Avtal
14th May 2016, 12:04 AM
Interesting article:
It's time to get over QWERTY: A Q&A with Tom Mullaney on alphabets, Chinese characters, and computing (http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/chinablog/time-get-qwerty-qa-tom-mullaney-alphabets-chinese-characters-computing/).
Selected quotes:
Ever since the mass manufacture of typewriters began in the U.S. in the 19th century, engineers and entrepreneurs imagined a day when this new technology would conquer the Chinese language and open up a vast new market to Remington, Underwood, Olivetti, and more...
[B]y the 1990s, [this] seemed to many to have come true: computers throughout China began to look “just like ours,” even including the familiar QWERTY keyboard, which today is ubiquitous in the Chinese-speaking world.
In the Western world, people began to assume that the Latin alphabet had finally “conquered” Chinese — just like they assumed it always would. But nothing could be further from the truth.
...
If anything, Chinese conquered the alphabet, not the other way around.
Avtal
It's time to get over QWERTY: A Q&A with Tom Mullaney on alphabets, Chinese characters, and computing (http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/chinablog/time-get-qwerty-qa-tom-mullaney-alphabets-chinese-characters-computing/).
Selected quotes:
Ever since the mass manufacture of typewriters began in the U.S. in the 19th century, engineers and entrepreneurs imagined a day when this new technology would conquer the Chinese language and open up a vast new market to Remington, Underwood, Olivetti, and more...
[B]y the 1990s, [this] seemed to many to have come true: computers throughout China began to look “just like ours,” even including the familiar QWERTY keyboard, which today is ubiquitous in the Chinese-speaking world.
In the Western world, people began to assume that the Latin alphabet had finally “conquered” Chinese — just like they assumed it always would. But nothing could be further from the truth.
...
If anything, Chinese conquered the alphabet, not the other way around.
Avtal