I’ve tried searching the internet for this but I can’t seem to find a definitive answer. Lots of pictures and historical information but no actual hard info on how they work.
The straight dope website I’ve found addresses how typing in those languages on a computer works but I’ve done this myself, I’m familiar with that. What is apparent from it is that this method would not work with a typewriter.
So.
How?
I guess with Japanese they might just use hiragana? But Chinese? They’ve no alphabet to fall back on, just the characters. Some kind of system whereby the type the radicals that make up the characters then press space to go onto a new one?
No, writing a sentence in all-hiragana would make it extremely difficult to read.
Practically speaking, everyone wrote by hand until electronic word processors became widespread in the 1980s.
There were mechanical Japanese typewriters for some special applications, with 1000 or more characters. They were never common; I’ve never seen one myself.
I’ve never heard of a Chinese typewriter either. Before personal computers became common and computer character input methods matured to what they are today, everyone just wrote everything by hand.
I’ve seen them in action. It’s a lot more like typesetting than a typewriter. Not quite sure how to describe it but the operator would pull the character from a big grid and put it in a slot and then hit the type key.
The wiki article above kinda describes it.
Wierd thing, people who did this had been “typing” for years, and they were really fast.
I’ve seen one in person. It looks nothing like a western typewriter.
There’s a giant metal matrix of little boxes, each box contains the type to make one character. Above it is a mechanism that can be slid to any position over the matrix.
The “typist” slides the mechanism over to the character he wants to type. Then he pushes down on a lever. This grabs the type character, lifts it out of the matrix, and presses it against ink and the paper.
Does the Gutenberg invention of movable type even make any sense in a language with 50,000 characters? To print a book, did the Chinese have to manually engrave every page like people did in the 15th century or did they have all (important) characters somehow stored?
Here’s a video of a Chinese typewriter in action. The audio’s in Swedish, unfortunately, but there is a brief explanation in the text underneath.
I don’t understand how the typist can line up the moving thingamajig with the exact character he wants, without making a mistake. Everything looks so tiny and fiddly. It would have me screaming!
As far as I know, Chinese printing presses worked the same way as Western printing presses. While there was a much larger set of movable types to be maintained, they could be reused many times, and I imagine that had got to be more efficient that custom engraving every single thing that you print.
In terms of productivity, note that each character represents a word. In typical English prose words average about 6-ish characters each, plus a space. So the operator is putting ideas on paper about 7 times faster than it initially appears. My understanding is that Chinese uses fewer words than English for equivalent concepts (fewer modifiers & glue words mostly), so the speed multiplier might really be more like 10x.
What really amazed me was when I realized that *if *the operator is looking at the working face of the type slug itself, then he/she is looking at each character upside down when trying to pick out the correct one.
But not the upside down that you get by rotating 180 degrees in the plane, as if holding a printed page with the top at the bottom. This is the upside down that comes from rotation front-to-back about a horizontal line; in other words a top/bottom mirror image of what the resulting character will look like.
Back in the early 80s, I saw one used. Quite slow and hard to use.
It should be noted that no one uses Japanese typewriters any more. They weren’t commonly used, most things were hand written until reasonably priced word processors because common in the late 80s/early 90s and gradually replaced handwriting.
The first company I worked in in Japan, in 1990, was a translation, documentation and printing company, and part of the work was inputting text from handwritten originals.
Uhmm. No. Japanese is much simpler to type than Chinese.
TokyoPlayer very well may be referring to the relatively low number of Chinese characters, known in Japanese as Kanji, used in Japan. As discussed on this Wiki page, the lists of Kanji used in Japan are not that large (comparing approximately 3,000 characters to the purported 100,000+ total of all Kanji).
There is also the issue that Japanese does have a native syllabary of 48 symbols, each symbol representing one syllable. Typing the symbol for MA only requires one keystroke in Japanese but still requires two keystrokes using the Pinyin system for Chinese.
Considering that I studied Chinese for a year, I can only say that MAN I am so happy they invented computers.
Also, most likely, the typeset-pieces (whatever they are called) are most likely arranged in some kind of order. I have a couple or three Chinese dictionaries, and in order to look words up via their Chinese characters (Incidentally, called “Hanzi” in Chinese; means exactly the same thing “Kanji” does in Japanese, from what I understand), you would look the word up via the first radical used in the character.
So yeah, crash course in Chinese lettering :D. Practically all of the characters in Chinese are constructed from the same 127 simple characters (known as “Radicals”), which are pieced together in many varying nightmarish configurations. Typically a character in Chinese will have two or three such radicals, placed in varying orders and sizes (they get smaller if you need to fit more into the same character, of course).Typically there will be a radical on the left side or the top that is considered the “first” Radical, because it would be the first one you’d draw (sorry, the first one you’d write. As my Chinese teachers constantly reminded me, you don’t draw Chinese characters.)
The radicals, when combined, might give you some idea of what the character means, and if you’re very intuitive and you’re having a good day, will even give you a clue how to pronounce it, with combinations of complete characters indicating larger concepts in a similar fashion, though sometimes admittedly it will only make sense AFTER you look it up and go “Oh, OK, I guess I can get that.”
But yeah, back to the point, in a dictionary, and maybe in this typewriter, the rows of characters might be lined up by what Radical they use as their first radical, and then within each row or column, they are similarly ordered via their subordinate radicals (the radicals themselves being ordered via stroke order, with the lowest-numbered radicals being the ones you can do with only one stroke of the pen).
I don’t know any of this for a fact, it might all be in the Wikipedia article which I haven’t read yet, it’s just my slightly-educated guess on how I imagine they would do this. it’s also possible that each typewriter has the characters in an arbitrary order, or in whatever order the user has them set up in, and he just gets used to knowing where he left that character for “Door” the last time he needed to type “Camera Shutter”.
