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Kingdom of Characters
Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern | Jing Tsu
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What does it take to reinvent a language? After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology. Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who reinvented the Chinese language, among them an exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, a Chinese-Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao's phonetic writing system, and a computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup from the floor of a jail cell. Without their advances, China might never have become the dominating force we know today. With larger-than-life characters and an unexpected perspective on the major events of China’s tumultuous twentieth century, Tsu reveals how language is both a technology to be perfected and a subtle, yet potent, power to be exercised and expanded.
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charl08
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The political weaponization of simplified scripts since 1949 [between Taiwan and PR China means that...] Proponents and opponents of simplification continue to hurl jabs and insults at one another. The character for "love" in traditional form and in simplified form) is a favorite example. The simplified version replaces the component for "heart" with "friend" . What is love, the champions of traditional characters ask, with no heart?

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charl08
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It was the sorting, classifying, and indexing that fascinated him to no end. So much so that Du [Dingyou] wrote profuse odes to the temple that consecrated this bond, the modern library. He even created a special Chinese character for the book depot, or library (pronounced tuan). The character for "book," shu , is lovingly guarded by the enclosure wei.

rockpools Happy National Indexing Day tomorrow! (Random, I know…) 3y
charl08 @rockpools Oh no, I missed it! 🤣 3y
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charl08
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... some began to wonder whether the writing system should continue to exist. Anarchist Wu Zhihui sounded one of the first alarm bells: "No amount of change can alter the fact that the Chinese script is bizarre-looking and weird in form; it assumes a thousand shapes and is nearly impossible to differentiate-all because it is fundamentally flawed. That is why we believe it is only a matter of time before it is abolished."

charl08 Image via wikipedia 3y
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charl08
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I'm not sure how clearly this comes out in my photo, but the characters on the cover include binary code in faint print... 🤩🤩

mobill76 There are 10 kinds of people in the world... 3y
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