One thing that doesn't get mentioned often is that the West had a "simpler" alphabet of 26 characters, 10 numbers, and a few punctuation marks (~20). Ok, add uppercase, and you're still at about 80 individual, distinct characters.
Chinese or Korean, on the other hand, needed many more characters. Creating the movable types for them was not an easy feat. Certainly more difficult than with the German equivalent.
In particular for Korea: Hangul [0], which is a "simpler" language that gradually took over Hanja [1] in Korea, was "created" only in the 15th century, not before. Earlier than that, even if Korea has the equivalent of "printing", the complexity of it was higher than the one experienced with the west alphabet.
> In particular for Korea: Hangul [0], which is a "simpler" language
It's not a language, it's an alphabet. And I fail to see the need for quotes, there's really no denying hangul is simpler than hanja.
However the syllabic structure of hangul would still make it a lot more challenging printing than the linear structure of the latin alphabetic script: you'd need either a type piece per syllable (of which there are >10000), or you'd need a variant for each possible block layout.
There are 9 possible layouts, though there are limitations which cuts down on the complexity of that option. But still, assuming you want fixed-size blocks and depending on your decisions on complex finals you'd need 6-9 variants of each initial, and 2-3 version of each final.
If you're fine with variable-size blocks (and spacers to line things up) then you can probably cut down to 3 or even 2 of each initials, but it's not going to look great.
To add, Korean as a language existed long before hangul. There was a writing system where they used Chinese characters to encode the words semantically. Like how modern Korean still uses Chinese words in the "backend" so to speak, and the old system was exactly how Japanese Kanji works, you write the Chinese character and you read it with the Korean pronunciation (unwritten, and you had to memorize it, just like Japanese--difficult!)
Now the kicker is, they encoded pure-Korean words using stand-ins using Chinese. Particles would be written in Chinese with ridiculously complex rules, and pure Korean words were written phonetically in Chinese, with the pronunciation of the Chinese characters would be "close enough" to the pronunciation of the Korean word. It was a horrendous system which is why hangul was made (like the yangban nobles literally needed full time learning all day for like a decade to master it, and the literacy test to get into high status government jobs was literally just to write a few essays)
The first few lines of 훈민정음 (basically a declaration that hangul is a thing we made, please use it) starts off with "the language of our land is different to that of the chinese and our writing system is not compatible. For that reason the uneducated subjects of the kingdom have trouble accomplishing their desires.
So I (king sejong) find pity in this so I have created a new system of 28 characters, and would like everyone to practice it daily so that people can use it comfortably"
But the Korean phonology is different from English and generally simpler so you’ll need to approximate a fair bit (not unlike English words in Japanese phonology).
Korean phonology is interesting. As a beginner in the language, it seems like the vowel sounds are richer and more complex while the consonants are simpler and less varied than English.
You also mostly can’t have consonant clusters in Hangul. It’s not a problem for Korean because they don’t have them to begin with.
This means that when Koreans adopt an English word that has multiple consonants not separated by a vowel then they need to add in some new vowels to be able to pronounce it. Thus words like Starbucks have two syllables in English but six in Korean.
Correct but with a minor correction. Starbucks becomes four syllables in Korean. A vowel (ㅡ) is inserted between the 's' and the 't' in 'star', and also after the last 's' in 'bucks'.
I though the same thing happened often in Japanese where vowels are added into English words, for example Starbucks becomes Sutābakkusu, or Englishman becomes Igirisu hito.
IPA probably doesn’t work like you think it does. I also had this misconception that it was a “universal alphabet,” but apparently even linguists have to learn subsets of IPA in order to properly pronounce phonemes in different languages.
The person you're replying to said phoneme, suggesting awareness of the phonetic/phonemic distinction.
> apparently even linguists have to learn subsets of IPA in order to properly pronounce phonemes in different languages
I don't actually understand what you mean by this clause, but if we strip some words, "linguists learn subsets of IPA in order to properly pronounce phonemes in different languages" is in fact exactly what IPA is for.
>I also had this misconception that it was a “universal alphabet,” but apparently even linguists have to learn subsets of IPA in order to properly pronounce phonemes in different languages.
What exactly do you mean above? If "subsets of IPA" are enough to "properly pronounce phonemes in different languages" then IPA is indeed a "universal alphabet".
More or less, the same way different subsets of Unicode cover most/all languages, which makes it a universal encoding.
Did you meant to imply that IPA would be a universal alphabet only if all of it was needed to cover each language - and e.g. no IPA-letters were redundant for covering this or that language?
Hangul is actually very easy to learn, so much so that it can trick you (me) into thinking Korean should be a snap. To answer you're question, you can find multiple pre built anki decks just for hangul.
If you want a quick reference page on the characters, search 'hangul character guide'. This video was also helpful for me: https://youtu.be/TVqJbiSLw-E
> Hangul is actually very easy to learn, so much so that it can trick you (me) into thinking Korean should be a snap.
I don't really understand this. It's even easier to learn the Italian writing system, coming from English, than it is to learn the Korean writing system.
