The Chinese Typewriter: A History
Prof. Tom Mullaney presents on his new book at CCSRE.
Is your keyboard racist? Yes, sort of.
The modern QWERTY keyboards we use today were specifically created for English and best-suited for such alphabetic Latin languages. Only 2.6 billion people of the world population use the Latin alphabet. The keyboard has been stretched to accommodate Arabic, Hebrew, and non-Latin alphabets. Though ubiquitous, the QWERTY keyboard does not accommodate character-based languages like Chinese, but these writing systems have been forced to adapt. It’s not just the keyboards, the history of telecommunications reflects and reinforces the linguistic hegemony of the Latin alphabet and subordination of non-Latin languages.
Thomas Mullaney, Associate Professor of History and Faculty Research Fellow at Stanford's Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE), uses the development of the typewriter to show the ascendency of Western alphabetic languages in telecommunications and the subjugation of character-based scripts, in his new book, The Chinese Typewriter: A History. Mullaney recently discussed his book at the Research Institute of CCSRE. The book’s exploration of the relationship between language and technology is critical today, as we undergo yet another revolution–the shift from typing to voice and video to communicate, popularized by smartphones and devices like the Amazon Echo.
The presumed universality of the western alphabet – and the linguistic imperialism underlying this belief – has pervaded the history of information technology from telegraphy to computing. The common typewriter, produced and popularized by companies like Remington and Olivetti, includes keys for each letter. Companies sought to apply the same one-to-one logic to other languages. It was, therefore, thought that a Chinese typewriter should bear a key corresponding to each of the 2000+ common characters.
A standard Remington with over 2000 keys was unthinkable in the late 19th, early 20th centuries. Newspapers of the time printed absurd representations of Chinese typewriters, whereby a typist arduously operates a room-sized keyboard by climbing a staircase or moving across an expansive terrain to identify the desired Chinese character. By casting the western type system as universal, it was impossible to conceive of a Chinese typewriter. This false universalism of the typewriter with a one-to-one key-letter relationship in turn cast Chinese as incompatible with modernity.
Mullaney does not merely chronicle the consolidation of the alphabetic system of telecommunications in the twentieth century. He points out that, even today, we accept the predominance of a Western encoding system as universal in the computing world. We accept that typing the key “t” on our keyboard should create a “t” impression on our screens to reflect the letter t. We accept that technology mediates our language – not phonetically or calligraphically – but rather alphabetically. If the Western way is the default, Chinese and other character-based systems become aberrant. To some extent, this linguistic pecking order insinuates an underlying racial hierarchy, whereby linguistic proximity to the West confers value. Moreover, non-alphabetic languages are disadvantaged under this system. Indeed, technological innovation in the field of information technology is built on the foundational assumption of alphabetic supremacy. Modern computing is based on a wester text encoding system: the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) scheme.
Despite the uneven playing field, Chinese has not only survived but thrived in the age of information technology. This resilience was not always a foregone conclusion. Many Chinese reformers encouraged a shift away from characters to an alphabetic script to modernize the language in light of the disadvantages Chinese script faced in telecommunications. These proponents were ultimately proven wrong. As Mullaney points out, the critical shift occurred when Chinese innovators overcame the idea of typing as a one-to-one representation between key and letter; they developed an input system, whereby a user inputs a phonetic representation (which corresponds to numerous characters) and the computer uses this representation to predict likely characters based on the context and frequency of use. As the user types additional phonetic representations, the computer hones in on the correct character. The input method has developed to incorporate predictive text, autocorrection, and other features that speed up the writing process.
The input typing system found in China today is the product of 150 years of experimentation induced by pressure for conformity with alphabetic typing. In the west, the core relationship between users and technology remains unchanged: the keyboard is a one-to-one correspondence between keys and letters, as the typewriter had been. For Mullaney, the West’s belief in the superiority of an alphabetic typing system and its efforts to universalize this system has perhaps limited innovative thinking and experimenting with information systems. Yet, the future of global information and technology is the input system, and western users and keyboards must adapt to this new landscape.
