[HN Gopher] Why was western printing superior to Asian printing?
___________________________________________________________________
Why was western printing superior to Asian printing?
Author : socialdemocrat
Score : 178 points
Date : 2022-09-04 06:48 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (erikexamines.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (erikexamines.substack.com)
| c7b wrote:
| Calling Gutenberg a James Watt to Chinese printing press designs
| is... questionable. Afaik he was not aware of Chinese/Korean
| designs that he could have improved upon. Also, the Chinese
| designs arguably weren't presses, since they rubbed paper against
| a type - the screw was one of the many important innovations by
| Gutenberg. The article would benefit from focusing less on the
| "race" between Europe and China (which arguably wasn't one, but
| two largely separate developments) and more on the technology.
| socialdemocrat wrote:
| It was because, Gutenberg did not invent movable type. That was
| already in use in Europe. A high chance that technology came
| from Asia. Hence Gutenberg took an exiting technology and
| improved it. Gutenberg did not invent the screw press. Almost
| identical presses were already used in paper making. This was
| about combining a variety of technologies into one better
| system.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| As others have said it seems obvious dealing with about two dozen
| characters well adapted for engraving is easier than dealing with
| several thousand (at least) more complicated characters.
| nathias wrote:
| it probably didn't hurt that the whole culture was centered
| around a book
| hasmanean wrote:
| And that there was constant demand for said book. And there was
| no copyright on the text.
| ineedasername wrote:
| TLDR: China beat Gutenberg to movable type but Gutenberg beat
| everyone else to a printing press.
| barrysteve wrote:
| These bar charts are confusing.
|
| _Development in Book Prices and Productivity_
|
| Pages printed per day: Europe
|
| Cheapest book: biggest bar
|
| The years go forward but you want to read it backwards to
| understand it's meaning.
|
| _Size of Largest Book Collection_
|
| no y axis, just text written on random bars. big year gaps that
| don't really add to the narrative.
|
| I get you're retelling the paragraph you wrote before in a visual
| format. It's hard to read and doesn't add much.
| ascar wrote:
| > The years go forward but you want to read it backwards to
| understand it's meaning.
|
| I don't really get what you mean with that. Prices dropped
| rappidly within 60 years. Bar graphs are maybe not the best
| pick here, but I definitely read this graph forward to
| understand its meaning.
| paulluuk wrote:
| I'm surprised this doesn't mention Mongolians or Kublai Khan
| anywhere, as they ruled China at the time and were the ones who
| introduced Asian printing techniques to Europeans in the first
| place, and allowed Gutenberg to make his first printing press.
| trinovantes wrote:
| I suspect only needing to learn a dozen alphanumeric characters
| vs hundreds/thousands of unique characters also helped literacy
| avyeed_desa wrote:
| I don't really believe that, as using chinese characters would
| lead to a much higher information density compared to using
| alphabet, which in turn would've tuned out to make books much
| lighter and being able to print more pages on one sheet,
| compared to two with the same informational value in western
| languages.
| funcDropShadow wrote:
| How does increased information density help with literacy? If
| increased information density would increase literacy,
| couldn't we solve analphabetism with switching to writing in
| gzipped latin alphabet?
| [deleted]
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Really?
|
| I once saw an old YouTube video that claimed that some hanzi
| are super obscure and even native Chinese have to look them
| up sometimes when wanting to use them, and gave the example
| of "sneeze".
|
| I asked my Shanghai born coworker, who led the local Chinese
| friendship society, about this, and he furrowed his brow and
| said "...shit, actually, yeah, I'd need to look that up
| myself."
|
| This is merely one anecdote, of course,
|
| There's information density, but there's also information
| accessibility. And the trick is finding the balance between
| the two.
|
| Having 8000 characters (in simplified Chinese) may be
| information dense, but how accessible is that information?
| E.g., a typical Chinese university graduate will know, on
| average, 3 -4K of them, and no doubt ones that are unused
| will atrophy over the years.
|
| The balance between density and accessibility is always
| ongoing. E.g., I find reading presentation slides with a
| transcript far more information dense than watching a video
| of that presentation, but some people find it far more
| accessible in video form. And then for complex discussions, I
| find video calls far more information dense than Slack
| message or email exchanges.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| The real advantage that Chinese writing has is that it
| bridges very different, mutually unintelligible variants of
| the language.
|
| Imagine a common "Germanic" or "Roman" script that would be
| comprehensible to any literate person that speaks any
| Germanic or Roman language. So the same book could be read
| by people in San Francisco, Berlin, Oslo and Amsterdam
| without the need to learn any new language.
|
| This might be one of the reasons why China is still one
| country with one central bureaucracy, which is nigh
| impossible to establish in Europe, all the EU-wide
| initiatives notwithstanding.
|
| But it comes with a high bar to clear as to what "literacy"
| even means. Westerners are fully literate in their native
| languages after several years of elementary school; the
| same cannot be said about the Chinese.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| > I once saw an old YouTube video that claimed that some
| hanzi are super obscure and even native Chinese have to
| look them up sometimes when wanting to use them, and gave
| the example of "sneeze".
|
| Isn't that also the case in other languages? Most people
| don't know all the words in a dictionary for example, and a
| word is roughly analogous to a character in Chinese.
| pezezin wrote:
| In most languages with alphabetic writing, if you know a
| spoken word, you can write it. But in Chinese and
| Japanese, people might know a word, use it daily, being
| able to read it, and still forget how to write it:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia
| dontlaugh wrote:
| It varies in alphabet languages too. Plenty of native
| English speakers can't spell words they can speak.
| Chinese is not much worse than English in this respect.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| Yes, English is a terrible written language. In a sane
| world we would have moved to IPA a long time ago.
|
| j'es, 'INGglIS Iz a t'erIb@l r'It@n l'aNGgwIdZ. In a
| s'eIn w'e:ld wi: wUdhav m'u:vd tU ,aIp,i:'eI a l'aNG
| t'aIm ag'@U.
| tokinonagare wrote:
| And then we would need to use two very different
| spellings for American and British English. Be careful
| with what you wish.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| Ah right, that makes sense.
| yorwba wrote:
| > some hanzi are super obscure and even native Chinese have
| to look them up sometimes when wanting to use them, and
| gave the example of "sneeze".
|
| Pen Ti is the example always used because it describes a
| common thing that is rarely written about, and there is no
| other, more frequently written character with the Zhi
| component that could remind people how to write it. So when
| handwriting, one might substitute Pen instead.
|
| Most obscure characters are simply obscure because they
| refer to an obscure thing, like not being able to spell the
| name of a village you've never heard of.
|
| And characters for non-obscure things made of obscure
| components are usually common enough that people get enough
| practice writing them. E.g. Cang "store/hide" contains
| Zang , an archaic term for "good" that now mostly occurs in
| ancient idioms and as a rare surname. But hardly anybody
| seems to have trouble writing Cang .
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| Recognizing and writing characters are different skills.
| Chinese people typically recognize far more characters than
| they can write (this has become much more severe in the
| electronics age, because most people input text using the
| pinyin Romanization, so they don't write by hand any more).
|
| In addition, if you're reading a text and you come across
| an uncommon character, you can often figure it out, both
| from context and by recognizing elements in the character
| (which give hints about the pronunciation and meaning).
