notion of spelling a word. You know, the word
cat is not on our typewriter. We just we have
(35:49):
C and A and T, and therefore we do have
cat on our typewriter. It's the same kind of concept
that abandoning or leaving behind the phenetic part of that
and just saying okay, we're not hearing about the sound
of it. We care about the ability to build up
something on the page. So this if you, if you,
if you look at this, it's this is neither trying
(36:12):
to take the typewriter and make it serve or subordinated
to the Chinese writing. It's still it's still trying to
build a machine that looks like a Western typewriter. But
at the same time, it's also not simply taking Chinese
writing and subordinating it to uh to a Remington's. It's
(36:33):
trying to meet the problems somehow halfway and in an
essence saying okay, both parties are going to have to
give something up. I don't know if that's the right word,
or are going to have to be willing to really
uh reimagine what you consider to be canonical first principles.
So in Chinese, we have to give up the idea
(36:55):
that the character is the base of our language. But
the character is the fundamental unit of our language. It
isn't we're going to in this machine. It's going to
be the pieces of characters that are the fundamental units.
And if people are willing to accept that I learned
how to use this machine in this way, then you
can have all the characters you want. If you're unwilling
to think that way, that's another that's another issue. And
(37:18):
then in the on the you know, visa VI the
I mean this is sort of a diplomatic negotiation metaphor,
but visa VI the remington you know, delegation saying to them, listen,
you know, you're going to have to give up on
the idea of of of of sound and phonetics and
the sounding out of words. That's that's not how this
(37:40):
machine works. Um. It's these symbols are not going to
be letters of any alphabets, Uh, technically speaking, it's not
an alphabet we're talking about. It's a set of modular shapes.
But we can we can still you know, think of
the of the type R. We but there. But you
don't have to give up on your idea of a
typewriter as you know it more or less. It's kind
(38:01):
of the typewriter, you know. Um, and this this, this
machine in its day and age, uh, doesn't win the day,
It doesn't gain mass manufacturing support. But arguably this idea
of how to treat characters, how to quote unquote fit
them into digital spaces, is very much alive and well
(38:22):
even today. Um. In fact, it's kind of made a
comeback as one of the dominant ways of thinking of writing.
When when typeface designers those you know, when practitioners are
companies that are building a font, a digital font for Chinese,
they often the team that builds a Chinese funt often
thinks in these terms. They don't think, Okay, I'm gonna
(38:43):
draw every Chinese character from scratch, which would take you know,
would take years and years. I'm gonna scan them and
I'm going to create my basier curves and I'm going
to do all this sort of stuff. They say, what
are the pieces and modules that make up characters. Let's
let's focus to a certain extent at that level, and voila.
(39:04):
The work that we did on this piece has a
multiplier effect because this module shows up in fifty other characters,
or a hundred characters, or a thousand characters. So that's
that's one of the I mean, that's that's the fascinating
thing about history in general, but history of information technology
in particular is it is completely nonlinear, and something that
was laughed off the stage eighty years ago can suddenly
(39:27):
in a different ecology be the way to to do something. Um. Yeah,
and so I think that's that might be a good example.
That's that's that's the story of the Young the Young
overseas Chinese student. I deal with um in the early
part of the book. I love in the book how
you you explore this, uh, this sort of middle path
is attempt to find this compromise, and at one point
(39:48):
you compare it to aryptis and so the sea monster
in the whirlpool. Uh. I love this exploration of how
on on one end you don't want the machine to
change or limit the language and the culture, but then
On the other side, there's this reluctance to create something
(40:09):
that will look like the monster machine that some are
expecting a Chinese typewriter to be. I like thinking in
terms of agony, I think, and what I mean by
agony is something to the extent of I don't know.
Imagine you're an international trans oceanic pilot and and you
(40:30):
know you've got three passengers on board, and you know
you're you're going over the sea, and maybe you maybe
under certain circumstances, if you chose, you could just hit something.
You know, you don't feel well, whatever, you just hand
over controls to your copilot. Short of these two people, uh,
there's no one else to hand over controls too. There
(40:51):
is the space of having to stay within a condition
of anxiety, contradiction, irresolvability, and in essence those it's it's
that kind of staying in ambiguity, staying in uncertainty that
is probably the shared characteristic among the actors in the book.
