Even our keyboards are A-Z. And through this Roman set of alphabets, we type other “foreign” characters and glyphs. Technology too forced us to be accommodative. A-Z is already a standard for all learning, a mediator or a tool.

We can’t avoid this; Chinese to have PinYin, Malay ancient Indic script and Jawi to become Rumi (Latin). They are part of the developments in linguistic. But I guess what’s important now is to relook at what we have/had have – a kind of self-actualisation – hoping to root out possibilities beyond this Roman constriction.

On design, the complexity in Chinese characters is very inspiring as they evolved from pictures attached with a plethora of thoughts, customs and social values. About “…more difficult to develop to viable form for typography design?…” It’s only so when one has frequently exposed on Western typography design (the Roman constriction), hence limiting many probabilities, like in Plato’s cave where one not aware.

It happens to me as a student where History of Types is all about gothic blackletters, Carolingian, Johannes Gutenberg and Helvetica. Gosh, what about Sanskrit, ancient Malay script (Kawi etc) and Chinese calligraphy/calligraphers (of regular, cursive, clerical). Definitely the college can’t be holistic, but please do teach me something closer to my culture before putting me into foreign purview. Why must students succumbed to a pre-determined “international scene”? The only reason is the college needs to be practical and relevant? And in the end neglecting our legacy/documentations of our history and civilisation?

Due to that, I am trying to re-learn many things because I felt lost.

If Chinese has spent centuries writing with brush, it is simply one of many ways to communicate; brush is flexible and the stroke is controlled by strength, emotion, serenity and many aspects in real time. Perfection is impossible under this flexibility, add in the many Chinese characters, it simply makes Chinese interesting. There won’t be twin because the possibilities in communication is wider.

Instead of having typographers to be in charge of type design, speaking about balance, realist, humanist, organic, neutrality, could it be a better way for us to just write/craft/personalise in the end instead of creating font after font?

I am not disregarding their achievements, in fact do learn from their precision and look beyond the form of ABC. Shouldn’t we?

Funny isn’t it? The thing about our generation is that most of us did receive primary school level Chinese education. Must be something to do with the fact that they had back then just allowed students who scored more than four As and above to skip remove class. During my year six, remove class was completely scraped.

I know typing chinese is a real bitch for me, but that doesn’t seem to apply to a few friends of mine who can whip out characters using a pretty sophisticated taiwanese style of typing, which doesn’t use pin yin. it’s a bitch to learn it though.

i guess memorisation does slow things down. i still think mandarin is one of the hardest language to learn and one probably wouldn’t succeed very far without a teacher that actually canes you everytime you make a spelling mistake (I learned it the hard way).

Alongside simplicity of the alphabet language, i guess, also comes flexibility. But you think alphabet facilitated modernity? Surely some of the more significant factors have to do with the political climate as well as the socio-cultural context of the East/West?

If it weren’t for Pin Yin, I wonder if the Chinese could have entered into modernity. Perhaps the Chinese language should go further like the Koreans and Japanese and have an additional alphabetic system to their language (anyone with good links on Asian typography design?).

Without limiting your characters, it’s more difficult to develope a viable form of typography design. What you have left is this cottage business and the appearance of occasional talents and eccentricities you find in Serdang.

Even with the technology of today, I’m sure coding and typing chinese characters must be a real bitch compared to typing ABCs.

Intellectually, i think it might have really screwed the chinese people. Despite having invented printing so much earlier than the europeans, financial, and economical cost of type setting ideograms would have added more layers to the complexity of knowledge creation, transfer, and storage.

I’ve no research to back all this but I’ll go further and suggest that all that memorizing of character might have a certain limitating effect on creativity and experimentation. I mean, if you are a musician, mathematician, or a coder, you’ll want a language that is basic enough that it doesn’t mess with the working of the other complex languages you are developing right?

I’m not saying cultures with alphabetic languages are automatically more creative. Just that it’ll have more possibility for it.

Another reason is that small changes in characters, or sound substitutions, could affect meaning more than say, s0me1 who taiPes Laike Dis?

Anyways, my Chinese is only limited to a primary school level so maybe I’m just venting.

Someone debate me on this?

Interestingly, the main Chinese dialect in Serdang is Hakka, as in Ampang…