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| True, and the context of "use them" was indeed writing
| them.
| [deleted]
| WalterBright wrote:
| I thought so, too. Until I was in Japan for business, where I
| saw some books that were translated into Japanese Kanji. The
| books were significantly larger in every case than the
| English versions.
| imron wrote:
| Japanese writing is made up of a mix of 3 different
| scripts, kanji, hiragana and katakana.
|
| The hiragana and katakana are syllabaries and don't have
| the information density that you get with kanji.
|
| I don't imagine you'd get Japanese books that are more
| compact than their English counterparts because per
| sentence Japanese texts are comprised mostly of hiragana
| and katakana with a sprinkling of kanji.
|
| Chinese on the other hand is all hanzi, and that does
| provide significant information density.
|
| I used to have the lord of the rings in both English and
| Chinese on my bookshelf. The 3 volumes in Chinese where
| about the same thickness as a single volume in English
| (width and height were approximately the same) and this was
| with a much larger Chinese font required for legibility.
| alexlur wrote:
| There's no language called "Japanese Kanji" since it's just
| a regular part of the language, but the books are larger
| simply because Japanese is an agglutinative language whose
| famously long suffixes outweigh whatever information
| density advantage using the characters has.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Kanji is the script. Anyhow, one thing I noticed was that
| Kanji characters were printed significantly larger than
| ASCII, so that accounted for a lot of it. ASCII can have
| a pretty small font and still be perfectly legible -
| apparently not so with Kanji.
| cyphar wrote:
| > Kanji is the script.
|
| Kanji is _part_ of the Japanese writing system, it 's not
| the entire thing. "Translated to Japanese kanji" is like
| saying "translated to English consonants".
|
| > Kanji characters were printed significantly larger than
| ASCII, so that accounted for a lot of it.
|
| Japanese books also have a lot more whitespace and are
| generally smaller than western books. I disagree that the
| font is much larger -- the books I read have a font size
| that is practically identical to most western books (the
| difference is that CJK characters are more boxy and so
| they may appear larger).
|
| > ASCII can have a pretty small font and still be
| perfectly legible - apparently not so with Kanji.
|
| You can print kanji pretty small and have it still them
| be legible to native speakers (just look at the first
| video games that used kanji instead of just using kana --
| the effective font size is tiny).
| dghf wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halfwidth_and_fullwidth_f
| orm...
| euroderf wrote:
| I've often thought, what if early CRT hackers (or, say,
| Apple) had designed fonts where characters could have
| widths of 1, 2, or 3 units, such that (for example) "W"
| and "M" would be 3-wide and "i" an "l" and "." would be
| 1-wide. Might this have lessened the desire for variable-
| pitch fonts, and sped GUI innovation in general ?
| alexlur wrote:
| Kanji is not the only script in the written Japanese
| language, in fact it's not even the most used script by a
| large margin. Kanji usually makes up less than 30% of the
| text while kana is around 70%.[1] Both kana, which are
| phonetic syllabaries, are also larger than ASCII, so
| chances are you confused them with kanji.
|
| 1. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/234725928.pdf
| antupis wrote:
| There was also ideologial push to increase literacy from
| religious movements after reformation (Luther and Jesuit etc)
| which did not happen at China.
| thematrixturtle wrote:
| The Communists came pretty close to dumping characters in
| favor of Latin script (pinyin). And this actually happened in
| Vietnam, although we have the French to thank/blame for that.
| jhbadger wrote:
| I think it was more the other direction. Protestantism was
| based on the idea that people should read the Bible
| themselves rather than have priests interpret it for them as
| had been traditionally done. This was impractical before
| printing because hand-copied books were so expensive. Cheap
| printed books led to the possibility of these movements being
| successful.
| joshuacc wrote:
| It goes both directions. Without the printing press, the
| rise of mass religious movements prioritizing literacy
| would not have been possible. But once the printing press
| was there, the religious movements pushed literacy forward
| faster than it would have gone without them.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| More important was writing in vernacular. Learning a writing
| system is comparatively easier than learning a new language.
| For a long time people needed to learn a new language to write.
| brazzy wrote:
| In really though, literacy in Europe before the arrival of the
| printing press was _lower_ than in China.
| pixodaros wrote:
| Another common fallacy in economic historians / "rise of the
| west" research is to compare the most developed parts of
| Europe (after 1700, typically the Low Countries and England)
| with 'all of China.' By doing this, they exclude the poorer
| parts of Europe and include the poorer parts of China to give
| the impression that "the great divergence" (sic) was early
| and foreordained
| WalterBright wrote:
| We're going back to hundreds/thousands of unique characters.
| See the growth of icons and emojis, and Unicode's rush to
| invent endless new "characters".
| bregma wrote:
| If this were true, the first page of every book would consist
| of nothing but special glyphs for product placement.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| Lucky our printing technology has moved past moveable type
| and mechanical typesetting in recent years. My printer is not
| that new and can already print all extended Latin characters
| and maybe even some emojis.
| WalterBright wrote:
| From time to time, people ask for D to support Unicode
| operator code points. I decided it wasn't a good idea, as
| it makes code more difficult to type in, and there's the
| problem of text processing programs' (like editors,
| printers, etc.) support for non-ASCII being rather
| unpredictable.
|
| > maybe even some
|
| I.e. unreliable :-/
| thrown_22 wrote:
| Change is not progress.
|
| It took millennia for us to go from emojis to characters
| and the few societies that did ended up dominating the
| world because of the increases in efficiency. Now we're
| heading in the other direction because literacy is too
| hard.
| funcDropShadow wrote:
| Unicode is primarily concerned with standardizing existing
| characters in the majority of the language systems of the
| world. The big exception are emojis and a small number of
| usefull icons, the power button icon comes to mind. Its story
| of addition to unicoe was shared on Hacker News some years
| ago. As far as I know the only area of invention and growth
| are emojis.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Obviously we're not. Icons and emoji aren't characters -- you
| don't need them to write words and their meanings are
| relatively self-evident as opposed to letters where you have
| to learn how to pronounce an otherwise mostly arbitrary
| squiggle.
|
| And aside from emoji (which is demand-driven), Unicode isn't
| inventing anything, it's codifying things that already exist.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > their meanings are relatively self-evident
|
| All I can say is LOL to that. Even the original Mac icons
| required someone to tell you what they meant first, down to
| today where half the icons on a car's controls make no
| sense, and of course there are the laundry icons, which
| people can probably guess correctly half of them.
|
| > letters where you have to learn how to pronounce an
| otherwise mostly arbitrary squiggle.
|
| Yes, we learn the sounds they make in first grade. Then we
| can sound out new words, and look up the meanings of words
| in the dictionary. Not so with icons. There's no sounding
| them out. There's no way to look them up in a dictionary.
| If you can't guess what they mean, you're out of luck.
|
| > arbitrary squiggle
|
| The letters are all derived from icons. The letter A is a
| bull's head and horns turned upside down. Phonetic
| alphabets are derived from icon languages, and are a great
| invention.
|
| > Unicode isn't inventing anything, it's codifying things
| that already exist.
|
| Not true. As for emoji, there is no difference between them
| and icons.
| thematrixturtle wrote:
| Here are the Chinese characters for concave and convex: Ao
| Tu
|
| Care to take a stab at the difference between these and
| emoji?
| elurg wrote:
| Very few Chinese characters are pictograms and even those
| are extremely stylized.
|
| The vast majority are complex compounds of smaller
| radicals.
|
| They are nothing like emoji.
| thematrixturtle wrote:
| No, they're both on the same continuum. The original
| Chinese characters _were_ emoji, which literally means
| "picture characters" in Japanese, and emoji today are
| already evolving beyond their original pictorial meanings
| -- for example, an eggplant isn't just an eggplant
| anymore.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _The original Chinese characters were emoji_
|
| This is one of the most absurd things I have ever read,
| but in an extremely funny way!
|
| I _think_ you 're trying to make the argument that both
| Chinese characters and emoji are pictographs. Yes, a
| _few_ Chinese characters originated as pictographs (a
| tiny minority of them), and emoji are _one form_ of
| pictograph, but that... doesn 't make Chinese characters
| emoji, not even "the original ones". It doesn't even put
| them on the same "continuum" -- one is stroke-based
| logograms that represent individual syllables of words,
| the other is pure artistic illustration.
|
| You seem to be trying to redefine the word "emoji" into
| something it's not, your own idiosyncratic personal
| definition. But that's not how words work.
| c7b wrote:
| > Here are the Chinese characters for concave and convex:
| Ao Tu
|
| Really? Funny that neither of those shapes is convex.
| political12345 wrote:
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Was Germany doing a lot of colonialism in the fifteenth
| century?
