This is insane. Just finding a single character must be a real challenge.
What is the character ordering on these cylinders? I counted about 40 characters per row, and I’m guessing about 40 rows around the cylinder (1/4 of a cylinder is around 10 rows). So that’s about 1,600 characters.
How does this typewriter score for usability? In Kanji, ~1000 characters mean basic literacy, and 2000-2500 characters is “newspaper level” literacy.
I still cannot wrap my mind around mastering the written form of this language.
Kanji (which derive from Chinese characters) are indexed based on the on-yomi reading which approximately matches the Chinese sound - albeit as understood several centuries ago. The index can be ordered on gojuon ('fifty sounds') or Iroha, a Japanese poem which contains all syllabic sounds of the Japanese language exactly once. This is more likely as Iroha was the standard ordering for centuries and continues to be used today in many contexts.
Japanese is hard to read and write, but you can do it with practice. Complex kanji are not unlike complex words whose spelling you can learn through chunking. There are ~214 bushu, aka 'radicals', fairly simple characters from which all more complicated characters are made. In practice you only need to know about half of them unless you plan on being a hardcore language scholar, the others are rare. Once you get used to this, complex kanji are not arbitrary pictograms of 5-30 unique strokes, but small arrays of 2-4 bushu which are combined and written according to a small (8,8) set of rules. I think this is way more useful than the mnemonic approach used in many popular books.
In short, if you want to learn written Japanese (or Chinese/Chinese adjacent languages), learn the radicals early on. You can find Anki decks to help and mastering 214 of them is reasonably easy. Also, write. Nothing improves your recognition/retention like writing them regularly with a pen or a brush. Write them on your hand. Write them in the air.
Apparently 1,172 characters on that machine. No mention I could find of composability of characters, which is possible in theory (many characters are combinations of simpler characters, but combining them alters the representation, shrinking the component characters/substituting slightly different marks).
Something else I didn't see mention of: can you easily switch the cylinder or the rows to get different character sets? I can imagine a business making due with ~1,000 characters because their subject matter is narrower than a newspaper would generally need.
I suspect you'd memorise at least the common ones with enough practice. After all, there are people who have memorised a significant fraction of what could be considered equivalent to Unicode codepoints: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_telegraph_code
I really wish this other typewriter got a chance to enter mass production--it basically contained an ahead-of-its-time input method akin to modern Chinese/Kanji/Hanja on computers, rather than require hunting through 1000+ tiny characters on a grid.
Thank you! I went searching for more information after my post and was shocked to see the recent news, it made my day to see that and to see that Prof. Mullaney is in contact with the finder.
Cool, I hadn't seen this video. I am currently working on mapping the character tray and boxes of a Taiwanese Jue Shine typewriter, which uses a different mechanism:
The tray-based design not only permits swapping out the entire characterset, but also sections.
My understanding is that Chinese typewriters typically have a large number of characters in common, but also provide for characters specific to specialised activities, e.g., government, commerce, education, science, technology, and the like, which are addressed in the auxiliary characters used.
Vague recollections from a New Books Network episode some time back. I'm pretty sure it's this episode with Tom Mullaney:
You swap character by character, and of course if you want to swap a group of characters related to a particular domain you can do so. The tray is just a grid so you have as much flexibility as you want as long as you have the appropriate characters at your disposal.
The impression I'd had from the interview(s) I'd heard were that it was common practice to use a fairly standardised characterset and then the specific auxiliary set as needed. How much individual typists might move between different machines and (nonstandard?) configurations I don't know.
I find typing Kanji still a real challenge, I can read and handwrite Kanji to a decent enough level, like middle school, but I find it so slow to type and during that time frame I am second guessing myself if I am correct or not. Romaji or hiragana/katakana are equally as tricky in my view to type.
This is insane. Just finding a single character must be a real challenge.
What is the character ordering on these cylinders? I counted about 40 characters per row, and I’m guessing about 40 rows around the cylinder (1/4 of a cylinder is around 10 rows). So that’s about 1,600 characters.
How does this typewriter score for usability? In Kanji, ~1000 characters mean basic literacy, and 2000-2500 characters is “newspaper level” literacy.
I still cannot wrap my mind around mastering the written form of this language.
