技术爆炸下中文经历了什么

最初是在NYT的文章里看到了这本书，当时那篇文章的封面图片是一个转盘式的Chinese Typesetter，我这种（伪）字体迷怎能错过呢hhhhh一开始还以为就是讲一讲中文打字机，结果被这本书的广度和深度惊艳到！完全是一个崭新的看待中文和看待历史的角度！

本书一共七章，从1900年一直讲到现在2020年代，我觉得可以主要分为两个方面，一个是如何“改造”中文，使其更加易读易学，从而提高全民的识字率，也利于各地方的交流；另一个是如何使新的技术适应中文，其中包括了排印技术，电报技术，激光照排，编码技术等等。

如何“改造”中文可能是我们比较熟悉的部分，毕竟简化字是长久以来一个讨论很多的话题。不过这本书除了介绍简化字（以及不简化字）以外，还提到了很多其他的“改造”，包括了普通话是如何成为了普通话，各种罗马字化（Romanization，比如拼音）的尝试，如何给汉字进行“排序”从而方便索引等等。

如何使新的技术适应中文是我个人觉得更“mind blowing”的部分。中文作为一种非常特殊的语言，首先它的字符很多（不像英文只有26个字母），而且无序（不像英文26个字母有规定好的顺序），当西方的各种先进技术传到中国来的时候，就发现他们面对中文束手无策。比如说Linotype这种打字机，只需要使用和现在的电脑键盘差不多的键盘，就可以自动铸造铅字然后排印，极大的加快了出版业的印刷速度。然而这样的机器是建立在英文只有26个字母的前提下的，中文有几千个字符，就没有办法做一个非常小的键盘。因此有各种不同的尝试，比如按照部首或者声韵排列方便查找，还有林语堂的把汉字按照笔画拆分（有点类似于五笔输入法）然后选字的设计。再说说电报技术，也是以英文作为基础对每个字母进行编码，并不适用于中文。中文最后采用的是用数字先编码，然后拍电报的时候用数字对应的电报码。还有激光照排技术，和之前的打字机一样除了面临着字符太多不好选择的问题，还面临着汉字字模数字化存贮量很大的问题。而到了现在的数字时代，什么汉字可以被选进编码（常为Unicode），以及东亚语言（CJK）的统一化编码问题还需要每年开会讨论。

除了内容非常丰富充满新奇感以外，这本书写的也是很精彩。书中不仅是介绍各种技术本身，而且着重笔墨介绍了各种技术的发明者，还有当时的历史背景，和读故事一样。这本书主要面向的是英文读者，所以书中还有很多直观的例子让并不熟悉中文的读者对中文面对的问题有更直观的想象。不过这也是我个人觉得略微遗憾的一点：书中提到的很多知识我希望找到一些中文资料，但是因为提供的人名和书名等等都是英文，有些实在是不太好找。非常期待这本书翻译成中文出版，一是可以方便和中文对上号儿，二是也可以让我妈看看哈哈哈哈～

摘抄

Chapter 1 A Mandarin in Revolution (1900): Unifying the National Tongue

• Main character: Wang Zhao
• The Chinese script, once revered, celebrated by its people, and practiced by neighboring cultures, now seemed clumsy and backward. The philosopher G. W. F. Hegel had banished it from the consideration of history, because “the nature of the written language in itself is a great hindrance for the development of the sciences.”
• Other closer to home also confirmed that the Chinese language was unfit — even onetime users. China’s neighbor and recent colonizer Japan began to reduce the number of Chinese characters in its lexicon and experimented with Romanization — distancing itself from a character-dominant writing system and admitting that the West, with its alphabetic languages, was superior.
• The general rate of literacy among men was less than 30 percent, and as low as 2 percent for women.
• While in exile, he completed his vision for its salvation: a thin document titled Mandarin Combined Tone Alphabet... With it, he intended to help China’s masses of poor peasantry rise, building a common bridge of communication and understanding that extended even to the foreigners they hated.
• Alphabetic languages were lauded as the trains and automobiles of modernity, while the Chinese script trailed behind as the rickety oxcart.
• Subtle Explorations of Phonology: It was an official dictionary personally commissioned by the Kangxi Emperor.
• In December 1912, just a year after the end of the imperial dynasty, the Ministry of Education created the Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation to settle the issue of the national tone.
• To this day, when asked, a southerner in Hong Kong or Guangdong will say, were it not for this fateful crossfire, Cantonese would have been chosen over Mandarin.