| morelisp wrote:
| "Germany" was not really doing much of anything for most of
| the 15th century but the Hanseatic League was certainly a
| precursor to poor political theories about who "owned" the
| Baltic areas.
| gpvos wrote:
| Not this time.
| m_mueller wrote:
| colonialism might have happened the other way round (coming out
| of China) if just a few variables are changed. The article
| argues I think that Gutenberg's innovation was one of those
| variables.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| This is pretty questionable. What few variables would have to
| change? It was an entirely different inward-facing system.
| Werewolf255 wrote:
| The article isn't bad, but why is the title so needlessly
| antagonistic?
| apienx wrote:
| Flawed premise IMHO. Printing is a tool which evolved to keep
| pace with the sophistication of the societies using/developing
| it. The Southern Song dynasty came close to an industrial age,
| but was held back by a belief system (confucianism) that
| privileges cushy stability over ruthless progress. This, in part,
| prevented the emergence of a product-and-service-hungry
| bourgeoisie. The level of technological progress of a society is
| mostly determined by its culture.
| [deleted]
| socialdemocrat wrote:
| The Song dynasty was not anywhere near an industrial age. China
| never went through a machine revolution with great
| proliferation of the usage of machines as in things like
| windmills, water wheels, clocks, trip hammers, screw presses
| etc: https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/the-missing-chinese-
| mach...
|
| China had machines, but they were used at a much smaller scale
| and had no way to expand in usage thanks to unsuitable
| geography and climate in China.
| socialdemocrat wrote:
| Author here, sorry about the paywall, I am trying to experiment
| with different ways of growing my readership and subscribers. You
| can get past the paywall by signing up for a 7-day free trial. It
| can be canceled at any time. If this really rubs you the way then
| I am making this draft link of the whole article available for a
| limited time:
| https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/bc1449ba-7e0d-43b6-8d53-...
|
| Some of the questions popping up here regarding significance of
| different components of the Gutenberg invention is addressed in a
| linked article:
|
| https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/why-was-the-printing-pre...
|
| This discusses technologies existing in Europe at the time but
| not in China, which Gutenberg could leverage to create his
| printing system.
|
| To clarify the point here isn't to suggest a civilization or
| society is superior to another. It is a discussion about printing
| systems, not people or languages.
| mikewarot wrote:
| Watt had a model steam engine, with a glass cylinder, but
| couldn't scale it up in iron or steel. When he tried, there was a
| gap of up to an inch between the piston and cylinder, he had no
| way of filling the gap. It was when Wilkinson came along and used
| his new boring machine to make a precision cylinder that Watt was
| able to complete his engine. There are a lot of things that had
| to precede Watt's success.
|
| In the same way, there are a lot of details that tend to get
| ignored in the Gutenberg as Great Man narrative. They did get
| enumerated, and it's important to keep those details in mind as
| they were the decisive factor, and Gutenberg was just the hacker
| who managed to successfully combine them in an effective manner.
| secondcoming wrote:
| Connecting the dots is a feat in itself. By your measure,
| nobody can ever claim to have invented anything because they
| didn't first create the universe.
| ithkuil wrote:
| "We stand on the shoulders of all sorts of people of different
| heights"
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| And the model Watt had wasn't the first steam engine. He got
| his start repairing a steam engine of Newcomen, an inventor who
| died before Watt was born.
|
| Watt invented the steam engine in a similar way to how Bill
| Gates invented the computer.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I think that a better analogy would be individual germanium
| transistors vs. a printed circuit of silicon transistors.
| Similar principle, but a big leap in practicality.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > just a hacker
|
| He did it, while others did not. So Gutenberg gets the credit.
| NamTaf wrote:
| If you've not watched it, go find James Burke's "Connections".
| It takes this idea writ large; technology is almost always
| standing on the backs of giants before you and changing one
| thing which pushes the ball a bit further forward.
| oifjsidjf wrote:
| Stable diffusion is a great example.
|
| First Nicola Tesla for electricity, then transistors, then
| programmable microchips, then operating systems, then video
| games and because of them GPUs came into existance, them
| machine learning, then GPUs because more programmable because
| games required more and more freedom in shaders, then
| eventually deep learning, and now stable diffusion.
|
| "The right man at the right time makes all the difference."
| mywacaday wrote:
| There was an article publisher here a while back discussing that
| Chinese progress was limited due to not having invented glass so
| scholars ability to remain productive after their 40s was
| diminished due to the lack of reading glasses, perhaps this was a
| factor as well.
| marsven_422 wrote:
| fsckboy wrote:
| _We like to think of Johannes Gutenberg as inventor of the
| printing press and movable type in 1450. Yet, the first movable
| type got invented in China around 1040 by Bi Sheng. The types
| were made from porcelain material. Later wooden movable types
| were developed..._
|
| on wikipedia if you look up "movable type" you see a big
| discussion of the earlier work in China and Korea before moving
| on to Gutenberg.
|
| if you look up "printing press" you get the Gutenberg story only,
| including that Gutenberg discovered an alloy for his type that
| was so good it remained unchanged for hundreds of years.
|
| conflating movable type with printing press is a big mistake for
| this type of analysis, and that's before getting to the out of
| the box simplicity of movable type for alphabets a few dozen
| characters long vs the vocabulary required for Chinese writing.
|
| (I happened to look this up the other day just to get the date
| that mass printing started in Europe, and I started with movable
| type so I had already recently discovered all the above points)
| nosianu wrote:
| > _conflating movable type with printing press is a big mistake
| for this type of analysis,_
|
| Innovation on the movable types was a key part of Gutenbergs
| system and creating the movable metal types was an inseparable
| part of the Gutenberg innovation. The article mentions a bit
| more than my short summary too.
|
| I think the mistake actually is to _separate_ them in your
| analysis of the analysis. To get a working product Gutenberg
| created an integrated package with both.
|
| It specifically mentions the innovations in creating the
| movable metal types themselves under "Advantages of Gutenberg's
| Printing Technique". A much better metal alloy and a hand mold,
| allowing for much faster creation of new metal types than the
| Chinese alloy and technique.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| but note that you can try printing without printing press. It
| is just order of magnitude (or two) worse:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press
|
| > European printing presses of around 1600 were capable of
| producing between 1,500[47] and 3,600 impressions per
| workday.[3] By comparison, Far Eastern printing, where the
| back of the paper was manually rubbed to the page,[48] did
| not exceed an output of forty pages per day.[4]
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| I think Gutenberg was simply in the right place and the right
| time. His bible was still Catholic but he was living in a part
| of the world where Protestantism would soon kick off; powered
| by his re-discovered printing press and movable type.
|
| His part of the world was a patch work of city states, small
| provinces, and kingdoms. Germany as a country simply did not
| exist at the time. Many of those states were fiercely
| independent and interdependent (trade).
|
| And some of them were prospering and featured a growing middle
| class, trade, and relative freedom. So, he was in a place that
| was relatively literate (for the time) and entrepreneurial. The
| combination of people capable and free to express themselves
| and a new technology to do that at scale created a perfect
| storm of information and soon revolution.
|
| Aside from the complexities of their written language and its
| many characters; China and Korea were basically very old
| empires at the time they invented movable type. Their societies
| were managed in a very hierarchical way. They had the means to
| spread information but only used it to spread officially
| sanctioned information. So, it did not really catch on to the
| same level that Gutenberg's press revolutionized (quite
| literally) Europe.
| mjh2539 wrote:
| > They had the means to spread information but only used it
| to spread officially sanctioned information.
|
| You're making this up. There was a robust tradition of
| scholar-bureaucrats printing whatever the hell they wanted
| (usually red-blooded tracts against the Emperor when he
| didn't toe the Confucian line). Travel literature was
| incredibly popular in late Ming China.
| lawrenceyan wrote:
| I doubt your average peasant was reading though.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The actual Gutenberg museum, which I went to earlier this year,
| has a good selection of exhibits on Chinese and Korean movable
| type.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| Silly but genuine question: how to you use movable type without
| a printing press?
|
| I mean, once you've arranged all your type onto a plate
| representing a page, what are you going to do with it except
| slap some ink on it and put paper against it? Is the difference
| that the Chinese just lay the paper manually over it rather
| than use a machine (the press) to do it?
