by PETER GORDON
It is an accident of history that most information technology, from Morse Code to the Internet, was developed in and for English-speaking countries. English, with just 26 letters and no accents or diacritical marks, means that everything from keyboards to displays to internal character codings are simple, deceptively so, because almost no other language makes life that easy. As a result, developers adopted solutions which have bedeviled information technology in other languages ever since. If developers are being honest, they would probably admit that solutions for languages from French and Russian to Arabic and Thai are (to use the technical term) kludged-up versions of products first designed for English.
Chinese, with its tens of thousands of characters, is however a case apart. How could one even type them, display or store them in computer systems are fascinating questions, taking one down to the basics of what language is, but also of tremendous practical importance in our technically-integrated world. The challenges of contemporary data communications in Chinese is where Jing Tsu’s Kingdom of Characters ends up after a journey that begins in the twilight years of the Qing dynasty.
Tsu starts with the story of how modern “Chinese” was constructed alongside the development of the Chinese nation-state through a deliberate national process of standardization resulting in Putonghua, simplified Chinese characters and pinyin romanization, a process that didn’t end until well into the second half of the 20th century. This particular story is to some extent told better in David Moser’s A Billion Voices: China’s Search for a Common Language, but Tsu is setting up a discussion on technology. She begins back in the 19th century with telegraphy, a tale that is at times almost surreal:
International telegraphy recognized only Roman alphabet letters and Arabic numerals … which meant that Chinese, too, had to be via letters and numbers… Every Chinese character was transmitted as a string of six numbers, each of which cost more than a letter. The assigned code for a Chinese character first had to be looked up in a codebook before being converted to the dots and dashes of Morse code.
Chinese telegraphy was both troublesome and expensive but protecting revenue rather than efficiency seems to have been the International Telegraphic Union’s major priority. Tsu recounts how that since abbreviations cost the telegraphy companies money, they started pricing by word; users as a consequence starting running words together or using code words, practices the ITU tried to stamp out. China’s first foray into international standards diplomacy nevertheless resulted in it being deemed a special case, a partial accommodation but at least a partial success.
Asian Review of Books for more