(41:15):
In a certain sense, that's intentional, and it's also trying
to make an intervention because there are other actors, much
more famous actors in Chinese history who receive you know,
the Lion's share of attention when it comes to questions
of the Chinese language and modernity and technology and stuff. Um.
And these are these are figures that I talked about
in the introduction of the book. Who made these really
(41:38):
sweeping iconoclastic statements that we should just get rid of
characters altogether and use English or use French or use esperanto.
And they sound so iconoclastic and sexy and rebellious, and
really their naives the statements that they're making are completely
ridiculous at one level, uh, simplistic and in many ways naive. Um.
(42:02):
I mean, clearly, there are societies on Earth that have
undertaken massive transformations in their orthographies. But the idea that
China as a whole was going to just cut ties
with writing uh and uh was it sounds good on paper,
It gets the attention certainly of contemporaries and even more
(42:22):
so uh uh scholars of of China after the fact.
But what it what it obscures is that, hey, those
guys didn't win. You know, Chinese characters are with us,
Chinese I t is booming, you know. So the prognosis
that they were giving in the years twenty did not
(42:44):
pan out. And yet we still teach there, We still
assigned their essays in all of our classes. There is
this other kind of motley crew of individuals um you know,
most of them Chinese or Chinese descent, but also engineers
and linguists and entrepreneurs around the world. They're stuck and
they understand that they're stuck. We can't We're not going
(43:04):
to just get rid of Chinese and go the alphabet
and therefore we can all buy IBM s and that's
the you know, that's the benefit of us severing this.
We're not going to do that. But we want IBM s.
We want mainframes, we want microcomputers, we want telegraphy, we
want these things. Or in a more selfish way, we
want to be the company that gives this to the
(43:27):
Chinese market because we want to make money. You know,
that's that's there as well. But they're staying in this
space of agony between where there's no way out. They
have to stay in this and think in that space.
You know, I often don't think in terms of historical
success or like where's the you know, where's the when
did the strings come in? And when does when are
(43:47):
the lovers reunited? But the lovers reunited is in essence
at the end of the book because the practice and
the concept of input that is in that is is
baked in in an early form into the Utag's experimental
Ninettes typewriter. Than being quiet, that way of building a
(44:09):
typewriter is something that is born out of that that tension,
that that agony, that irresolvability that all of these individuals
are living in for for decades. I mean, arguably, I
mean not just any one individual, but as a cast
of characters, there are people that are living in that
(44:29):
space for a century and an ass. They're not giving
into easy, iconoclastic, flashy uh in statements, but neither are
they saying, well, I guess we should pack it up
and go home. We can't take part in the global
this new iteration of the global information revolution. They're just
staying in that space. And so I have admiration, not
(44:51):
not not because of what they build or that they
made money here, that they're you know, in a sort
of romantic sense, but that staying and that kind of
space is not a very rewarding thing. Um And but
you know, dozens and dozens, it's not hundreds of people
in the story are really in that space and that's
(45:13):
the that's that's where. And also, just to bring it
back a little bit to the discussion of techno linguistic
the techno linguistic space is where these this motley crew
is focusing most of their attention. They're saying to themselves
to the world, Okay, we want to keep Chinese characters.
(45:34):
What does that mean? Exactly what that means is that
when we pick up a book in twenty years in China,
we want to see Chinese characters. When someone sits down,
goes to the telegraph the post office and wants to
send a telegram, we wanted that the sender can write
this out in Chinese and that the recipient when they
receive it, can receive something in Chinese with Chinese characters
(45:56):
in it. Like, let's be very specific about what we
mean about preserve being the language. And then and then then,
and then the next kind of collective statement out of
their mouth is, Okay, what are we willing to blow
up and totally dismantle and rebuild in radical new ways
in order to achieve that effect? H and the stuff
(46:17):
that they're willing to blow up and build and be
iconoclastic with regards to is mainly the stuff that is
I use this metaphor in the book. It's like it's
under the street, it's in the sewage system, it's in
the walls and the electrical and the you know, the
air conditioning system. It's it's in the way that the
library card catalogs are organized. It's in the way that
(46:38):
we break down characters and we put them into pieces
inside a machine. It's lots and lots and lots of stuff.
