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This is the QWERTY keyboard. While I know QWERTY may sound like the name of a Gen Z high school
girl who bullies people on TikTok, it’s actually the name for the keyboard most of us use every
day for things like checking twitter, doing work, and checking twitter at work. Nobody actually
knows where the name QWERTY comes from--we spent hours trying to research its origins and
came up with nothing. If you can figure it out, let us know in the comments, but here’s one thing
we do know about the QWERTY keyboard: it’s causing Chinese people to forget how to write Chinese.
So basically, sometime in the 1900s China figured out a way to fit their character-based
writing system into the QWERTY keyboard, helping the country become the modern world
power it is today: ranked first in population, second in economy, and 36th alphabetically.
Okay, so in order to understand the ramifications of transferring Chinese dialects from handwritten
to typed, we need to understand the difference between the English alphabet—the squiggles we use
to do words and make talk—and Chinese characters… the squiggles, not these guys. So, allow me
to Ameri-splain. When writing in English, we use these 26 symbols to spell out sounds. For
example, if I put the sounds associated with the letters B-U-M-F-U-Z-Z-L-E together, I get the word
bumfuzzle which I can then use to carry forward the idea of confusion. Now if I remove the letters
L and E, and their associated sounds, you get… well actually let’s skip over that, but you get
the idea: there’s a very close connection with how you write an English word and how you say it. In
Chinese, on the other hand, how you write a word has nothing to do with how you pronounce it.
Instead, each word is represented by a single character, or in some cases a combination of two
or three. Plus, because just about every word has its own squiggly representative, Chinese
has more characters than an Avengers movie. All this is to say, letters and characters work
differently, and when it became popular to push buttons to make words, countries like China with
character-based languages found themselves in a tough spot. You see, by moving to typing, writers
of English only had to deal with 26 letters and a couple of dot things that I still don’t fully
understand—like this one, which I’m told is a semicolon; something that I thought you had to
have checked when you turned fifty. If Chinese typists were to follow the same approach as
their English-writing contemporaries though, they would have to figure out how to squeeze
about two to three thousand separate keys on a typewriter or keyboard, and maybe even a
few more if they too want to use a word like bumfuzzle in their script, but they don’t,
and that’s what separates HAI from the rest. But sadly, they decided not to make an awesome
giant keyboard that looks like something the Phantom of the Opera would play songs on. Like me
as I write this, and you as you type a heartfelt comment and a worthwhile video suggestion
not related to bricks, Chinese typists have also come to use the QWERTY keyboard, which is
possible, in large part, because of this guy: Zhou Youguang, who, in the 1950s, invented what
is called “pinyin,” which uses the roman alphabet to phonetically spell out Chinese characters.
For example, say I wanted to type the Chinese word for “rash.” Don’t ask why I need to type
it, I just do. That word looks like this, and it’s pronounced “zhěn.” I mean it’s not really
pronounced that way, but that’s the best I can do. Anyways, to get it on my QWERTY keyboard I would
phonetically spell it out. There’s no official phonetic spelling, so many options would work.
I could type z-h-e-n, or z-j-e-n, z-j-e-y-n, or a bunch of other things, and the computer
would be like “do you mean this'' and I would say “yes,” and then boom, I have the character for
zhěn. Essentially, it’s the Chinese equivalent of when you misspell “definitely” for the 500th
consecutive time and autocorrect bails you out. But while Pinyin has made business better, reading
commoner, writing faster, and memes danker, it has come with a troubling side effect—character
amnesia. Chinese people refer to this as “tíbǐwàngzì” which translates to, roughly, “pick
up the pen but forget how to write the character,” and it’s a real problem with the youths. You
see, by embracing the digital revolution, adopting the QWERTY keyboard, and using pinyin to
bridge the divide between alphabet and characters, younger Chinese folk are able to spell
out the pronunciations of a word, but are forgetting how to actually write
the character by hand, because remember, in Chinese, how you write a character has
nothing to do with how you pronounce it. In 2010, a China Youth Daily newspaper poll
indicated that over 80% of those surveyed admitted to occasionally struggling to remember how to
actually write the character they had in mind. For the prior generations who walked to their
character writing lessons uphill both ways, it’s deeply troubling that a 3,000 year-old
method of communication deeply embedded within Chinese culture is slipping away because
people wanted to use the clickety-clack machines. But Chinese characters aren’t likely to disappear
into varying-quality air overnight. Increased focus on handwritten characters in the education
system, continued handwriting practices like journaling, and governmental mandates all have
the potential to help protect the long-standing writing traditions of Chinese characters. At the
same time though, leaning into pinyin has been a key driver in China’s modernization and economic
rise over the past half-century, and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. When it comes to
balancing pinyin and traditional characters, Chinese folks are going to have to walk a
thin tightrope, above a double-edged sword, between a rock and a hard place, and below
a… uh… thing that has two bad outcomes. With the holidays upon us, you too might find
yourself between a rock and a hard place when it comes to figuring out gifts. However,
good news, because for a very limited time, subscriptions to CuriosityStream, are
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