Chapter 2 Chinese Typewriters and America (1912): Mapping Out the Ideographic Keyboard

• Main character: Zhou Houkun, Qi Xuan, Shu Zhendong
• Mechanics Hall
• He asked a bystander for the name of this gurgling beauty. It was a Monotype machine, he was tole, one where the typist “sat in front of a keyboard, touched the keys, punched multitudes of little holes in a long reel of paper, and, when finished, placed the latter in a machine which produced fresh, clean, clear types of lead all lined up and ready for the printing press.”
• He thought of the typical scene in a Chinese pressroom using traditional movable type. There, typesetters toiled in stale air reeking of oil, toting trays back and forth like ants carrying grains of rice, picking out one type cast at a time from a maze of thousands of characters, which then had to be rearranged by hand on a tray before a single impression could be made.
• The Roman alphabet enabled the West to dominate modern communications tools like typewriting and telegraphy, and the Chinese would need to find their place in that existing infrastructure.
• The first world fair, ... China was the only country to decline. That did not stop the British from staging a China Court display — mixed in with Japanese and Burmese objects. Or from fabricating a firsthand report called An Authentic Account of the Chinese Commission, Which Was Sent to Report on the Great Exhibition, Wherein the Opinion of China Is Shown as Not Corresponding at All With Our Own, which served a scathing portrayal in long verse, penned by a fictitious Chinese mandarin who was disappointed not to have a good old-fashioned beheading as part of the spectacle.
• China’s total imports of U.S. goods rose dramatically after 1900, from 2.65 percent of its total global trade in the last thirty-five years of the19th century to 22.05% in the first four decades of the 20th century.
• Fear of Chinese stealing American jobs made them a target of racial discrimination, and at the world exhibitions they were denigrated as cheap entertainment like animals in a zoo. The carnivalesque Joy Zone at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915, for instance, erected an Underground Chinatown installation. Though a small peephole, visitors could steal a voyeuristic glance at the wax figures of yellow-faced opium-smoking addicts, prostitutes, and coolie laborers lurking in the shadows of urban enclaves. China protested several times to little avail.
• Yet a usable keyboard for the Chinese typewriter seemed unachievable. A Western alphabetic keyboard worked because it easily manipulated a fixed number of letters into endless permutations... The Chinese language, with characters numbering in the thousands, required a mechanical connection that could “serve momentarily one character, but could be shifted to serve all other characters,” as Zhou described it.
• An American Presbyterian missionary named Devello Zelotes Sheffield built the first Chinese-language typewriters in 1897, with the help of Carlos Holly, and engineer from a renowned family that invented fire hydrants.
• Zhou laid out a map of the characters on a flat grid so that any character could be located along an x- and a y-axis. Each character, in other words, now had its own coordinates.
• The gears cut in a Chinese workshop, Zhou was appalled to see, were “like the ragged teeth of an old Chinese lady past sixty.” Dimensions and widths were eyeballed at best, and anything less than a thousandth of an inch couldn’t be measured accurately. Reliable mechanical experts and draftsmen, like those in the United States who could carry out any engineer’s instructions from a blueprint, were nonexistent.

Chapter 3 Tipping the Scale of Telegraphy (1925): Writing in Codes

• Main character: Wang Jingchun
• Telegraphy was the internet of its era. Anyone who couldn’t use telegraphy did not just lose time; they were also disconnected from the progress that the technology enabled.
• The original promoters of telegraphy promised that it would allow countries to leave strife and wars behind, ushering in an era of open exchange and collaboration; it was the beginning of a new age. Europe’s great powers had restrained themselves from waging major wars against one another for most of the nineteenth century, and now they saw greater benefits in cultivating mutual respect and striking a balance of powers. One of the first test messages sent across the ocean floor brimmed with optimism: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace, good will to men.” Telegraphy was seen as the harbinger of peace and prosperity.
• Morse code clearly favored the American English alphabet... To add even a single diacritical mark to the letter “a” — as when making the French “å” — required ten more units.
• Wang always stressed that solutions could not be found in blame, and he stuck to that advice before Western, as well as Chinese audiences. “With us,” he once advised the minister of communications in Beijing, “the question is not to regret or complain over the past but to endeavor to make the best out of the future.”
• Resentment brewed in the countryside against the intrusion of cable lines. They cut across swaths of the hinterland, and it was believed that they disturbed the spirits of ancestors in the burial grounds and strangled the fengshui on property, damning crops and harvests.
• An 1875 report to the throne explained why: “The foreigners know of God and Jesus, but not ancestors. Upon entering their religion one must first destroy the idols in one’s home. In China, the life after death is treated the same as life in this world...The foreigners bury their telegraphic wires in the ground, burrowing through and forcing their way across in all four directions until the either’s veins are all but severed, making the burial sites vulnerable to wind and flood. How can this sit well on our conscience?”
• More often, people skirted the rules a little. They came up with shorter spellings — like “immidiatly” for “immediately”, “nuf sed” for “enough said” — or used foreign-language words when the pricing was by letters rather than words.
• An 1884 manual on how to cheapen the rate of telegraphy recommended “CELESTIFY” for “I think it will be no cheaper” and “DANDELION” for “if it is damaged.”
• Where taxation or pricing of word length was concerned, then, they agreed to insert a special clause—”exceptionellement”—which specified Chinas and its use of four digits as plain text.
• Why should the Chinese language, after all, have to be represented by numbers for the world to accept it? Getting the international organization to grant the exception was a quick fix to close an urgent gap, but the root of the problem was still unresolved.
• To indicate sound in his New Phonetic System, Wang mapped the sounds of Bopomofo—represented by symbols ㄅ, ㄆ, ㄇ, ㄈ, etc.— onto alphabet letters that shared similar starting consonant sounds. So ㄅ, ㄆ, ㄇ, ㄈ would match the letters “b”, “p”, “m” and “f”.
• Still, Romanization was something he never let go, and he continued to revise his ideas. He called his last system Gueeyin.

