TECHNOLOGY

Conventional wisdom of the past 200 years held that China would have to abandon character-based writing and embrace alphabetization in order to prosper from world trade and technological change. Today, Chinese is a world script and China is an IT giant. How did that happen? (Los Angeles Review of Books)

Get to know your QWERTY with these free, challenging keyboarding games.

Teachers, scroll down for a quick list of key resources in our Teachers’ Toolkit.

Discussion Ideas

• What is QWERTY?
  • QWERTY describes the standard layout on keyboards for languages that use Latin script. (QWERTY are the first five letter keys on the top left of the keyboard.)
  • QWERTY is WYSIWYG—what you see is what you get. The author interviewed in the Los Angeles Review of Books is less charitable: “We use the computer keyboard in a dumb, what-you-type-is-what-you-get kind of way. In all but rare instances, we assume a one-to-one correspondence between the symbols on the keys we strike and the symbols that we want to appear on the screen. Press the button marked ‘Q’ and ‘Q’ appears. It’s just that simple.”

• Why did so many technology experts of the mid-20th century think Chinese script would not adapt to the keyboard-dominated digital world?
  • Chinese does not have an alphabet. It instead uses more than 50,000 (!) characters, making the WYSIWYG model entirely impractical. The good folks at the BBC assure us that an educated Chinese person will only know about 8,000 characters—but can you imagine a keyboard with more than 8,000 keys? (Here’s an early attempt. It didn’t catch on.)

• When did China start to rethink the way its script was organized?
  • “[M]odern-day Chinese computing owes a tremendous debt to the work of Chinese library scientists and others back in the 1920s through 1940s—figures … who never knew that the computer would be invented, of course, but who obsessed over the question of how to design faster and faster ways of organizing Chinese library card catalogs, phone books, and filing systems! Little could they have known that, decades later, major companies like IBM, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Sougou, and others would dust off their methods and turn them into the engine of China’s rise as an IT giant!”

• So how did a Bronze-Age script outwit Silicon Valley?
  • Chinese typists actually use QWERTY keyboards, but in an entirely different way than Western typists do.
    • In China, the QWERTY keyboard is ‘smart,’ meaning clicking a key/letter initiates an algorithm based on either the letter’s phonetic sound or root shape. It’s a sort of predictive text, where the algorithm guesses what the typist wants.
      • The author describes a simple scenario in which a keyboard is equipped with a phonetic input editor: “[T]he moment I strike the letter Q, the system is off and running, trying to figure out what I want. With the first clue, the IME [input method editor] immediately starts showing me options or ‘candidates’ in a pop-up menu that follows me along on screen—in this case, Chinese characters, names, or phrases whose phonetic value begins with Q, such as Qingdao or qigong … The moment I hit the second button—let’s say U—the IME immediately changes up its recommendations, now giving me only characters that have pronunciations starting with ‘Qu.’”
      • Chinese input methods also include abbreviations. bj, bej, or bjing will all offer ‘Beijing’ as an option, for instance.

• How are Western IT professionals experimenting with the QWERTY keyboard?
  • They’re not, really. “We are dismissing and resisting all kinds of technological possibilities that exist now for English, French, Russian, and other alphabetic languages, simply because we unconsciously subscribe to the powerful idea, ‘If it ain’t broke, why fix it?’”
  • One outlier system that expanded the possibilities of QWERTY was the ShapeWriter system. ShapeWriter, mentioned by the author, allowed users of mobile devices to “draw” words by swiping/linking the letter/keys on their devices’ graphical keyboards with either their finger or a stylus. (Take a look at it in action here.) ShapeWriter has been discontinued, but a similar method is used by the Chinese input method Aeviou—which uses a QWERTY graphical keyboard.

TEACHERS’ TOOLKIT

Los Angeles Review of Books: It’s Time to Get Over QWERTY—A Q&A with Tom Mullaney on alphabets, Chinese characters, and computing

Free Typing Games!

BBC Languages: Chinese (including vocabulary, games, and songs)