Physics World

Technology with characters: the story of China’s unique transformation

Key issue There are tens of thousands of Chinese characters, which creates a challenge for technologies developed based on Western alphabets. (Courtesy: iStock/alexsi) Chinese characters, in use by ...

This 3,000-year-old language doesn’t use an alphabet and still thrives

Most of the world’s 7,000 languages build words by matching sounds to letters. Yet Chinese takes a different route - one that ...
insider.si.edu

Chinese Script from Oracle Bones to Computer Bytes

This exhibition explores the evolution of Chinese characters from ancient times to the present. Chinese script is one of the oldest written languages in the world and the only ancient language still ...
MIT Technology Review

How the quest to type Chinese on a QWERTY keyboard created autocomplete

Decades before its rediscovery in the Anglophone world, autocomplete was invented for putting Chinese characters into a computer. This is an excerpt from The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the ...
The Conversation

Most assume writing systems get simpler. But 3,600 years of Chinese writing show it’s getting increasingly complex

This research was conducted with Simon Jerome Han as lead author. Piers Kelly receives funding from an ARC DECRA Fellowship. Charles Kemp's work on this project was supported by an ARC Future ...