Chinese Typewriter

Well Everyone, here is the moment I've all been waiting for: The Chinese Typewriter!

This is a small educational lesson today. Most likely I will cover this subject with more jokes in the future.

As we all know the Chinese language has tens of thousands of characters. The history and development of the typewriter and the system for mechanically or electronically creating text in Chinese has undergone many frustrating changes.

Throughout the years other, less sympathetic countries, have made fun of the very idea of a Chinese Typewriter. We will not cover all jokes about the device, but I'll give you a little educational lift today.



Below is an example of a Chinese typewriter from about 1970. The tray at the bottom has a few thousand characters to use and that type case can be traded out for other sets if more characters are needed. The typist lines up a grabber for the character than hits a switch to imprint it on the paper. A good typist could average 20 characters per minute.

It seems to me like it would be just as fast to set lines of type by hand then print the whole page at once, but then again you'd have multiple charcacters on a page and so the 1,000's of characters needed would increase 10 fold or more.

There was another design that never was produced commercially called the "Ming Kwai" which means "Clear and Quick". The typewriter could create 7000 distinct characters. It could type additional "words" using combinations of characters, attaining a theoretical total of 90,000 words.

According to the daughter of inventor Lin Yutang the day she was to demonstrate the machine to executives of the Remington Typewriter Company, they could not make it work. The machine was fixed the next day, but Ming Kwai's obituary was already written.

In the digital world the computer can do thinking that a mechanical device can't. While the most widespread method of inputting Chinese on a QWERTY keyboard (standard keyboard) is the Cangjie input method inwhich the typist "builds" the characters. Each letter on the keyboard stands for a different basic construct.

The computer is much more versatile in its abilities to modify your characters, or use alternate input methods like drawing with a mouse or even voice recognition. Other methods are used, but the Cangjie input method took off due to not putting a price on the software that translates/modifies your keystrokes. It is available as freeware and is installed on most (Chinese) computers standard.

Thinking about this too much often gives me a headache. That's why Reverend Rick has to stop every so often to get my groove on. So here is a recipe to rock out. Remember M.C. Hammer? Apparently in "U Can't Touch This" when hammer is breakin' it down, his dance is called the "Chinese Typewriter".

The gist is that he's so fast he's navigating an enormous set of keys on a typewriter with his quick moving feet. Brilliant. Ya got me Hammy. Maybe he was writing a letter to the chinese people. If so, we can guess the words....oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh Stop. Hammer Time.