Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern by Jing Tsu
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Reverential Technology

Life is too short to learn Chinese. At least it was until Mao reduced the number of characters in the language from over 45000 to less than 3000 and introduced a Latinised form that reasonably tracked the official dialect (Mandarin). Until then, only the elite officialdom was privy to the power of its complex ideographs. And many of that elite after a lifetime of study knew the secrets of this beautiful script but almost nothing of its written content. At the beginning of the 20th century the literacy rate in the country was no more than 10%, and almost no one in that minority was engaged in scientific research, engineering, or material innovation.

Yet during a century of national trauma - including occupation by almost every European nation, the overthrow of the ruling Qing dynasty, political degeneration into warlord rule, invasion and destruction by Japan, the Communist revolution and its aftermath in events like the Cultural Revolution - literacy is now almost 100%, and the country’s scientific, engineering, and material achievements exceeds all others except the United States. Jing Tsu’s history of the transformation of the Chinese language records the development of the underlying technology of this dramatic transformation, the Chinese language itself.*

Chinese is of course ideographic. Like ancient Egyptian, it uses glyphs. But unlike Egyptian, which was transformed into Coptic using the Greek alphabet, it never became expressed phonetically. There was good reason not to take the phonetic plunge. The disconnection between symbol and sound allowed enormous linguistic variation over a vast empire while maintaining the ability to communicate without translation. While there was an official pronunciation, this was used only among the elite at the imperial court. Even the Manchu invaders of the 17th century adopted the script without understanding a word of it. And Mao decreed the Mandarin dialect although he couldn’t speak it at all.

Jing recounts the details of the technical changes in the language that adapted it to modern technology, first to the telegraph, then to the mechanical typewriter, and ultimately to the computer. These are not insignificant for a script as aesthetically nuanced as written Chinese, and for a pronunciation that requires the subtlety of tone to distinguish among the language’s many homonyms.** But for me the most remarkable aspect of his story is the persistent cultural reverence for the ancient script itself.

The men (and they are exclusively so except for the unnamed women who developed a esoteric women’s script in Southern China) who pioneered these conceptual, bibliographic and technological changes are cultural heroes. Their devotion to the Chinese language, on occasion to the point of death, is something usually associated with religion in the West. The debate about the condition of the language is much like that of an English Council arguing the most appropriate programme for the restoration of a Grade I listed building. That is, the discussion is typically about alternative aesthetics rather than merely economic or technical efficiency, which are considered constraints but not objectives. Few other modern countries have had China’s linguistic experience (Soviet Tajikistan and other Arabic speaking republics were others in the 1920’s and 30’s; the ancient Phoenicians may have been the first when the Greeks and Jews alphabetised their ideographic symbols***).

In short, Chinese is revered not simply because of its antiquity, or it’s use by about a third of the world’s population. It is also an aesthetically beautiful object in its own right. Jing Tsu captures that beauty throughout his book.

*For a discussion of language as the fundamental technology see here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

**Consider, for example, the difficulties involved in creating a Latin script of some fixed number of alphabetic characters. In principle this appears easy since most Chinese words are composed of only two sounds, a beginning consonant followed by a vowel (each of these sounds has its own character as well). Suppose an extended alphabet of say 30 consonants and 10 vowels were used to express these sounds. This combination would yield 300 possibilities, that is, less than 10% of the distinctive sounds required in the vastly reduced number of words in the current dictionary. In fact a character is not a word in the Western sense. Its context defines it as much as the glyph. This is correlated with the crazy-making structure of the Chinese dictionary as well as the more-than-arbitrary character of library subject classifications.

***See here for a discussion of the Western transition to phonetic script: https:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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