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I think the answer is that you mostly didn't, because it was
| cheaper/better to just carve the whole page in wood, which
| then acts as it's own press, and was the widespread technique
| used in Europe for images and short text before people tried
| moveable type.
|
| So it's kind of like, why didn't we use electric cars in the
| 1900s, the answer is we did, but since something else was
| cheaper/better at that moment given the context all the
| decades of industrial innovation happened around that model,
| until there was a reason to revisit it much later. I think
| the Chinese inventors were like those early electric car
| makers. Really smart inventors, but just missing some key
| supporting infrastructure or need. Just like printing in
| Europe was held back by lack of paper.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodblock_printing#Impact_of_m.
| ..
| masklinn wrote:
| Probably. Much like woodblock printing, which can be done
| with or without press.
|
| Also a printing press would not lay the paper, it was "just"
| used to press said paper onto the type (which had been inked
| by hand).
|
| You'd lay the type, then ink the type, lay paper on top
| (usually using a frame to ensure it's correctly positioned),
| move the assembly under the press then press it down.
|
| Release the press, open the assembly, get the printed sheet
| out, repeat (minus laying the type).
|
| That Gutenberg also invented movable metal type in europe, as
| well as a production process for reproducible quality metal
| type, are probably bigger factors than the press itself
| (though the separation of labor and mechanical efficiency of
| the press should not be discounted). But since he basically
| released the entire thing as a "movable-type printing
| system", the printing press is often used as a stand-in for
| the entire production process.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > Is the difference that the Chinese just lay the paper
| manually over it rather than use a machine (the press) to do
| it?
|
| Seems so.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press
|
| > European printing presses of around 1600 were capable of
| producing between 1,500[47] and 3,600 impressions per
| workday.[3] By comparison, Far Eastern printing, where the
| back of the paper was manually rubbed to the page,[48] did
| not exceed an output of forty pages per day.[4]
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Wikipedia has some contrasting info in their woodblock
| printing article though:
|
| > only Europeans who had never seen Chinese woodblock
| printing in action tended to dismiss it, perhaps due to the
| almost instantaneous arrival of both xylography and movable
| type in Europe. The early Jesuit missionaries of late 16th
| century China, for instance, had a similar distaste for
| wood based printing for very different reasons. These
| Jesuits found that "the cheapness and omnipresence of
| printing in China made the prevailing wood-based technology
| extremely disturbing, even dangerous."[42] Matteo Ricci
| made note of "the exceedingly large numbers of books in
| circulation here and the ridiculously low prices at which
| they are sold."[43] Two hundred years later the Englishman
| John Barrow, by way of the Macartney mission to Qing China,
| also remarked with some amazement that the printing
| industry was "as free as in England, and the profession of
| printing open to everyone."[42] The commercial success and
| profitability of woodblock printing was attested to by one
| British observer at the end of the nineteenth century, who
| noted that even before the arrival of western printing
| methods, the price of books and printed materials in China
| had already reached an astoundingly low price compared to
| what could be found in his home country
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodblock_printing#Impact_of_
| m...
|
| Also interesting that the Korean moveable type was highly
| restricted, as mentioned elsewhere, so it's partly
| industrial technology and commerce but partly lack of
| censorship the Westerners are surprised by.
| Symbiote wrote:
| It's described in the article at least three times.
| socialdemocrat wrote:
| The point of the article is to describe the printing press as
| an advancement of the technology of movable type. It is also
| important to point out that the press was really just one of
| many components that made the Gutenberg approach superior to
| the techniques that existed in Asia at the time.
|
| The press was not that big of a novelty. Described more in
| detail here: https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/why-was-the-
| printing-pre...
| pixodaros wrote:
| Was it? As late as the 18th century, European visitors to China
| kept remarking on how cheap books were there and how many people
| had them.
|
| Movable type was suitable for the Greek and Latin alphabets, but
| not for Chinese characters or Arabic flowing script. The Chinese
| had great success with woodblock printing.
| notRobot wrote:
| > Books got 60 times cheaper in 50 years
|
| I'm always confused by this wording. Does this mean that the new
| price was 1/60th the original?
| euroderf wrote:
| Good catch. A pet peeve of mine. Using "times" for a decrease
| in size is not too bright. I attribute it to laziness, because
| (apparently) nobody wants to actually form the word "sixtieth",
| not even mentally.
| [deleted]
| crazygringo wrote:
| Yes. If vanilla ice cream is twice as cheap as chocolate ice
| cream, that means you can buy two vanilla for one chocolate.
| Vanilla is half the price.
|
| Extrapolating, 60 times cheaper means 1/60th -- you could buy
| 60 books for the same price 1 book cost 50 years ago.
| xena wrote:
| It means that the process to make books was made 60 times less
| expensive, which allowed more people to afford making books.
| idiotsBeDamned wrote:
| Yes, we understood that, we're wondering about the numerical
| interpretation of "60x cheaper"
| Maken wrote:
| I don't really see how it could be interpreted as anything
| as "the cost was 1/60 of the original".
| karatinversion wrote:
| Indeed, "1/60th cheaper" cannot be used either, as it
| would mean the prices were as 59 is to 60
| c3534l wrote:
| It makes no sense. 100% cheaper would be free. 60,000% cheaper
| would imply they pay you the cost of 59 books to take it off
| your hands. That's quite a sale.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Why are you adding % into the mix? 60 times cheaper means
| they cost 1/60 of the original price, which is (1-1/60)*100
| =~98.3% cheaper.
| BossingAround wrote:
| Agreed about the percentage. A more roundabout way to think
| about it is also 100-(1/60*100) = ~98,3%
| c3534l wrote:
| Because that's what "times more/less" means. 2 times the
| cost is 200% the cost. Half off is the price times fifty
| percent (1/2). A sixtieth isn't 60 times anything in any
| direction.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| You can think of "twice cheaper" as meaning "twice the
| amount for the same price", so "60 times cheaper" means
| you can buy 60 books for the price of 1.
| c3534l wrote:
| While that has a logic to it, I don't think that's the
| logic or meaning of the terms as they are generally used
| in English. If you mean 98% cheaper, say that, not 60
| times cheaper. Two times or three times the price means
| you multiply it by that integer value. For "less" or
| "cheaper" people use percentages or fractions. Using an
| integer for cheaper is wrong, IMO.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| While I accept this may not be common usage in English, I
| am quite certain no one would take "60 times cheaper" to
| mean "you would literally be paid 60 times the price to
| take one item". That interpretation makes no sense at all
| (except if doing some real mental gymnastics to translate
| common words mechancially into math and then execute the
| math).
| c3534l wrote:
| That was an illustration of why the phrase was silly and
| wrong. I wasn't trying to argue the author _intended_ to
| convey that idea.
| hugh-avherald wrote:
| Twice as cheap means half as expensive. It does not mean
| the price fell by 200%.
| sposeray wrote:
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| Glaring paywall in the article obscuring the actual
| statement/conclusion aside, I recommend reading "The Chinese
| Typewriter : A History" by Thomas S. Mullaney (ISBN
| 9780262536103). The book covers a lot about Chinese language(s)
| adaptation to an Information Age crisis brought by technologies
| based on primarily Western/Latin alphabets, and how some of these
| adaptations paved the way for Chinese language's integration into
| the information technology world of today.
|
| I recommend approaching these topics without predetermined
| judgement on whether a language is inherently superior or
| inferior. Such biases are the last things we need in today's
| world full of division and tribalism.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Yep this is the winning strategy. Actual historians rather than
| random software engineers dabbling in history writing essays
| with minimal citation. I find it baffling how little the
| software community seems to care for the expertise of
| historians. There are _so many books_ written by professionals
| who have spent thousands and thousands of hours on these topics
| that are available for access.
| socialdemocrat wrote:
| You can read the rest of the article by signing up for a 7-day
| free trial. You don't have to be a paid member.
|
| The article isn't suggesting one language is superior to
| another, but that one printing technique was a superior to
| another at some point in time. If one cannot recognize that
| then we are getting a bit too touchy when discussing history of
| technology.
|
| The point here is to understand why the printing press had such
| an impact Europe, while existence of movable type in China and
| Korea did not have the same impact. It is about understanding
| historical developments.