But if we're successful, the user, let's say, or the
recipient of the message, won't necessarily have to worry about
that stuff. They'll still be able to experience the Chinese
character writing environment. Um. And it's not glorious work, you know.
(47:03):
It's it's not the space of poetry. It's the space
of the predecessor of arguing over the unicode, you know,
Unicode regulations and protocols and stuff. It's it's it's technical,
dogged work. But they're convinced, and ultimately they prove it
to be. So they're convinced that that's the place where
(47:23):
Chinese can be preserved and saved. All Right, we are
going to take a quick break and when we come back,
we will have more of our interview with Thomas mulaney. Alright,
we're back. Could you talk a little bit about the
relationship of politics and values to what could be written
on some historical incarnations of the Chinese typewriter, Like I'm
(47:45):
thinking of the machines with limited numbers of character slugs,
and how the inclusion and placement of the character slugs
could be influenced by anything. I guess whoever is designing it,
maybe Christian missionary zeal or Maoist ideology. And then is
a second part, do you think that's unique to the
history of the Chinese typewriter? Or there are are there
(48:07):
ways that politics and values influence what can be done
on other composition and printing devices, even alphabetic ones. The
Chinese typewriter that ends up being mass manufactured and becomes
the quintessential model for Chinese typewriters is the common usage
(48:28):
Chinese typewriter and for this machine, in essence that the
compromise at play is, Okay, how do we fit all
tens of thousands of characters on this machine? The answer
is we don't. The answer is what we should be
doing is a rigorous almost proto digital humanities, distant reading
(48:49):
analysis of as big of a corpus of Chinese text
as possible. We should be counting the number of times
every single one of our characters appears, and then do
a frequency analysis, and based on that frequency analysis of
tens of thousands of characters, we should figure out what
(49:10):
is the what is the minimum number of characters that
we would need for the maximum amount of utility, all
with the understanding that in this mode we can't have
it all. We can't have all of our characters on
the machine. So the outcome of this is the common
usage machine, which by the midpoint of the twentieth century
gives the user a trade bed with two thousand four
(49:34):
characters on it, so roughly, which is a small percentage
of the tens of thousands of characters that exist. But
as they figured out through these statistical analyzes, which are
all done by hand, uh, that these account for five
or more per cent of of everything that you're gonna
need it for. And then so now this raises um
(49:58):
interesting possibilities questions with regard to politics and politics of language, because, uh,
when once you start saying that not all characters get
on the machine, the question naturally emerges, well, who decides,
and what's the basis for deciding who's in and who's
out and if something is out, what does that do? Uh.
From the user's perspective in terms of what they write
(50:20):
so ay is that the politics are alive and well.
The the some of the One of my favorite examples there,
there's I guess two from the political realm, from the
perspective of early Chinese republicans, those who wanted to overthrow
the empire and sound a republic and revolutionaries. One of
the bad guys of Chinese history is the first Uh
(50:45):
de facto president of the republic after the revolution. UH.
This gentleman you and Chicai, who's a comes from a
military background, and he's understood as having betrayed the revolution
because shortly after the Revolution of nineteen eleven overthrows the
final dynasty in China establish as a republic. This this fella,
under the advising under the council of his of his
(51:10):
kind of entourage, decides to re establish empire and he
names himself an emperor UH. And it causes another more
or less kind of small scale civil war, and he
dies of a natural He dies a natural deaths and
then he leaves China, and this political vacuum that gives
rise to what's called the warlord period, where there's no
central authority. He's he's he's not a love he's not
(51:32):
a beloved figure by many revolutionaries. So it's interesting is
that when you get to trade beds of Chinese typewriters
in the early twenties, his name, the characters that make
up his name will are not on the trade bed.
They're kind of stuck in what's called the secondary usage
(51:53):
box of characters, which is a wooden box that contains
a few more thousand characters that the type is can
can can can can use. If they need a character
that's not on the trade bed, they just use a
pair of tweezers. They pluck it out of the wooden box,
they put it on the trade bed, and then they
go ahead and use it. You know, this could in
certain sense, this could be accidental. Not all the characters
(52:15):
in his name are as common as others, but some
are not uncommon um, but there is there are these
decisions that that the designers of these machines get to
make about what to include and whatnot, and often for
political reasons. So the same typewriter engineer who leaves this
man's name off the or the characters that make up
(52:35):
this man's name off the machine, puts his name hit
the characters that make his name onto the common usage
trade bed, even though the characters in his name are
very uncommon. So there's it's to me, that's kind of
like the nineteen eighties when computer programmers would leave little
messages in the common field of of of programs that
they were making. It's sort of it's sort of the
(52:57):
you know, the the designers prerogative to their signature as
they will. UM. A more extreme example comes from revolution,
the Communist revolution, and this one is a bit more subtle.