Kanji (which derive from Chinese characters) are indexed based on the on-yomi reading which approximately matches the Chinese sound - albeit as understood several centuries ago. The index can be ordered on gojuon ('fifty sounds') or Iroha, a Japanese poem which contains all syllabic sounds of the Japanese language exactly once. This is more likely as Iroha was the standard ordering for centuries and continues to be used today in many contexts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroha
Japanese is hard to read and write, but you can do it with practice. Complex kanji are not unlike complex words whose spelling you can learn through chunking. There are ~214 bushu, aka 'radicals', fairly simple characters from which all more complicated characters are made. In practice you only need to know about half of them unless you plan on being a hardcore language scholar, the others are rare. Once you get used to this, complex kanji are not arbitrary pictograms of 5-30 unique strokes, but small arrays of 2-4 bushu which are combined and written according to a small (8,8) set of rules. I think this is way more useful than the mnemonic approach used in many popular books.
In short, if you want to learn written Japanese (or Chinese/Chinese adjacent languages), learn the radicals early on. You can find Anki decks to help and mastering 214 of them is reasonably easy. Also, write. Nothing improves your recognition/retention like writing them regularly with a pen or a brush. Write them on your hand. Write them in the air.
They are ordered based on the readings: https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2021/04/typewriter-three-lang...
Apparently 1,172 characters on that machine. No mention I could find of composability of characters, which is possible in theory (many characters are combinations of simpler characters, but combining them alters the representation, shrinking the component characters/substituting slightly different marks).
Something else I didn't see mention of: can you easily switch the cylinder or the rows to get different character sets? I can imagine a business making due with ~1,000 characters because their subject matter is narrower than a newspaper would generally need.
I suspect you'd memorise at least the common ones with enough practice. After all, there are people who have memorised a significant fraction of what could be considered equivalent to Unicode codepoints: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_telegraph_code
I really wish this other typewriter got a chance to enter mass production--it basically contained an ahead-of-its-time input method akin to modern Chinese/Kanji/Hanja on computers, rather than require hunting through 1000+ tiny characters on a grid.
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-uncanny-keyboard/
The possibly unique instance of the MingKwai typewriter, thought lost, was recently found, by the way:
https://typewriterrevolution.com/the-discovery-of-lin-yutang...
Thank you! I went searching for more information after my post and was shocked to see the recent news, it made my day to see that and to see that Prof. Mullaney is in contact with the finder.
This page has both the video from above and some additional information: https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2021/04/typewriter-three-lang...
Cool, I hadn't seen this video. I am currently working on mapping the character tray and boxes of a Taiwanese Jue Shine typewriter, which uses a different mechanism:
https://typewriterdatabase.com/1972-jue-shine-747l.24670.typ...
The benefit of the tray system is that you can easily swap characters, which is essential for Chinese, but maybe less so for Japanese.
The tray-based design not only permits swapping out the entire characterset, but also sections.
My understanding is that Chinese typewriters typically have a large number of characters in common, but also provide for characters specific to specialised activities, e.g., government, commerce, education, science, technology, and the like, which are addressed in the auxiliary characters used.
Vague recollections from a New Books Network episode some time back. I'm pretty sure it's this episode with Tom Mullaney:
<https://newbooksnetwork.com/006-the-chinese-typewriter-a-his...>
Mullaney is also the basis for several other links provided by others in this thread, particularly <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43212063>.
You swap character by character, and of course if you want to swap a group of characters related to a particular domain you can do so. The tray is just a grid so you have as much flexibility as you want as long as you have the appropriate characters at your disposal.
I have just finished reading Mullaney’s book.
Thanks.
The impression I'd had from the interview(s) I'd heard were that it was common practice to use a fairly standardised characterset and then the specific auxiliary set as needed. How much individual typists might move between different machines and (nonstandard?) configurations I don't know.
I find typing Kanji still a real challenge, I can read and handwrite Kanji to a decent enough level, like middle school, but I find it so slow to type and during that time frame I am second guessing myself if I am correct or not. Romaji or hiragana/katakana are equally as tricky in my view to type.
tangentially, Google Japan makes joke keyboards. Here's their latest
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHqPrHTN1dU
you can see some others here
https://www.youtube.com/@GoogleJapan/search?query=%E3%82%AD%...
They had one with 1000+ keys but I don't see a video for it
I always wondered how they did that...