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| Nothing touchy about pointing out the risk of misinfo. And
| the book I mentioned is exactly about historical
| developments, as some of the most commonly used Chinese
| typewriters heavily resembled movable type printing press up
| until they were replaced with computers. A real book with
| real research instead of a bite-sized paywalled blog article.
|
| In a day and age where Chinese language content occupies a
| significant portion of the Internet, there are still people
| who claim the non-alphabetical nature of the language is
| somehow a conspiracy at monopolizing knowledge. What's so
| touchy about recognizing some people being stuck in 19th
| century mentalities (not the author of the article, but the
| crowd these articles inevitably attract) are perhaps not the
| most credible?
| navigate8310 wrote:
| I didn't even realize the article was behind a paywall. Have
| you tried considering the use of extensions that bypass such
| artificial restrictions, especially scientific journals?
| UncleMeat wrote:
| The linked article is the ad for the actual article, which
| requires you to be a paid subscriber to this person's
| substack. If you read the linked article only, you also
| didn't bypass the paywall.
| kurupt213 wrote:
| Paper had been around in the Mediterranean since the late Bronze
| Age thanks to the Egyptians
| socialdemocrat wrote:
| Not really usable in Europe due to the climate. Chinese style
| paper really made a big difference.
| pseingatl wrote:
| Papyrus is not paper. It's a completely different technology.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| The reason europe succeeded, was mostly internal competition. A
| million thiefdoms, preying up one another (mostly in germany,
| italy and the balcans) with some economic save heavens (great
| britain, the netherlands) this was basically a free market of
| rulers. If a ruler did not cut it, the micro-nation would fall
| behind and be gobbled up.
|
| If a ruler was against a invention, you would pack up, move into
| the town behind the next hill were some upstart youngster would
| welcome the new things - because he had a expansion planned.
|
| So fierce competition and wars destroy entrenched interests and
| landlords of stagnating stability (church, guilds, etc.). To push
| inventions, one need - in a civilized manner, recreate those
| conditions.
| jlkuester7 wrote:
| Was your history book written by Ayn Rand?
|
| Sure competition and allowing things to fail can, under the
| right circumstances, generate great advancements. But given the
| context of human history, it seems that decentralized feudal
| societies caused about as many technological revolutions as
| communist societies...
| socialdemocrat wrote:
| It is a bit of a stereotype that nothing happened in medieval
| Europe and Greeks and Romans did everything. That is
| nonsense. Medieval Europe saw a massive increase in the use
| of mills and machinery, that never occurred in the Roman
| Empire or China: https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/the-
| european-mill-revolu...
|
| The development of advanced plate armor, gunpowder weapons,
| mechanical clocks, medieval cathedrals, innovation within
| glass making, lenses, spectacles etc suggest medieval society
| was plenty capable on innovation. Both earlier Greek city
| states and later medieval Italian city states demonstrated a
| large amount of innovation.
|
| I would rather say that large monopolies outcompete smaller
| competing units in the short term but loose in the long term.
| We can see that in markets as well as in comparison between
| China and Europe. Fragmented Europe was at a disadvantage for
| several hundred years until that fragmentation started paying
| off.
| shipman05 wrote:
| Most history books endorse some version of this theory. It's
| not some libertarian revision, and it has absolutely nothing
| to do with communism (which didn't exist in any recognizable
| form anywhere in the world until the 19th Century and not in
| China until the 20th)
|
| There are two main downsides to centralization.
|
| 1) A single ruler means the whims of that ruler can have
| major impacts on the development of society. When the Ming
| abandoned their treasure fleets, there was no alternative
| power to step in and continue expanding maritime commerce.
| The emperor was so powerful that their monopoly on trade
| decided the course of history for the whole region:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_treasure_voyages
|
| 2) A unipolar power structure inherently seeks to maintain
| the status quo. When you have a dynasty that already has
| unquestioned authority within its borders while also having
| no plausible rivals outside them (at the time of the "great
| divergence" the Mongols had ceased to be a threat), ANY
| change leads to a loss of status and power for the ruling
| elite. Any commercial activity or technological advance was
| measured by whether it benefitted the emperor or hindered
| him.
|
| None of this is to say that there weren't substantial
| downsides to the decentralized mess of European politics. In
| earlier time periods, the centralized model helped China to
| be the richest region on earth while Europe was one of the
| poorest, but post-Renaissance, competition between European
| states drove innovation and pressured those states to expand
| or die. Both of which led to Portuguese ships sailing into
| Guangzhou in 1513 rather than Ming ships sailing into Lisbon.
| pixodaros wrote:
| Just remember that the situation which caused the Opium
| Wars was that since the 1300s or so, China had exported
| more than it imported, so the world's silver tended to
| settle in China. You can see the Spanish empire as a scheme
| to move silver from Mexico and Peru to China the long way
| via the Dutch.
|
| The Honourable East India company settled on opium as the
| one commodity which might settle their balance of payments
| problem. The period when China was poor was 100, 150 years
| in the 19th and 20th centuries, linked to specific bad
| governments (Great Leap Forward, cough).
| helloworld11 wrote:
| Bullshit. Truly, what nonsense. Europe spent centuries
| stagnating under the rules of multiple fiefdoms in constant
| attrition against each other for power, wealth, territory and
| so forth. Many other parts of the world did likewise for long
| stretches of time and in both cases, only moderate technical
| advancement that happened very, very slowly. It was only when
| certain very specific conditions of government stability,
| property protection, legal transparency and basic respect for
| individual and human rights helped certain states become
| prosperous. This was further helped by these states
| accumulating enough capital under conditions of prolonged
| internal peace to invest in aspects of wealth-facilitating
| public infrastructure. What you claim is the diametric opposite
| of basic reality. Asia during much of the middle ages at times
| fulfilled conditions of state stability, but it often did not
| coincide with certain other systemic requirements for
| widespread markets to develop. Instead, the stability was of an
| autocratic and arbitrary type that facilitated stagnant top-
| down paternalism.
| socialdemocrat wrote:
| There was stagnation after the fall of the Roman Empire while
| new states and systems were trying to establish itself.
| However the later medieval period was full of innovation. It
| was far more active in using machinery than Roman Empire and
| China:
|
| https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/the-european-mill-
| revolu...
|
| Medieval Europe significantly advanced glass making, invented
| spectacles and lenses, laying the groundwork for telescopes
| and microscopes:
|
| https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/glass-the-substance-
| of-s...
|
| Medieval Europe pioneered mechanical clocks which was a
| pretty big deal: https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/the-
| missing-chinese-mech...
|
| Medieval Europe also advanced gunpowder weapons more rapidly
| than in China, and already had evolved technology around
| plate armor and crossbows far beyond anything the Romans did:
| https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/why-did-europe-and-
| not-c...
|
| The idea that no innovation happened in medieval Europe is
| severely overstated. I think it stems from the fact that
| medieval Europe had less production of literature, science
| and arts than Rome and Greece. Yet in terms of practical
| inventions, medieval Europe, did a lot more.
| helloworld11 wrote:
| I never said that Europe didn't advance during the early
| and later middle ages, only that it advanced slowly
| compared to what happened when the industrial revolution
| occurred. Its arrival heavily correlates with many of the
| factors I described in my comment above for greater wealth
| and development. I don't think it's a coincidence that the
| industrial revolution started in the UK, one of the most
| peaceful and stable of states in the world at the time.
| Though of course, there are other factors that im missing
| which influenced the development of modern markets.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I'm _really_ not rooting for restarting the Thirty Years War.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War
|
| > The Thirty Years' War from 1618 to 1648 was one of the most
| destructive wars in European history, directly responsible for
| the death of an estimated 4.5 to 8 million soldiers and
| civilians, with some areas of present-day Germany experiencing
| population declines of over 50%
| socialdemocrat wrote:
| That wasn't a constant thing though, and China despite being
| unified had far more bloody civil wars with more people dead.
