It is well known that pictographic languages that use Hanzi, like Mandarin, are difficult to work with for computer input and output devices. After all, each character is a tiny picture that represents an entire word, not just a sound. But did you ever wonder how China used telegraphy? We’ll admit, we had not thought about that until we ran into [Julesy]’s video on the subject that you can watch below.
There are about 50,000 symbols, so having a bunch of dots and dashes wasn’t really practical. Even if you designed it, who could learn it? Turns out, like most languages, you only need about 10,000 words to communicate. A telegraph company in Denmark hired an astronomer who knew some Chinese and tasked him with developing the code. In a straightforward way, he decided to encode each word from a dictionary of up to 10,000 with a unique four-digit number.
A French expat took the prototype code list and expanded it to 6,899 words, producing “the new telegraph codebook.” The numbers were just randomly assigned. Imagine if you wanted to say “The dog is hungry” by writing “4949 1022 3348 9429.” Not to mention, as [Julesy] points out, the numbers were long driving up the cost of telegrams.
It took a Chinese delegate of what would eventually become the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to come up with a method by which four-digit codes would count as a single Chinese character. So, for example, 1367 0604 6643 0932 were four Chinese characters meaning: “Problem at home. Return immediately.”
Languages like Mandarin make typewriters tough, but not impossible. IBM’s had 5,400 characters and also used a four-digit code. Sadly, though, they were not the same codes, so knowing Chinese Morse wouldn’t help you get a job as a typist.
A few years ago I was reading about alternate number systems. Humans , of course, are typically base-10 machines (no doubt because of 10 fingers) while computers are base-2, where the digits zero and one are conveniently represented by voltage-on and voltage-off. But what are the relative merits of x-symbols vs y- digits?
If you have a small symbol set (like binary) then the number of digits you need to express a given quantity goes up. Conversely, you can reduce the number of digits needed by increasing the number of symbols, but now you have a potentially cumbersome symbol set. It strikes me that these same principles probably apply to alphabets, and that pictographic systems like Chinese correlate to the latter case.
If I recall, mathematics say the most efficient balance between symbol set size and number of digits is Euler’s number… implying a symbol set of three. Indeed base-3 computing hardware would seem to promise improvements in power consumption and performance… but I wonder if similar math/logic applies to written language.
Culturally interesting perhaps, but 10’s of thousands of pictographs is not a practical way to navigate the modern world. My question is, what size would the most efficient alphabet be?
Ternary is fun, but seximal is the future!
Oh, a “shocked face” youtube video. I’m definitely going to not watch it 🙂
10k dictionary, using 10k worth of numbers is still going to be an insanely difficult memory issue for the operator imho.
This reminds me of the old telegraph code books.
Thousands of years of using such ineffective system of writing makes it nearly impossible to change it for something better. It is also interconnected with speech system, which uses pitch to change meaning.
Hard to solve.
Reminds me of nations which for similar historical reasons keep strange measurement units:) But they minimally united nice part of world with using simple and effective language with plus-minus adequate writing system. Thanks and go on!
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