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