|
| But sure Europe being fragmented did lead to more wars, which
| is bad. On the other hand those wars mean European military
| technology advanced quicker, and the existence of multiple
| political units meant that different ideas about religion,
| science and society was far more difficult to suppress than
| in a unified China.
|
| The price China paid for its unity was a far more oppressive
| regime. To keep such a huge empire from falling apart a lot
| more state power had to be exercised. At the time of the 30
| years war the average Europe was generally a lot freer.
|
| One could say there was a tradeoff. Europe "accepted" more
| violence for more freedom. China "accepted" more peace for
| less freedom. What you prefer depends on your values and
| ideological beliefs.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| One thing that doesn't get mentioned often is that the West had a
| "simpler" alphabet of 26 characters, 10 numbers, and a few
| punctuation marks (~20). Ok, add uppercase, and you're still at
| about 80 individual, distinct characters.
|
| Chinese or Korean, on the other hand, needed many more
| characters. Creating the movable types for them was not an easy
| feat. Certainly more difficult than with the German equivalent.
|
| In particular for Korea: Hangul [0], which is a "simpler"
| language that gradually took over Hanja [1] in Korea, was
| "created" only in the 15th century, not before. Earlier than
| that, even if Korea has the equivalent of "printing", the
| complexity of it was higher than the one experienced with the
| west alphabet.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja
| masklinn wrote:
| > In particular for Korea: Hangul [0], which is a "simpler"
| language
|
| It's not a language, it's an alphabet. And I fail to see the
| need for quotes, there's really no denying hangul is simpler
| than hanja.
|
| However the syllabic structure of hangul would still make it a
| lot more challenging printing than the linear structure of the
| latin alphabetic script: you'd need either a type piece per
| syllable (of which there are >10000), or you'd need a variant
| for each possible block layout.
|
| There are 9 possible layouts, though there are limitations
| which cuts down on the complexity of that option. But still,
| assuming you want fixed-size _blocks_ and depending on your
| decisions on complex finals you 'd need 6-9 variants of each
| initial, and 2-3 version of each final.
|
| If you're fine with variable-size blocks (and spacers to line
| things up) then you can probably cut down to 3 or even 2 of
| each initials, but it's not going to look great.
| rvba wrote:
| Is there some way to learn hangul to be able to write it?
|
| I dont ask about learning actual Korean. Just Hangul yo say
| "write English in Hangul" - if it is possible.
|
| Or some service that "translitetates" your name to Hangul?
| j-bos wrote:
| Hangul is actually very easy to learn, so much so that it
| can trick you (me) into thinking Korean should be a snap.
| To answer you're question, you can find multiple pre built
| anki decks just for hangul. If you want a quick reference
| page on the characters, search 'hangul character guide'.
| This video was also helpful for me:
| https://youtu.be/TVqJbiSLw-E
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Hangul is actually very easy to learn, so much so that
| it can trick you (me) into thinking Korean should be a
| snap.
|
| I don't really understand this. It's even easier to learn
| the Italian writing system, coming from English, than it
| is to learn the Korean writing system.
|
| Who concludes from that that it's going to be easy to
| learn to speak Italian?
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > Who concludes from that that it's going to be easy
|
| Peoples' preconscious lizard brain, that generates gut
| feelings and first impressions based on superficial
| brute-force pattern-matching, presumably.
| terrorOf wrote:
| igorkraw wrote:
| It's actually easy enough to be done in 30 minutes (the
| guide says 15 but I'm old and slow):
| https://www.ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/
|
| you simply insert padding-vocals and "silences" to make the
| syllable stuff line up, my name (Igor) becomes
| (silence)I-go-ru.
| manual89 wrote:
| That sounds more like a Japanese transliteration. Korean
| provides for the "gor" to be expressed in a single
| character. i "ee" gol "gor"
| user982 wrote:
| Korean consonants have slightly different sounds at the
| beginning and end of a syllable. r is pronounced as L at
| the end of a block, but R at the beginning of one, hence
| the additional syllable.
| changoplatanero wrote:
| You could learn most of it in about five minutes! Search on
| YouTube and you'll find some guides.
| half-kh-hacker wrote:
| You can transliterate English to Hangeul but you'll end up
| missing some sounds (e.g. you'll not be able to super
| easily get 'th' or 'f' or 'v' or 'z') because Korean
| doesn't use those
| masklinn wrote:
| Hangul itself is quite easy:
| https://www.ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/
|
| But the Korean phonology is different from English and
| generally simpler so you'll need to approximate a fair bit
| (not unlike English words in Japanese phonology).
| kibwen wrote:
| Has anyone designed a Hangul-like alphabet that supports
| IPA (or even just English) phonemes?
| faitswulff wrote:
| IPA probably doesn't work like you think it does. I also
| had this misconception that it was a "universal
| alphabet," but apparently even linguists have to learn
| subsets of IPA in order to properly pronounce phonemes in
| different languages.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _I also had this misconception that it was a "universal
| alphabet," but apparently even linguists have to learn
| subsets of IPA in order to properly pronounce phonemes in
| different languages._
|
| What exactly do you mean above? If "subsets of IPA" are
| enough to "properly pronounce phonemes in different
| languages" then IPA is indeed a "universal alphabet".
|
| More or less, the same way different subsets of Unicode
| cover most/all languages, which makes it a universal
| encoding.
|
| Did you meant to imply that IPA would be a universal
| alphabet only if all of it was needed to cover each
| language - and e.g. no IPA-letters were redundant for
| covering this or that language?
| samatman wrote:
| The person you're replying to said phoneme, suggesting
| awareness of the phonetic/phonemic distinction.
|
| > _apparently even linguists have to learn subsets of IPA
| in order to properly pronounce phonemes in different
| languages_
|
| I don't actually understand what you mean by this clause,
| but if we strip some words, "linguists learn subsets of
| IPA in order to properly pronounce phonemes in different
| languages" is in fact exactly what IPA is for.
| faitswulff wrote:
| Korean phonology is interesting. As a beginner in the
| language, it seems like the vowel sounds are richer and
| more complex while the consonants are simpler and less
| varied than English.
| jinwoo68 wrote:
| As a Korean native, I agree.
| changoplatanero wrote:
| You also mostly can't have consonant clusters in Hangul.
| It's not a problem for Korean because they don't have
| them to begin with.
|
| This means that when Koreans adopt an English word that
| has multiple consonants not separated by a vowel then
| they need to add in some new vowels to be able to
| pronounce it. Thus words like Starbucks have two
| syllables in English but six in Korean.
| robocat wrote:
| I though the same thing happened often in Japanese where
| vowels are added into English words, for example
| Starbucks becomes Sutabakkusu, or Englishman becomes
| Igirisu hito.
| jinwoo68 wrote:
| Correct but with a minor correction. Starbucks becomes
| four syllables in Korean. A vowel (eu) is inserted
| between the 's' and the 't' in 'star', and also after the
| last 's' in 'bucks'.
| terrorOf wrote:
| I came to say the same thing. wondering how he counted it
| as six.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > need to add in some new vowels to be able to pronounce
| it.
|
| The fancy/searchable term for this is epenthetic vowels /
| epenthesis, FWIW.
| [deleted]
| modernpink wrote:
| > And I fail to see the need for quotes, there's really no
| denying hangul is simpler than hanja.
|
| Simpler is a culturally conditioned subjective value
| judgement rather than a scientific one and therefore it
| expresses an opinionated view. It may be more correct to say
| it is a more systematic script.
| cwillu wrote:
| "If" "we" "take" "that" "argument" "to" "it's" "logical"
| "conclusion" "..."
| MarkPNeyer wrote:
| There are numerous mathematical measures of complexity.
|
| Do you think people believe "tic tac toe is simpler than
| chess" because of cultural conditioning?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| The State Department has long experience with teaching
| employees a working capacity in other languages. [1] is the
| summary of it.
