Tom Mullaney: The Chinese Typewriter: A History

[@Maazin5]

I was curious what Chinese typewriters looked like. Stayed for the whole lecture. Really amazing

[@Miawzhies]

watch a similar one called japanese typewriter since they both developed Chinese-Japanese typewriting since until PCs exist.

[@sofiapetala8220]

same

[@cuivincent9744]

Before the PC era, Chinese may rely on handwriting and there are no personal typewriters.

[@gudetamak4420]

One of the best lectures I've heard on KZbin, and it's amazing how innovating a Chinese logographic typewriter inadvertently led to predictive texts and accelerating the development of hypography for East Asia :)

[@oldtechie6834]

I found this video while reading Professor Mullaney's book "The Chinese Typewriter -- A History". Great book and great lecture!

[@sofiapetala8220]

I don't speak chinese, I study architecture in college, not foreign languages or even my language, and I can barely understand english but somehow this topic is fascinating for me, so here I am, literally in the middle of my vacations, enjoying it by watching a lecture.

[@jaketan5172]

I feel that your background in architecture - a design mindset somewhat like Geometry in Math - and Chinese characters being pictograms in nature has a connect. Open-minded learners connect separate discreet learnings to form synthesised compact knowledge, happily.

[@ellowell8160]

This lecture has NO right being this fascinating. Got here on a whim and watched the whole thing.

[@noedevin3302]

Very interesting lecture ! I had been searching for comprehensive info on the chinese typewriters but this was it and so much more ! Thank you very much

[@Reallynotnick]

This started with me having a curiosity and here I am 90mins later on a Saturday night not regretting a think. Fantastic presentation.

[@doleperfection]

His pronunciation was phenomenal!

[@andzzz2]

That was one of the best things I've heard in years. What a brilliant guy.

[@MajoroTom]

"I can't believe I was just about to sing the hokey pokey at the San Francisco Public Library" this is probably one of the better lectures i've ever watched, even aside from this

[@jennasalisbury4628]

This lecture is amazing and actually helped reinforce what I learned in Jing Tsu’s book KINGDOM OF CHARACTERS.

[@Solitaire001]

A very interesting and informative lecture. I knew a little about Chinese typewriters but didn't know just how complicated it was to use one. The comment about the Palm PDA caught my attention. I used a Palm PDA for years and I didn't know that its handwriting system (Graffiti) was related to the system used for the Chinese computer writing system. Graffiti was designed to teach you to write in a way that the PDA could understand and then accurately convert it into regular characters (letters, numbers, spaces, and punctuation). I became very good at writing using Graffiti, making few errors even when writing blind. After I stopped using the Palm PDA I noticed that my handwriting was affected. I find it takes me more effort to write clearly (I write in block letters) and I think that was due to my time using Graffiti. While many of the Graffiti symbols are similar to the regular characters (such as i, z, and o), others are different (t, f, and y), and that could be the reason my handwriting was affected.

[@alexv3357]

Anyone who's tried to learn Japanese as a second language is quite familiar with knowing a character and not being able to write it by hand

[@現実逃避39]

Once you pickup a smart phone you forget how to write kanji 😂

[@lohphat]

The content around 55:00 is chilling -- the potential for "groupthink" needs to be addressed as IMEs bulk-paste "entire poems" and thoughts without the person thinking about what they're including. The computer is now pasting entire thoughts from others. I could imagine a defense in a political court case in the PRC where a person is accused of political crimes and the defense is "I didn't type those thoughts, the IME did."

[@utkarshtripathi1200]

Arrival is a 2016 American science fiction film directed by Denis Villeneuve and written by Eric Heisserer. Based on the 1998 short story "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang, it stars Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, and Forest Whitaker. The film follows a linguist enlisted by the United States Army to discover how to communicate with extraterrestrial aliens who have arrived on Earth, before tensions lead to war. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrival_(film)

[@ihspan6892]

Brilliant, thank you. I love this kind of exploration. Super exciting!

[@timetraveller6643]

Came here after learning about the Chinese Telegraph Commercial Code Numbers. Fascinating.

[@승자김-g6i]

what? I own a vintage hangul typewriter & it can literally type batchim, just as modern digital computers can. to type 한글 you have to press ㅎ+(batchim(shift key))+ㅏ+ㄴ ㄱ+(batchim(shift))+ㅡ+ㄹ in that order. we are lucky that we could give up chinese characters whereas japanese with so many homophones, couldn't

[@KaushikLele]

Superb lecture. Informative and interesting.

[@erichapolinario8964]

Amazing lecture!

[@TheBuffaloEstate]

Great Lecture so far, wish the visuals on screen matched up better to him talking.

[@williamstahla8616]

utterly fascinating

[@joelthomastr]

Gotta watch this to the end! 1:24:19

[@KibbleWhite]

Awesome, and thank you.

[@devinreese1397]

Japanese writing, which is a variant of the same script, also uses logographs.