Chapter 4 The Librarian’s Card Catalog (1938): Breaking Down the Character Into Its ABCs

• Main characters: Lin Yutang, Wang Yunwu, Du Dingyou
• If the alphabet were organized by descending stroke count, then "E" instead of "A" would be the starting letter, followed by "F," "B“ or "H," all of which have three strokes. If the alphabet looked like EFBH instead of ABCD, one would, among other things, have to expunge expressions like "A-list" or "plan B" from the English language immediately. There would also be no more A grade in school or C-class shares to own in a company. Not only does order matter in the alphabet, but that sense of order has also become deeply embedded in language, shaping our orientation in the world, the ways we express priorities, and how we organize affairs in order of importance, preference, and hierarchy.
• “A Chinese Index System: An Explanation” (Lin Yutang)
• The first compiler of radicals, Xu Shen, was a Confusian scholar and commentator on the classics during the Eastern Han dynasty, 25-220.
• Rather, bibliographic classification in Chinas properly began in the first century B.C.E., and it was based on a perceived moral order. A Confucian scholar devised an elaborate scheme of seven main subject divisions—with thirty-eight subdivisions—prioritizing the Confucian classics first, with science and medicine—astronomy, geomancy, pharmacology, sexology, etc.—occupying the last two categories. Two centuries later, the division of seven began to give way to a trimmer, tighter division of four, proposed by an imperial librarian. After a couple more reshuffling, the four divisions settled in their modern form: classics, history, philosophy, and poetry, in that order.
• The scheme that ultimately prevailed was the Four-Corner Index Method, invented by Wang Yunwu.
• By then, he had found his true passion, despite his rising reputation as a literary writer. He wanted to build a typewriter. He was familiar with the typewriting machines of Zhou Houkun, Qi Xuan, and others. But Lin was imagining a design that would set itself apart. His would be based on deep linguistic knowledge, drawn from the East and the West, ancient and modern, literary and scientific. It would take him two more decades to build a prototype that he was willing to unveil to the world.
• Du began by revisiting how the ancients looked upon characters in motion. He made the case that Chinese characters were not meant to be treated or seen as purely static shapes, as stale forms on paper.
• He (Du Dingyou) had rescued some of China’s most precious written volumes from the enemy’s hands. The Japanese may have advanced inside China’s borders, but on this particular occasion their destructive intent had been foiled on his watch. After the war, he would continue to rebuild this country’s library system from the ground up, becoming the founding father of modern library science in China.
• Lin's keyboard provided pivotal evidence for how Chinese can be used in a photographic system of storage and optical retrieval. Hiss. organization of the Chinese script, by assimilating it to an alphabetic logic, put it in position for the upcoming digital age, almost forty years before China even had a computer. Computerized Chinese using Chinese characteristics would be the character index race's lasting legacy.

