Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution that made China Modern

Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution that made China Modern

  • Downloads:8661
  • Type:Epub+TxT+PDF+Mobi
  • Create Date:2022-01-18 00:51:07
  • Update Date:2025-09-06
  • Status:finish
  • Author:Jing Tsu
  • ISBN:0241295858
  • Environment:PC/Android/iPhone/iPad/Kindle

Summary

A riveting, masterfully researched account of the bold innovators who adapted the Chinese language to the modern world, transforming China into a superpower in the process

What does it take to reinvent the world's oldest living language?

China today is one of the world's most powerful nations, yet just a century ago it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, left behind in the wake of Western technology。 In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu shows that China's most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: to make the formidable Chinese language - a 2,200-year-old writing system that was daunting to natives and foreigners alike - accessible to a globalized, digital world。

Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who adapted the Chinese script - and the value-system it represents - to the technological advances that would shape the twentieth century and beyond, from the telegram to the typewriter to the smartphone。 From the exiled reformer who risked death to advocate for Mandarin as a national language to the imprisoned computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup, generations of scholars, missionaries, librarians, politicians, inventors, nationalists and revolutionaries alike understood the urgency of their task and its world-shaping consequences。

With larger-than-life characters and a thrilling narrative, Kingdom of Characters offers an astonishingly original perspective on one of the twentieth century's most dramatic transformations。

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Reviews

Danielle | Dogmombookworm

KINGDOM OF CHARACTERS |Examines the challenges the Chinese written script posed over the past 100 years in keeping up with the fast pace of our technological advancements。Putting aside the question of whether to abandon Chinese script altogether which has been hotly debated, Tsu examines the many situations in which the Chinese have had to consider how to systemize their written script so as to allow quick, efficient and accessible means to look up and use characters in modern times。 Should one KINGDOM OF CHARACTERS |Examines the challenges the Chinese written script posed over the past 100 years in keeping up with the fast pace of our technological advancements。Putting aside the question of whether to abandon Chinese script altogether which has been hotly debated, Tsu examines the many situations in which the Chinese have had to consider how to systemize their written script so as to allow quick, efficient and accessible means to look up and use characters in modern times。 Should one use stroke count, radical placement, quadrant and stroke count and placement? None of which is objectively as easy as the inherent ordered system of A- B - C。 Language reform has been debated and revised over multiple millennium, from standardization over 2,000 years ago to more recently with character simplification under Mao。 Tsu delves into the battles for how the Chinese dealt with creating a typewriter, telegraphy (for sending telegrams), bibliographic classification system, and computing technology。 How do you process text that is not alphabetic but is made up of thousands of characters before our digital age, pre-computers? I found this book absolutely enthralling。 It really is such an interesting topic and has been through so many thought debates。 。。。more