Chinese typewriter

Typewriters that can type Chinese characters were invented in the early 20th century. Written Chinese is a logographic writing system, and facilitating the use of thousands of Chinese characters requires more complex engineering than for a writing system derived from the Latin alphabet, which may require only tens of glyphs. In the Kangxi Dictionary, there are over 40,000 Chinese characters, but only 423 distinct syllabic sounds, not counting tones. An ordinary Chinese printing office uses 6,000 characters. Models began to be mass-produced in the 1920s. Many early models were manufactured by Japanese companies, following the invention of the Japanese typewriter by Kyota Sugimoto, which used kanji adopted from the Chinese writing system. At least sixty different models of Chinese typewriter have been produced, ranging from sizable mechanical models to electronic word processors.

Historical Context

Before the development of Hanyu Pinyin, many attempts at Chinese typewriting relied on the structure of Chinese characters themselves. These systems either used complete characters or decomposed characters into strokes and stroke combinations, an approach often described as "shape-based." By contrast, many modern writing and encoding systems, including Morse code, braille, and ASCII, were originally developed for alphabetic languages rather than character-based writing systems such as Chinese. In response to the difficulty of inputting Chinese characters on Western, Latin-alphabet-based typewriters, some reformers argued that Chinese should adopt an alphabetic writing system.