|
| Obviously, "native English-speaking" is assumed, so the
| time for a Mandarin speaker to learn Swahili or vice versa
| is not considered. This isn't really "complexity" in a
| universal sense.
|
| It would be interesting to see a similar chart from the
| Chinese foreign service's language institute (I assume they
| must have one). Or the Egyptian one.
|
| [1] https://www.atlasandboots.com/travel-blog/foreign-
| service-in...
| affgrff2 wrote:
| I quickly googled: Hangul has 24 different
| symbols/characters. Hanja had something around 214 radicals
| that can be combined to thousands of meanings.
| modernpink wrote:
| So in which case Korean can said to be a "simpler"
| language than Chinese (which uses Hanja). But in modern
| linguistics you would not exactly say any language is
| "simpler".
| masklinn wrote:
| Langage and script are two completely different and
| largely orthogonal concerns.
|
| While there is a "floor" to the complexity of a script in
| its ability to faithfully reproduce a langage, there is
| no "ceiling", you can always pile on complexity.
|
| Although I would say that logographic scripts are the
| other kind of complexity, they're complicated to learn
| and use because they're simplistic in their approach.
|
| Syllabic or alphabetic scripts require higher concepts,
| but that makes them more flexible and composable.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| There's also the fact that Hangul is phonetic, whereas
| Hanja has very little to do with Korean language that
| isn't of Chinese origin.
|
| Hangul is simpler, that's not really in dispute. It was
| literally designed to be simple so that a native speaker
| could become literate in ten days.
| tokinonagare wrote:
| > There's also the fact that Hangul is phonetic
|
| Hangul is _not_ phonetic, it 's a morphophonemic script.
| The Korean language has a lot of rules that applies at
| different boundaries, which make the pronunciation of
| words different from what is written. The best example of
| this is the "Korean wave" /han/ + /lyu/ => [hallyu],
| written has "hanlyu" (hanryu) which is conforming to the
| phonemic decomposition but certainly not to how the word
| is pronounced.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I understand that many things in life are cultural and
| relative. Saying one language is "easier" may reveal many
| biases.
|
| But "simpler" can be used in fairly objective ways. Spoon
| is a simpler mechanism than internal combustion engine.
| "Yes" is a simpler way of saying "absolutely I would be
| willing to undertake that endeavour". Square of plain
| colour is simpler than a painting. Some formula are simpler
| than others.
|
| In this case the Immediate difference in sheer count makes
| it difficult for me to understand what point you're trying
| to make about this particular example, try as I might,
| because in this case I aftually think "more systematic" is
| the less defined, more ambiguous term :-(
| hatsunearu wrote:
| To add, Korean as a language existed long before hangul.
| There was a writing system where they used Chinese characters
| to encode the words semantically. Like how modern Korean
| still uses Chinese words in the "backend" so to speak, and
| the old system was exactly how Japanese Kanji works, you
| write the Chinese character and you read it with the Korean
| pronunciation (unwritten, and you had to memorize it, just
| like Japanese--difficult!)
|
| Now the kicker is, they encoded pure-Korean words using
| stand-ins using Chinese. Particles would be written in
| Chinese with ridiculously complex rules, and pure Korean
| words were written phonetically in Chinese, with the
| pronunciation of the Chinese characters would be "close
| enough" to the pronunciation of the Korean word. It was a
| horrendous system which is why hangul was made (like the
| yangban nobles literally needed full time learning all day
| for like a decade to master it, and the literacy test to get
| into high status government jobs was literally just to write
| a few essays)
|
| The first few lines of hunminjeongeum (basically a
| declaration that hangul is a thing we made, please use it)
| starts off with "the language of our land is different to
| that of the chinese and our writing system is not compatible.
| For that reason the uneducated subjects of the kingdom have
| trouble accomplishing their desires. So I (king sejong) find
| pity in this so I have created a new system of 28 characters,
| and would like everyone to practice it daily so that people
| can use it comfortably"
| brudgers wrote:
| Another thing that isn't mentioned is Gutenberg had a "killer
| use case" -- printing Bibles to prosthelytize Protestantism.
|
| The spread of new scientific ideas mentioned in the article
| only came later on the exhaust fumes of spreading new religious
| ideas.
| samatman wrote:
| Gutenberg died in 1468, Martin Luther was born in 1483.
|
| Gutenberg was a Catholic who sold Bibles to the gentry.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Gutenberg's 42-line Bible required about 299 glyphs. The
| natural presumption is his letters were cast from a single
| matrix (e.g. a single 'A' mold casts thousands of 'A' types),
| however careful analysis of his books reveals variations
| between letters which suggest multiple subtly different
| matrices were used. The reason for the apparent variation
| between the matrices is disputed, but one explanation is the
| variation between matrices may indicate the matrices were
| produced by composing several individual stroke punches, rather
| than one punch per gylph. I think this technique of using
| individual stroke punches to compose matrices then used for die
| casting could work for Eastern languages too. I don't know how
| many individual stroke punches you would need for Korean or
| Chinese, but it's surely fewer than the number of glyphs those
| languages have.
| rob74 wrote:
| That's very interesting actually! Today it's tempting to
| think that you only need 26*2 glyphs for the entire alphabet
| (although with ligatures that's not quite true either), but
| back then they probably still felt the need to more
| faithfully emulate hand-written books? That would explain
| that there are several variations for the same letter?
| masklinn wrote:
| Nah it's probably that they had multiple matrices to cast
| more types faster.
|
| You only need 62 glyphs for a basic Latin alphabet
| including case (although gutenberg's german would require a
| few more), but you need a lot of copies of each to lay a
| complete page, and they'd lay multiple pages per sheet.
|
| Not to mention because character frequencies are not equal
| you need a lot more of some than others so you might have a
| multi-type matrix of just Es in order to cast enough of
| those for your needs in a reasonable time frame.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _You only need 62 glyphs for a basic Latin alphabet
| (although gutenberg's german would require a few more),_
|
| Gutenberg's bible used ligatures and various symbols too,
| that ups the count a lot. I haven't counted them myself,
| but wikipedia says 290 characters and cites John Man's
| book about Gutenberg. A paper I found about using ML to
| do cluster analysis on the glyphs says 299 unique glyphs
| and cites Gottfried Zedler. I can't read either of those
| sources, but a bit less than 300 seems like a safe bet.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutenberg_Bible#Type
|
| https://deepai.org/publication/classifying-the-typefaces-
| of-...
| bnralt wrote:
| > One thing that doesn't get mentioned often is that the West
| had a "simpler" alphabet of 26 characters, 10 numbers, and a
| few punctuation marks (~20).
|
| Really? I feel like this is usually used as the main -
| sometimes only - argument for why moveable type took off in the
| West. If you look at the Wikipedia for moveable type[1], the
| simpler alphabet is listed in the article summary at the top of
| the page as a reason for why Gutenberg's printing press was so
| successful.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_type
| UncleMeat wrote:
| The "too many characters" thing is used to justify a huge
| amount of myths about asian printing technology. For example,
| people love to say that there were no Chinese typewriters
| because the alphabet is too complex and this is just straight
| up false. Tom Mullaney at Stanford has good writing on a lot of
| this.
| canjobear wrote:
| Mullaney's article is not uncontroversial. There are
| substantial technical challenges that come from the Chinese
| writing system; Chinese typewriters were highly limited
| compared to Western alphabetic ones. See discussion at
| https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=25776 for example
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Academics whining about other academics pointing out
| orientalism is not unusual. I'm not familiar with Moser
| personally.
|
| I am not a historian - I am only married to one. So I'll
| only say that from my personal experience interacting with
| historians who know Mullaney well (both professionally and
| personally) that his writing is well respected even if his
| social media presence is a bit much.
| canjobear wrote:
| I took his class as an undergrad. He struck me as
| ideologically driven.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| My understanding was that Chinese typewriters were slow to
| operate until the Chinese government came up with an
| alternative, phonetic way to spell.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| This is largely a myth. They are very _different_ than
| typewriters for english, but not impossible to use.