The so the trade bed, the two thousand characters that
the user has in front of him or her, they
(53:18):
are they're not. They're organized according to basically let's call
it dictionary organization, a way of organizing characters that would
have been familiar to anyone using them. But they were
also further subdivided into most most common characters, and those
were in the very center of the trade bed, and
then second most common characters, which were on the left
(53:39):
and right flank of this rectangular matrix. UM and the
idea quite simply was because you had to go from
one character to the next to the next to the next.
You want to group and cluster and clump together common
usage characters as close as possible. So you know, we
we we really want that center piece, that center part
(53:59):
of the trade bed to have as many of the
most frequent characters as possible. Well, in the nineteen twenties,
thirties forties, prior to the Communist Revolution, the character Mao,
which by itself means a follicle of hair like hair
on your head, is a very common character, and but
it's not the most common of characters, so it was
(54:21):
on the right flank of the trade bed. Well after
the revolution that character was promoted. Basically, it was moved
from the flanks of the machine to this center, most
most most common region. And for obvious reasons that this
is the surname of Malta Dong of chairman Mao, whose
(54:43):
name engineers rightly understood was going to be in lots
and lots and lots of texts, And so suddenly it
becomes easier for a type is faster for a type
of to produce his name. You know, the question often
comes I often encounter the question, do I think that
these dimensions cycle back into what the user is doing
(55:08):
and basically, you know, shape what it is that they're writing.
Does do our technologies shape what we write? And the answer,
I think, in a kind of first principles way is
undoubtedly yes. There it's it's it's undoubted that when you
create different levels of difficulty and and and time to
(55:30):
produce one word versus another word, that this kind of
an economics of energy send cycles back into how we
use those technologies. The real challenge is how do we
study that methodologically so that we don't simply, you know,
find in our in our research foregone conclusion. Um. That's
(55:51):
a very very very hard thing to think of as
in a story, and like how would I actually put
that hypothesis to the test um, you know, because then
you touch really build a research program that would allow
you to do that. One way that's possible is uh
is and it's a pretty it's it's actually pretty fun is.
In the nineteen fifties and sixties, Chinese typewriters were increasingly
(56:13):
used to publish books and articles. So someone would use
uh mimiograph paper produce a master copy of a text
and then with a mimiograph machine would create a run
those maybe anywhere from ten to a hundred fifty and
a hundreds. And this was a perfect kind of technology.
(56:34):
This is a niche that the typewriter plus mimiograph was
perfect for. Because if you're going to publish only a
hundred copies of a book, you don't want a printing press.
It's just too too much overhead for too little output.
But neither do you want to write that stuff by hand.
So anyway, on the in these books which I've amassed,
this collection of you can see that whenever the type
(56:57):
is encountered a word or a character or series that
was not on the machine, he or she would simply
skip ahead and leave spaces there and then write it
in by hand onto the memeo paper and then produce
the book. So you could actually see a which characters
were not on this person's machine, and how many, how
often or how willing the type ist was to do this,
(57:20):
to leave spaces and then enter a word. Um. Now,
the question would be is that over time are there
fewer of these handwritten insertions? Are there? Lets? Are there
more in handwritten insertions? And if there were fewer handwritten insertions,
over time. This is kind of building a research program
on the fly here. If there were fewer insertions over time,
(57:40):
it would be reasonable to hypothesize that that type ists
are using the strategy of basically synonym replacements. It's like, well,
I don't have that word which is not and then
let me just replace it with a synonym or leave
it out, uh, in favor of a character that is here.
