Critique de Kingdom of Characters par Josh

Starting in the mid-19th century the Chinese script faced a number of challenges. Some of these arose from the development of new technologies, notably the telegraph and typewriter. Both of these devices had been invented in the west and were designed to work with western characters. There was no obvious way the technologies could be adapted for for a language which had not a few dozen but thousands of characters.

There were also social challenges to the Chinese script. In the 19th century some countries had embraced the idea of universal literacy, which turned out to have significant economic benefits. Chinese literacy remained relatively low (perhaps 20% among men and less than 5% among women) and part of the problem was supposed to be that memorizing thousands of characters was a lot harder than memorizing a few dozen phonetic characters. As a result, reformers were beginning to call for either the simplification of Chinese script or it's wholesale replacement with western characters, which could represent Chinese using the Wade-Giles transliteration system.

This book is about how the Chinese script was preserved, and technologies were adapted to the script rather than (as many had expected) the script being forced to adapt to technologies.

Adapting the typewriter to Chinese might seem impossible, given the physical space constraints. The western device couldn't simply be adjusted, it needed to be reachitected using a different approach. Zhou Houkun solved this by creating a cylinder with thousands of characters, which could be rotated to find the correct character. The real challenge with this approach was how to organize the characters so that users could easily find them. This led to efforts to re-organize the written language to make it easier to find characters based on their physical appearance (the types of strokes they used).

Telegraph operators faced different constraints. Ultimately all telegraph characters needed to be reducible to binary (dots and dashes). Telegraphs proved what was possible with binary a century before digital computers. There would be nothing theoretically difficult about encoding Chinese characters in binary - Unicode does that today. But, whereas the 36 symbols in the Morse system could be represented with at most five keystrokes, representing say 20,000 Chinese symbols would require fifteen keystrokes (the number of symbols you can represent in a binary string of length n = is 2^n) all of which would have to memorized by telegraph operators. Since the telegraph system was global a single system was needed for use everywhere even if operators in China were willing to put in the years of practice to learn this it unlikely operators elsewhere would be.

There were two alternatives to direct encoding: transliteration and numerical encoding (assigning a unique number to each character). Initially the operators used transliteration, but eventually the Chinese lobbied to switch to numerical encoding to cut costs. Since telegraphs charged on a per character basis it was far cheaper to send a symbol as five numbers vs. (typically) a far greater number of characters.

With the rise of digital computers and the internet the memory of telegraph operators ceased to be a constraint on encoding. This led to the development of Unicode, which directly encodes all characters (in Chinese and every other script) in binary. However, this produced its own set of problems and disputes because there was no universally agreed way to write Chinese. Notably, the PRC had simplified it's version of the script, while Taiwan (positioning itself, rather dubiously, as the guardian of traditional Chinese culture) stuck to traditional script. In addition, other major Asian languages including Japanese (kanji), Korean (hanja) and Vietnamese (chữ Hán) all had scripts derived from Chinese, but the representation and meaning of their characters had shifted over centuries. This resulted in the Han unification project to develop a single encodable standard.

I found Kingdom of Characters interesting, though surely not to everyone's tastes. As someone who doesn't know Chinese, I found some of the discussions of script organization (as in dictionaries or Chinese digital keyboards) difficult to follow. Nonetheless it's an interesting story about a very big project of transformation and adaptation that I previously knew nothing about.