| Functional typewriters existed for the chinese language
| long before simplified chinese.
| filleduchaos wrote:
| I mean, the person you are replying to said "slow to
| operate". Not sure how that's being conflated with
| "impossible to use".
| thematrixturtle wrote:
| Got a pointer? Chinese typewriters exist, but they are (were)
| complicated, expensive machines and take a long time to learn
| to operate.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Tom Mullaney, as mentioned in my post, is arguably the
| global expert on the chinese typewriter and has done a lot
| of work on chinese printed and digital language technology.
| His books would be the starting point.
| segfaultbuserr wrote:
| > _One thing that doesn 't get mentioned often is that the West
| had a "simpler" alphabet of 26 characters_
|
| This article has presumably mentioned it. It says:
|
| > _Answering this question is actually quite complex because it
| involves mechanical knowledge, metallurgy, mills and writing
| systems. I have read numerous articles on this topic, but I
| started to notice that everyone leaves out some different
| essential part of the story. Here I am trying to include all
| the factors involved._
|
| The content is cut off in the middle by the paywall (which
| raises the question of whether it's suitable to be submitted to
| HN in the first place, if there's no workaround available).
| socialdemocrat wrote:
| The simple workaround is sign up for a free 7-day free trial.
| You don't have to be a paid subscriber.
|
| It does get into discussing alphabets at the end.
| incongruity wrote:
| Signing up for something isn't a workaround - it's signing
| up for something.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| To be fair, the term "paywall" is kind of misleading
| here; just by looking at it, it's hardly obvious that it
| also refers to things like "sign up" (or "disable your
| adblocker", etc). It's unfortunate that less opaque terms
| like "signupwall" are too awkward to supplant it. (Of
| course, if they did, we'd probably have the opposite
| problem, of people pretending something's not a
| signupwall because you can pay without signing up. If
| socialdemocrat has any suggestions for a term for this
| single concept that's etymologically compatible with both
| of those special cases, I'd quite like to hear them.)
| franciscop wrote:
| I didn't notice it was a paywall and thought it was just the
| end of the article+sub box until you mentioned it and I went
| back to check it!
| kamaal wrote:
| This is often cited as a reason why Printing press didn't get
| moving in cultures using Arabic script, including Turkish
| lands.
|
| Of course we can print anything today. But in early days some
| of these things add additional complexity and barriers to what
| is already a very nascent tech and social trend.
| shipman05 wrote:
| I've often wondered if digital media is a factor in the way
| many East Asian countries have closed the gap with Europe
| when it comes to economic productivity.
|
| - Phase 1: Before movable type printing press - no strong
| advantage for either character set
|
| - Phase 2: After printing press but before digital media -
| advantage Latin characters
|
| - Phase 3: After digital media - no strong advantage for
| either character set
|
| Phase 2 just happens to line up very neatly with the "great
| divergence" where Europe surpassed China in technology and
| economic output. Probably just a coincidence, or, more
| likely, one small factor among many.
| aetherson wrote:
| I think it's a big factor among many.
|
| This article spends a lot of time expressing that the
| Gutenberg printing press was better than Eastern printing
| presses. That's true. But _why_ was the Gutenberg press
| better, given that there were eastern printing presses
| hundreds of years earlier?
|
| I think a big part of the answer was that because of the
| difficulties in printing their languages, there was no big
| incentive to improve their printing presses. You couldn't
| look at it and say, "Oh, man, if I could just solve _this_
| problem, my fortune would be assured! " And so the
| technology languished.
|
| And the result was, as the article demonstrates, a vast
| difference in literacy and knowledge storage/transfer in
| the West. And that's certainly not the _only_ reason why
| the West diverged from the East, but it 's a big factor.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| I mean, Japan's postwar convergence is largely before
| digital media.
| shipman05 wrote:
| Yes, and that crossed my mind. Japan may be the exception
| that proves the rule, though. The Meiji Restoration and
| rapid industrialization of Japan are special cases that,
| to my knowledge, no other nation in any part of the world
| was able to replicate.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Yeah I too am surprised at how often the alphabet is ignored or
| dismissed in these comparisons. Not only for printing but also
| for the development of the computer.
|
| I havne't seen a good analysis of this but I wonder how much
| the impact of literacy has on the demand for books. Now in the
| Middle Ages in Europe, literacy wasn't universal. The monastic
| class, clergy, the nobility and certain professions (eg
| merchants) were likely literate but less so the general
| population.
|
| A simpler and more phonetic alphabet clearly impacts literacy.
| Post-1929 Turkey is good evidence of this (where Turkish
| switched from the Arabic alphabet to what they use today).
|
| Chinese is notoriously difficult to learn to read and write. Is
| it possible that lower literacy reduced the demand for printed
| works? Was literacy in China actually lower than in European
| countries 500-1000 years ago? I have no idea but it's an
| interesting thought.
| satellite2 wrote:
| The Arabic alphabet is no more complex than the Latin one.
| That's definitely not a good example.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Arabic is cursive and usually but doesn't necessarily skip
| vowels in written form. A lot of Arabic words have the same
| 3 letter root (eg IIRC ktb for "book", "librarian" and
| others) and they're all written the same if vowels are
| omitted so you have to discern the meaning in context. Plus
| it has gender and case. Plus Modern Standard Arabic ("MSA")
| differs a lot from colloquial Arabic.
|
| So there is a lot of inherent complexity in Arabic.
|
| From a typesetting POV (both for the printed press and
| computers), Arabic's cursive nature is more difficult
| because the letters need to connect and the shapes can vary
| depending on what's next to them.
| mmis1000 wrote:
| Fun fact, you used to need a dedicated hardware to print
| Chinese character on screen before personal computer have
| enough memory and storage space to fit every characters in.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language_card
| drewcoo wrote:
| Medieval writing had diphthongs, strange, often regional
| abbreviations, and, based on what I remember from college, were
| difficult for someone used to reading Latin in current print
| form.
|
| There was still need in Europe to standardize and simplify
| those things. That process was still underway well into the
| 18th century.
|
| There was also the problem of spelling.
|
| Early Latin print in Europe is similar to Chinese also in that
| it's written form was more or less understood by educated
| Europeans, but their spoken langues had splintered away and
| we're often not mutually intelligible.
| offByJuan wrote:
| Let's not forget Aldus Manutius. His orders of magnitude cheaper
| books than Gutenberg made books available to regular people. He
| can be seen as inventor of paperback books.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldus_Manutius
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| It's a strange article. The author conflates 'printing press' and
| 'movable type' in the second paragraph, but then admits that the
| printing press in Asia wasn't a machine at all and was entirely
| manual. The innovation was not in producing the type plate, but
| in automating the production of printed pages.
| socialdemocrat wrote:
| Author here, they are conflated for good reason. The printing
| press is really an advancement of the movable type system
| developed in Asia. What Gutenberg did wasn't really about the
| screw press as I elaborate on here:
|
| https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/why-was-the-printing-pre...
|
| The screw press already existed in Europe and was widely used.
| Reducing Gutenbergs invention to just being about using a screw
| press does not do justice to what he did. It was really about
| combining several techniques to advance printing. Better alloys
| for types. Better system for duplicating types. Better ink. A
| lot of the advancement could have been made even without the
| printing press itself. And the printing press without these
| advancement would have made very little improvement.
| kalimanzaro wrote:
| Overlooked in the article: the Yuan/Song invention of movable
| types made of tin, which melts at low temperatures similar to
| that of Gutenberg's type metals. But they didnt catch on due to
| the poor ink adsorption.
|
| Source:
| https://books.google.com/books/publisher/content?id=d__HBAAA...
| socialdemocrat wrote:
| I knew about that but didn't think to include it has it wasn't
| widely used and lacked many important components. Not just the
| ink. A key advantage of Gutenberg's alloy was that it neither
| shrunk not expanded. That is what gave quick accurate
| duplication of types.
|
| Wood cuts and bronze types were worth mentioning as they were
| widely used in China and Korea.
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