Because we know that the typewriter itself ever changed size,
(58:00):
you only have two thousands five to deal with. It's
not as if they grew over time, and that's what
would account for the lack of insertions. So there's you'd
have to figure out how to actually submit this to
the acid bath of reason. But I do think that
on a first principles basis, it's undoubted that this that
this feedback loop exists. It's hard to imagine that it
(58:21):
could not exist. This is kind of silly, but I
kind of can't help but wonder if the availability of
emojis is shaping our language or the way we think,
Like what you have an emoji for and what you
don't have an emoji for. I think that's true, and
also animated gifts. If you think about someone who wants
to articulate something. I mean, think about Twitter and the
(58:44):
number of times that some political figure says something it's
so befuttling that instead of the person bothering to articulate,
what is it about this statement by said political figure
that is ridiculous or causes cognitive us an ins or
it's a contradiction, or it's illogical. Instead, it's a post
of two second clip of some famous actor, you know,
(59:09):
looking befuddled at the camera, and that's it. And that's
like as if that captures it. I think that's what
I'm getting in there with this, with economy of expression.
I mean, one is takes time and it's hard and
you have to and you're you're sticking your neck out
there to figure out how to put this into words.
And how do I get my feeling which is going
on in my mind that this is an illogical statement,
(59:32):
and how do I make the argument that it is.
That's that's like a that's an afternoon, you know, that's
a that's that's a that takes the whole day, a
whole week, a whole month to figure out how to
put it. And it's so fast and you've got to
get it out there, because there's going to be another
illogical statement any second now, so might as well just
take and now, of course the fact that these animated
gifts are preloaded into the technology. Let me just find
(59:55):
a preloaded one, uh that is spacious and and ambiguous
enough that I can encode my feeling in it, and
then I'll post that instead, and it takes me, you know,
all of five seconds. There's that dimension of it. So
that's one where it's cycling into expression and also the
capacity to express because it takes good you know, good
(01:00:15):
book isn't written, it's rewritten. A good writer is basically
a good editor is what they really are. And so
if you never learn how to edit and how to
revise and how to then can you become a good writer?
That's that's probably not, but it's open for question. I guess.
The other part is our chiveability. If someone takes the time,
(01:00:37):
even if they fail, you know, even if their argument
doesn't hold, if they take the time to express why
they found some statement theological or shocking or whatever it
might be, whatever the case might be, well it exists
in a textual form that can be attributed to a
person and a time and a place. How in the
world is an historian in the year to two thousand,
(01:00:59):
three hundred if exists going to cite Uh, I don't know.
The animated gifts a that was used seven hundred thousand
times in twenty different scenarios as as a way of
trying to articulate what people in the year whatever thought.
(01:01:20):
It almost you know, And these are the reverberations of
technologies of expression, technologies of writing that we don't have
to deal with, but of course someone will maybe. All right, Tom,
it looks like we're out of time here, but we
really appreciate you taking time out of your day to
chat with us. Uh really enjoyed the book. It's a
it's a great read for people that are interested in
(01:01:41):
Chinese history, history of technology, linguistic technology, linguistics itself. So
thanks for chatting with us. Yeah, thanks very much for
having me. I really appreciate it. Thanks a lot, all right,
so that you have it, Thanks again to Tom Us
mulaney for chatting with us about his book The Chinese Typewriter. Again,
(01:02:04):
it's out from M I T Press. You can get
that in print, you can get it as a digital
e book. However you like to consume your media. And
he's not stopping here. The next book in the series
is going to be The Chinese Computer. Oh yeah, and
he he teased it a little for us, kind of
off Mike, But it's gonna involve not only the some
(01:02:25):
of the the agencies that were involved in the first book,
but also UH like the US government and UH and
sort of the the the espionage world of the Cold
War as well. Yes, we will go deeper and deeper
into the realms of composition surrogacy. If you're curious what
that means, check back in with The Chinese Computer in
(01:02:45):
the future. In the meantime, be sure to head on
over to stuff double your mind dot com. That's where
you'll find all the podcast episodes, blog post links out
to various social media accounts, etcetera, and the on the
landing page. For this episode, we will be sure to
link out to a place where you can buy Milany's book,
as well as Molany's profile at Stanford. Thanks as always
(01:03:06):
to our excellent audio producers Alex Williams and try Harrison.
And if you want to get in touch with us
to let us know your feedback on this episode or
any other, or if you'd like to, you know, request
a topic for the future, something that interests you you
think might interest us and the other listeners as well.
You can email us at blow the Mind at how
stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands
(01:03:38):
of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com,
(01:04:00):
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