This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.
Have you ever thought about the miraculous fact that despite the myriad differences between languages, virtually everyone uses the same QWERTY keyboards? Many languages have more or fewer than 26 letters in their alphabet—or no “alphabet” at all, like Chinese, which has tens of thousands of characters. Yet somehow everyone uses the same keyboard to communicate.
Last week, MIT Technology Review published an excerpt from a new book, The Chinese Computer, which talks about how this problem was solved in China. After generations of work to sort Chinese characters, modify computer parts, and create keyboard apps that automatically predict the next character, it is finally possible for any Chinese speaker to use a QWERTY keyboard.
But the book doesn’t stop there. It ends with a bigger question about what this all means: Why is it necessary for speakers of non-Latin languages to adapt modern technologies for their uses, and what do their efforts contribute to computing technologies?
I talked to the book’s author, Tom Mullaney, a professor of history at Stanford University. We ended up geeking out over keyboards, computers, the English-centric design that underlies everything about computing, and even how keyboards affect emerging technologies like virtual reality. Here are some of his most fascinating answers, lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Mullaney’s book covers many experiments across multiple decades that ultimately made typing Chinese possible and efficient on a QWERTY keyboard, but a similar process has played out all around the world. Many countries with non-Latin languages had to work out how they could use a Western computer to input and process their own languages.
Mullaney: In the Chinese case—but also in Japanese, Korean, and many other non-Western writing systems—this wasn’t done for fun. It was done out of brute necessity because the dominant model of keyboard-based computing, born and raised in the English-speaking world, is not compatible with Chinese. It doesn’t work because the keyboard doesn’t have the necessary real estate. And the question became: I have a few dozen keys but 100,000 characters. How do I map one onto the other?
Simply put, half of the population on Earth uses the QWERTY keyboard in ways the QWERTY keyboard was never intended to be used, creating a radically different way of interacting with computers.
The root of all of these problems is that computers were designed with English as the default language. So the way English works is just the way computers work today.
M: Every writing system on the planet throughout history is modular, meaning it’s built out of smaller pieces. But computing carefully, brilliantly, and understandably worked on one very specific kind of modularity: modularity as it functions in English.
And then everybody else had to fit themselves into that modularity. Arabic letters connect, so you have to fix [the computer for it]; In South Asian scripts, the combination of a consonant and a vowel changes the shape of the letter overall—that’s not how modularity works in English.
The English modularity is so fundamental in computing that non-Latin speakers are still grappling with the impacts today despite decades of hard work to change things.
Mullaney shared a complaint that Arabic speakers made in 2022 about Adobe InDesign, the most popular publishing design software. As recently as two years ago, pasting a string of Arabic text into the software could cause the text to become messed up, misplacing its diacritic marks, which are crucial for indicating phonetic features of the text. It turns out you need to install a Middle East version of the software and apply some deliberate workarounds to avoid the problem.
M: Latin alphabetic dominance is still alive and well; it has not been overthrown. And there’s a troubling question as to whether it can ever be overthrown. Some turn was made, some path taken that advantaged certain writing systems at a deep structural level and disadvantaged others.
That deeply rooted English-centric design is why mainstream input methods never deviate too far from the keyboards that we all know and love/hate. In the English-speaking world, there have been numerous attempts to reimagine the way text input works. Technologies such as the T9 phone keyboard or the Palm Pilot handwriting alphabet briefly achieved some adoption. But they never stick for long because most developers snap back to QWERTY keyboards at the first opportunity.
M: T9 was born in the context of disability technology and was incorporated into the first mobile phones because button real estate was a major problem (prior to the BlackBerry reintroducing the QWERTY keyboard). It was a necessity; [developers] actually needed to think in a different way. But give me enough space, give me 12 inches by 14 inches, and I’ll default to a QWERTY keyboard.
Every 10 years or so, some Western tech company or inventor announces: “Everybody! I have finally figured out a more advanced way of inputting English at much higher speeds than the QWERTY keyboard.” And time and time again there is zero market appetite.
