Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern by Jing TsuMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
What a book!
For some reason, I expected this to be a history of Chinese characters, from the turtle shells on (although the subtitle should have set me straight).
In actuality it deals with the modern issues that have come up, most of which was completely new to me, and all of which was fascinating.
From trying to figure out an alphabet in order to increase literacy, to figuring out how to build a typewriter for Chinese, to figuring out how to send telegraphs, to library cataloging, to the fork between the Nationalists and Communists, to making Chinese work on computers and Unicode.
Each of these involved dedicated people, which the author introduces us to, and among which I had only even heard of Lin Yutang.
Some of the other reviewers complain that it goes into too much detail, particularly as regards the technology. That's certainly true in my case, since much of it was over my head, but then again, had the author not written about it people would have probably complained about the lack of explanation.
4.5 stars
Here are some of my highlights:
"In the earliest study of regional dialects, a scholar, Xu Chen, in the first century took on the mammoth task of surveying the different forms of everyday speech. This early lexicographer worked for twenty-seven years, listing around nine thousand entries" (p. 16)
"Lu Zhuangzhang... developed the first phonetic system for a Chinese language by a Chinese. His 1892 SImple Script used fifty-five symbols... to represent the southern dialect spoken in Amoy."
He was following by Cai Xiyong "who developed his Quick script for the major southern topolect group of Min" (p.24)
Zhang Taiyan invented Bopomofo (p.40)
Today there are officially 8,105 simplified characters in circulation (increased from 2,235 in 1986) (p. 257)
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