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Review | Book review: The Chinese Typewriter – a masterstroke of linguistic history

Thomas Mullaney explores the difficulties faced throughout history in trying to represent Chinese in movable type, and what that meant for technological change and global communication

Reading Time:4 minutes
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Thomas Mullaney is the author of The Chinese Typewriter: A History.

The Chinese Typewriter: A History

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by Thomas Mullaney

The MIT Press

4.5 stars

Thomas Mullaney begins his captivating new book, The Chinese Typewriter: A History, by analysing – of all things – a parade. No ordinary street procession, mind you, but the parade of nations at the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

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As athletes from Greece entered the Bird’s Nest stadium, they were trailed not by competitors from Afghanistan, Albania and Algeria, but by those of Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, and Turkey. The sequence, Mullaney writes, honoured the founding nation of the Olympics first, and then ushered in countries based on the number of strokes in the first and second characters of their Chinese name.

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