Will the QWERTY keyboard stick around forever? After this conversation, I’m secretly hoping it won’t. Maybe it’s time for a change. With new technologies like VR headsets, and other gadgets on the horizon, there may come a time when QWERTY keyboards are not the first preference, and non-Latin languages may finally have a chance in shaping the new norm of human-computer interactions.
M: It’s funny, because now as you go into augmented and virtual reality, Silicon Valley companies are like, “How do we overcome the interface problem?” Because you can shrink everything except the QWERTY keyboard. And what Western engineers fail to understand is that it’s not a tech problem—it’s a technological cultural problem. And they just don’t get it. They think that if they just invent the tech, it is going to take off. And thus far, it never has.
If I were a software or hardware developer, I would be hanging out in online role-playing games, just in the chat feature; I would be watching people use their TV remote controls to find the title of the film they’re looking for; I would look at how Roblox players chat with each other. It’s going to come from some arena outside the mainstream, because the mainstream is dominated by QWERTY.
What are other signs of the dominance of English in modern computing? I’d love to hear about the geeky details you’ve noticed. Send them to [email protected].
Catch up with China
1. Today marks the 35th anniversary of the student protests and subsequent massacre in Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
- For decades, Hong Kong was the hub for Tiananmen memorial events. That’s no longer the case, due to Beijing’s growing control over the city’s politics after the 2019 protests. (New Yorker $)
- To preserve the legacy of the student protesters at Tiananmen, it’s also important to address ethical questions about how American universities and law enforcement have been treating college protesters this year. (The Nation)
2. A Chinese company that makes laser sensors was labeled by the US government as a security concern. A few months later, it discreetly rebranded as a Michigan-registered company called “American Lidar.” (Wall Street Journal $)
3. It’s a tough time to be a celebrity in China. An influencer dubbed “China’s Kim Kardashian” for his extravagant displays of wealth has just been banned by multiple social media platforms after the internet regulator announced an effort to clear out “ostentatious personas.” (Financial Times $)
- Meanwhile, Taiwanese celebrities who also have large followings in China are increasingly finding themselves caught in political crossfires. (CNN)
4. Cases of Chinese students being rejected entry into the US reveals divisions within the Biden administration. Customs agents, who work for the Department of Homeland Security, have canceled an increasing number of student visas that had already been approved by the State Department. (Bloomberg $)
5. Palau, a small Pacific island nation that’s one of the few countries in the world that recognizes Taiwan as a sovereign country, says it is under cyberattack by China. (New York Times $)
6. After being the first space mission to collect samples from the moon’s far side, China’s Chang’e-6 lunar probe has begun its journey back to Earth. (BBC)
7. The Chinese government just set up the third and largest phase of its semiconductor investment fund to prop up its domestic chip industry. This one’s worth $47.5 billion. (Bloomberg $)
- In 2022, the fund was rocked by corruption charges. (MIT Technology Review)
Lost in translation
The Chinese generative AI community has been stirred up by the first discovery of a Western large language model plagiarizing a Chinese one, according to the Chinese publication PingWest.
Last week, two undergraduate computer science students at Stanford University released an open-source model called Llama 3-V that they claimed is more powerful than LLMs made by OpenAI and Google, while costing less. But Chinese AI researchers soon found out that Llama 3-V had copied the structure, configuration files, and code from MiniCPM-Llama3-V 2.5, another open-source LLM developed by China’s Tsinghua University and ModelBest Inc, a Chinese startup.
What proved the plagiarism was the fact that the Chinese team secretly trained the model on a collection of Chinese writings on bamboo slips from 2000 years ago, and no other LLMs can recognize the Chinese characters in this ancient writing style accurately. But Llama 3-V could recognize these characters as well as MiniCPM, while making the exact same mistakes as the Chinese model. The students who released Llama 3-V have removed the model and apologized to the Chinese team, but the incident is seen as proof of the rapidly improving capabilities of homegrown LLMs by the Chinese AI community.
One more thing
Hand-crafted squishy toys (or pressure balls) in the shape of cute animals or desserts have become the latest viral products on Chinese social media. Made in small quantities and sold in limited batches, some of them go for up to $200 per toy on secondhand marketplaces. I mean, they are cute for sure, but I’m afraid the idea of spending $200 on a pressure ball only increases my anxiety.