[@zhuzhou]

His arguments against discussion about chinese language reform also inconveniently would have proven that king Sejong, who created the brilliant Hangul system, was somehow racist. No dude, discussing costs and benefits of different writing systems, debating strategies to improve convenience and efficiency aren't racist. You can't go back to middle ages Korea and correct King Sejong to your way of thinking. He and every group has the right to discuss its own future and alter it if they choose. Your attempts to reinterpret legitimate discussions made by independent nonwestern people are super colonialist and also just wrong. Hangul is good; pointing out that hanzi can be a bit inconvenient isn't racist. It's true. Yet they have other unique advantages, and here we are

[@spookybuk]

great class. Thank you!

[@oldtechie6834]

I am tibiwangzi (提笔忘字) and I cannot use Wubi. The learning curve for Wubi is too much of a hurdle for most people. Wubi will forever be a niche IME player for a few die hards at best if it does not get phased out at all.

[@PCSoftware]

Great lecture, but the ending gave me depression.

[@YouLilalas]

Yes, the future is scary. Always has been.

[@zhuzhou]

It is so ridiculous to say that the invention of the qwerty typewriter actively excluded 600 million Bengali speakers. That is insane. That's not how the world works

[@MrRaul8Z]

It is quite clear that the solution for illiteracy and hypography in those exotic countries lies in their own hands. If he thinks that it is the west that needs to solve this "problem" for them, then he basically repeats the same condesending mindset of the pre-digital era when the QWERTY typewriter was "imposed" on the non-alphabetic languages. Why this should be a western problem at all?? No one can teach the chinese to master their own language better than the chinese, or any other counrty for that matter. It is strongly implied in his talk that it is the west that actually caused this hypography/disgraphia epidemic in china making them sort of "victims" of mechanization/westernazation. But in fact, it is actually the computer that made it finally possible to build a fully functional non-alphabetic typewriter. Retrieving words from the computer memory in order to write is not nessesarily a bad thing, especially for a langhuage that has thousands of characters. Maybe actually this computer-aided writing made the chinese and other similar language speaking countries so successfully integrated into the modern world? Maybe it actually boosted their communication quality so high that they quickly became one of the richest economies in the world?...

[@1943vermork]

On the last Q&A Just imagine if/when brain implants (Neuralink like) are on everybody in order to increase the bandwidth communication channel and add a layer of cloud suggestions with another layer of monetizing and state/cultural thought control. Throw AI in the mix... Maybe in the future people will not run for their life but for their thoughts

[@Zane-It]

Chinese speaking people how many times a day do you physically write down with pen and paper your thoughts in your native language?

[@mariomenezes5974]

That's the scary part of hypography...

[@zhuzhou]

Sorry dude, your way of judging Remington and those other type of other companies makes no sense. First you claim that they actively excluded Chinese and you blame them for that. Then you talk about how they did try to support Chinese and you blame them for failing. I don't understand what would you have them do? So the fact that somebody in the West made an English typewriter for their own language and then started a company and then try to support other languages and failed somehow, that makes that group guilty? That doesnt make sense. If China wanted something they can make it themselves.

[@cf5397]

Very weird to frame this in terms of a sort of "epidemic'" or "cognitive decline". I'd challenge most people to remember basic math equations they could do in high school but no longer can because they simply stopped doing so and their brain decided it was no longer worth retaining. This isn't some sort of disfunction or disease of the mind, that's how the brain works. You don't use it, you lose it. I strongly feel if this was occurring in the United States this narrative surrounding disease or epidemics would not be played out.

[@Alorand]

How does "You don't use it, you lose it." apply when they are reading all of these characters? They are using them every single day.

[@sunvivid]

感谢科普，比很多中国人做的都相信

[@timetraveller6643]

I know this is before Covid but, every time he says gezuntheit...

[@kanjurer]

csci 1800 gang yeet

[@patorishia_kunisaki]

don't like the quote 提笔忘字 but to ensure the confidentiality of certain informations, i guess a lot of people will have some sort of mental illness such as dementia, Alzheimer or even Schizophrenia. etc : (

[@zhuzhou]

Yep wait for it ... 20:00 he holds the querty typewriter responsible for excluding vast majority of people on earth This kind of rhetoric is not realistic. If anything, those groups themselves are responsible for not having their own typewriters. The fact that an English speaker made up a typewriter did nothing to harm them. Does he think this first random guy somehow was prejudicial in not adding right to left support to the first primitive typewriter? it's just so ahistorical and conspiratorial. Inventors in the rest of the world were still free to do whatever they wanted. But you know with a guy like this he's eventually going to come around to making those distorted claims. How else does someone like that become a professional at Stanford in today's day and age?

[@dissau2115]

Why the whole Chinese people learn Hispanic or English instead will make their lives so proud.

[@YouLilalas]

@FichDich InDemArsch username checks out 😂

[@ryushogun9890]

Wow he takes that much time to say how racist typewriters are.. to finally say, so yeah there was a Chinese typewriter. Come on, typewriters nowadays are hobbies, it's not a necessity, it's not making people illiterate. Jeez,

[@Priyo866]

He might not be a good speaker, but this was an amazing lecture nontheless.