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The Allusionist

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A PODCAST ABOUT LANGUAGE
BY HELEN ZALTZMAN

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The Allusionist

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Allusionist 153. In Character

April 15, 2022 The Allusionist

Chinese is one of the oldest still-spoken languages in the world. But when technologies arrived like telegraphy and computing, designed with the Roman alphabet in mind, if Chinese wanted to be able to participate then it had to choose between adapting, or paying a heavy price. And sometimes both were inevitable. Jing Tsu, author of Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution that Made China Modern, recounts how Chinese contended with obstacles like alphabetisation, Romanisation and standardisation.

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In episodes Tags words, language, linguistics, education, comedy, entertainment, society & culture, arts, literature, etymology, lexicon, vocabulary, history, Jing Tsu, Chinese, China, Asia, ideographic, characters, writing, alphabet, alphabetisation, alphabetization, standardisation, Romanisation, Roman alphabet, Latin alphabet, homophones, tones, telegraphy, telegraph, typography, typing, type, Morse code, computers, binary, computer programming, ASCII, coding, printing press, Wade-Giles, Pinyin, Danes, Portuguese, Doomsday Book, Mao Zedong, Zhao Yuanren, Communists, Nationalists, Taiwan, Japan, Sino-Japanese War, Qing, missionaries, Opium War, Ideographic Research Group, Unicode, names, lions, antanaclasis, rale
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The Allusionist by Helen Zaltzman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.