• Hi Guest!

    The costs of running this forum are covered by Sea Lion Press. If you'd like to help support the company and the forum, visit patreon.com/sealionpress

Chains of Consequences: Dirty QWERTY

I guess it’s the same sort of thing as why China had the printing press way before Europe. But never got into the use of metal elements
Naively it does seem bizarre that the moveable type printing press was invented by a civilisation with a non-alphabetic ideographic language that wouldn't have the same eureka factor as being able to move a small number of letters around.

The development of written languages to get around what letters their typists had received is amazing.
Might deserve an article in itself, though it sounds like other are better qualified to write it.
 
I think it was @Stateless who wrote about the 'shut down' typo incident that inspired me to write this one, but it may have been @Skinny87 and this isn't a bit, I actually can't remember which.

I didn't think it was me or the other me, and I was right:

Why is "u" so close to "i" on the keyboard that it can easily be misstyped when in a hurry?

Because when typing "shutdown process" repeatedly in official MoD documents that you're authoring, misstyping can be a touch embarrassing.
 
Naively it does seem bizarre that the moveable type printing press was invented by a civilisation with a non-alphabetic ideographic language that wouldn't have the same eureka factor as being able to move a small number of letters around.

I think the needs of bureaucracy encourage the idea of printing multiple copies of the same document, but at the same time the ideographic nature of the language probably explains why you didn't see the same jump in mass literacy as you saw with Europe- see for example Song China having a literacy rate of perhaps 10% which had only risen to about 20% by the late Qing, while Britain went from 7% in 1450 to 30% in 1640 and just kept going.
 
Back
Top