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Kingdom of characters : the language revolution that made China modern / Jing Tsu.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: New York : Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, 2022Copyright date: ©2022Description: xix, 314 pages : illustrations ; 24 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 9780735214729
  • 0735214727
Subject(s):
Contents:
A Mandarin in revolution (1900) -- Chinese typewriters and America (1912) -- Tipping the scale of telegraphy (1925) -- The librarian's card catalog (1938) -- When "Peking" became "Beijing" (1958) -- Entering into the computer (1979) -- The digital sinosphere (2020).
Summary: "After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world's most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire, with literacy reserved for the elite few. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China's greatest and most daunting challenge was a linguistic one. Just as important as China's technological and industrial advances and political maneuvers was the century-long fight to make the Chinese language--with its many dialects and complex character-based script--accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology. Kingdom of Characters follows the bold and cunning innovators who adapted the Chinese language to a world defined by the West and its alphabet: the exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, the Chinese Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao's phonetic writing system, the imprisoned computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a tea cup, among others. Without the advances they enabled, China might never have become the dominating force we know today. The revolution of the Chinese script is just as breathtaking as China's transformation into a capitalist juggernaut, in large part because those linguistic innovations literally enabled China's reinvention. With larger-than-life characters and an unexpected perspective on the major events of China's tumultuous twentieth century, Tsu reveals how language is both a technology to be perfected and a subtle yet potent power to be exercised and expanded"-- Provided by publisher.
Holdings
Item type Home library Collection Call number Materials specified Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Adult Book Adult Book Main Library NonFiction 495.111 T882 Available 33111010786743
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A New York Times Notable Book of 2022

What does it take to reinvent a language?

After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world's most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters , Jing Tsu argues that China's most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology.

Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who reinvented the Chinese language, among them an exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, a Chinese-Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao's phonetic writing system, and a computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup from the floor of a jail cell. Without their advances, China might never have become the dominating force we know today.

With larger-than-life characters and an unexpected perspective on the major events of China's tumultuous twentieth century, Tsu reveals how language is both a technology to be perfected and a subtle, yet potent, power to be exercised and expanded.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 283-304) and index.

"After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world's most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire, with literacy reserved for the elite few. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China's greatest and most daunting challenge was a linguistic one. Just as important as China's technological and industrial advances and political maneuvers was the century-long fight to make the Chinese language--with its many dialects and complex character-based script--accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology. Kingdom of Characters follows the bold and cunning innovators who adapted the Chinese language to a world defined by the West and its alphabet: the exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, the Chinese Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao's phonetic writing system, the imprisoned computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a tea cup, among others. Without the advances they enabled, China might never have become the dominating force we know today. The revolution of the Chinese script is just as breathtaking as China's transformation into a capitalist juggernaut, in large part because those linguistic innovations literally enabled China's reinvention. With larger-than-life characters and an unexpected perspective on the major events of China's tumultuous twentieth century, Tsu reveals how language is both a technology to be perfected and a subtle yet potent power to be exercised and expanded"-- Provided by publisher.

A Mandarin in revolution (1900) -- Chinese typewriters and America (1912) -- Tipping the scale of telegraphy (1925) -- The librarian's card catalog (1938) -- When "Peking" became "Beijing" (1958) -- Entering into the computer (1979) -- The digital sinosphere (2020).

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