林语堂完成了中文打字机的设计图 女儿帮他示范打字

Chapter 5 When “Peking” Became “Beijing” (1958): Simplification and Romanization

• Main character: Zhao Yuanren, Qu Qiubai, Zhou Youguang
• For Mao, Romanizing Chinese for the Chinese was an essential element of national and political self-determination. He and his advisors took a two-pronged approach to literacy: harnessing the Western phonetic alphabet to make Chinese easier to access for the Chinese and foreigners alike, and reducing the number of strokes in characters to lower the threshold for reading and writing Chinese characters.
• About 80 percent of current simplified characters existed before the mid-twentieth century, and of those about 30 percent had been in use before the third century.
• Nushu, literally “women’s script”, was a simplified writing system that used fewer strokes and gave women both literacy and a means of private communication with one another.
• Whatever support there was for character simplification among the Nationalists dwindled after 1949. After losing the mainland to the Communists and retracting to Taiwan, the nationalists appointed themselves the true guardians of traditional culture and have kept the traditional written characters intact to this day. By distancing themselves from character simplification, they left room for the Communists to claim it as a central platform for New China.
• no longer see one's relatives（親vs亲）. ... The factories are emptied' (厰 vs. 厂), while flour is missing wheat (麵 vs. 面). Transportation' has no cars' (運 vs. 运）... Flying is done on one wing (飛 vs.飞)
• In the 1920s and 1930s, two competing Romanization systems emerged: the Nationalists’ Gwoyeu Romatzyh, or National Romanization, and a later arrival, the Communists’ Latinxua Sin Wenz, or Latin New Script.
• For one thing, none of the Western schemes—Wade-Giles included—ever thought of phoneticizing characters in groups.
• The Communists took issue with the fact that National Romanization was led by intellectuals, not the people, and that it enshrined Mandarin as the national standard, which meant accommodating only its four official tones while excluding all other dialects, some of which had up to seven or nine tones. The Nationalists failed to prioritize the masses, the Communists proclaimed. They were elite to the core, enforcing a top-down decision on the people.
• By this time, the language question occupied the forefront of the Soviet Union’s policy toward its own national minorities. The newly unified Soviet Union included swath of Central Asia that did not speak or read Russian. Among the groups in these regions that already had a written tradition, Arabic had been in use for almost a thousand years.
• In truth, Latinization was also a way to divide and conquer. From the Russian’s perspective, Central Asia was about as savage and backward as a place could be—and they found its inhabitants difficult to tell apart...If the Soviet East were to be brought to heel, the Russians thought, it would have to be purged of its Islamic influence.
• Qu painted the Nationalists — and their National Romanization-in as poor a light as possible. Not only had they catered to Mandarin speakers, but their Romanization program was too complicated for the layman to grasp. He characterized National Romanization as a self-congratulatory intellectual exercise that excluded most everyday speakers. Qu would not have seen the humor or cleverness in Zhao's lion-eating Sir Shi-just evidence of the privileged class's excess. Only the Communist austerity of Latin New Script, straight from the mouths of the peasants themselves, could counter the Nationalists' bourgeois policies. Championing the cause of all speakers of the Chinese languages, divided by class rather than geography or religion, Qu and others believed they were standing up for the factory workers, coolie laborers, and toiling peasants who would drive the coming world socialist revolution.
• The Chinese script was born of the masses and sprang from the seat of the culture’s emotions. No matter how complicated Chinese script was, a foreign script, with its own roots and origin, would always look strange and unfamiliar to the Chinese people.
• Decades later, Zhou Youguang, one of the twelve men from the Pinyin Committee, reminisced about the momentousness of their task An original member of one of the subgroups that drew up the first draft of Chinese Romanization, Zhou lived to be 111 years old and came to be celebrated as the father of pinyin. But he knew better than anyone that it was a collective effort; everyone gave their utmost. It was a time of idealism and hope, after all, when New China promised a better path for its people and intellectuals and workers alike were roused by the bright rhetoric. "Mao promised us the rule of the people," he recalled. And pinyin gave the people their voice.

Chapter 6 Entering Into the Computer (1979): Converting Input and Output

• Main character: Zhi Bingyi, Wang Xuan
• It became clear that in order to be part of the computing age at all, the Chinese script would have to be rendered digitally...Converting human language scripts into digital form was the next frontier.
• Zhi knew he could tackle the first, critical step: how best to input Chinese into the machine. That meant figuring out a way to represent each character in a language that the human operator and the machine could both understand: as a finite set of zeros and ones entered directly into the machine, or in the alphabetic letters on which computer programming languages were already built.
• In April 1973, the deputy director of China’s state-owned Xinhua News Agency and a team of advisors traveled to Japan, where they visited the headquarters of Kyodo News in Minato.
• They saw the typesetters wearing white lab coats and working at keyboards without fuss or exertion. Their workspaces were as clean and orderly as a hospital ward. Back home in China, printing and communication were still largely dependent on hot lead type.
• Developing Chinese-language phototypesetting was complicated by the same problem China had always had with its written language—there were too many characters to use and choose from.
• Sinotype

Chapter 7 The Digital Sinosphere (2020)

• Main character: Joe Becker, Lee Collins
• Han script unification
• IRG meeting - a mini-U.N. in the encoding world
• An adage, recalled by Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich, goes, “A language is a dialect with an army and navy.” The idea is that the way any language becomes dominant has less to do with linguistic attributes than the politics that drive it.