Who concludes from that that it's going to be easy to learn to speak Italian?
Korean consonants have slightly different sounds at the beginning and end of a syllable. ㄹ is pronounced as L at the end of a block, but R at the beginning of one, hence the additional syllable.
You can transliterate English to Hangeul but you'll end up missing some sounds (e.g. you'll not be able to super easily get 'th' or 'f' or 'v' or 'z') because Korean doesn't use those
> And I fail to see the need for quotes, there's really no denying hangul is simpler than hanja.
Simpler is a culturally conditioned subjective value judgement rather than a scientific one and therefore it expresses an opinionated view. It may be more correct to say it is a more systematic script.
I understand that many things in life are cultural and relative. Saying one language is "easier" may reveal many biases.
But "simpler" can be used in fairly objective ways. Spoon is a simpler mechanism than internal combustion engine. "Yes" is a simpler way of saying "absolutely I would be willing to undertake that endeavour". Square of plain colour is simpler than a painting. Some formula are simpler than others.
In this case the Immediate difference in sheer count makes it difficult for me to understand what point you're trying to make about this particular example, try as I might, because in this case I aftually think "more systematic" is the less defined, more ambiguous term :-(
The State Department has long experience with teaching employees a working capacity in other languages. [1] is the summary of it.
Obviously, "native English-speaking" is assumed, so the time for a Mandarin speaker to learn Swahili or vice versa is not considered. This isn't really "complexity" in a universal sense.
It would be interesting to see a similar chart from the Chinese foreign service's language institute (I assume they must have one). Or the Egyptian one.
It’s interesting the site says Vietnamese takes 44 weeks versus 88 weeks for Korean. I assume it’s because Vietnamese has a western alphabet. But I thought Vietnamese pronunciation was more difficult due to tones.
No idea. But at least this is empirical data from a lot of samples.
What if we had the results of learning difficulty for native speakers of all the major languages, and some languages were hard for everyone? In principle, this is an experiment that's doable, if the foreign ministries of the other countries also publish this data.
So in which case Korean can said to be a "simpler" language than Chinese (which uses Hanja). But in modern linguistics you would not exactly say any language is "simpler".
Langage and script are two completely different and largely orthogonal concerns.
While there is a “floor” to the complexity of a script in its ability to faithfully reproduce a langage, there is no “ceiling”, you can always pile on complexity.
Although I would say that logographic scripts are the other kind of complexity, they’re complicated to learn and use because they’re simplistic in their approach.
Syllabic or alphabetic scripts require higher concepts, but that makes them more flexible and composable.
Hangul is not phonetic, it's a morphophonemic script. The Korean language has a lot of rules that applies at different boundaries, which make the pronunciation of words different from what is written. The best example of this is the "Korean wave" /han/ + /lyu/ => [hallyu], written has "hanlyu" (한류) which is conforming to the phonemic decomposition but certainly not to how the word is pronounced.
Gutenberg's 42-line Bible required about 299 glyphs. The natural presumption is his letters were cast from a single matrix (e.g. a single 'A' mold casts thousands of 'A' types), however careful analysis of his books reveals variations between letters which suggest multiple subtly different matrices were used. The reason for the apparent variation between the matrices is disputed, but one explanation is the variation between matrices may indicate the matrices were produced by composing several individual stroke punches, rather than one punch per gylph. I think this technique of using individual stroke punches to compose matrices then used for die casting could work for Eastern languages too. I don't know how many individual stroke punches you would need for Korean or Chinese, but it's surely fewer than the number of glyphs those languages have.
That's very interesting actually! Today it's tempting to think that you only need 26*2 glyphs for the entire alphabet (although with ligatures that's not quite true either), but back then they probably still felt the need to more faithfully emulate hand-written books? That would explain that there are several variations for the same letter?
Nah it’s probably that they had multiple matrices to cast more types faster.
You only need 62 glyphs for a basic Latin alphabet including case (although gutenberg’s german would require a few more), but you need a lot of copies of each to lay a complete page, and they’d lay multiple pages per sheet.
Not to mention because character frequencies are not equal you need a lot more of some than others so you might have a multi-type matrix of just Es in order to cast enough of those for your needs in a reasonable time frame.
> You only need 62 glyphs for a basic Latin alphabet (although gutenberg’s german would require a few more),
Gutenberg's bible used ligatures and various symbols too, that ups the count a lot. I haven't counted them myself, but wikipedia says 290 characters and cites John Man's book about Gutenberg. A paper I found about using ML to do cluster analysis on the glyphs says 299 unique glyphs and cites Gottfried Zedler. I can't read either of those sources, but a bit less than 300 seems like a safe bet.
> One thing that doesn't get mentioned often is that the West had a "simpler" alphabet of 26 characters, 10 numbers, and a few punctuation marks (~20).
Really? I feel like this is usually used as the main - sometimes only - argument for why moveable type took off in the West. If you look at the Wikipedia for moveable type[1], the simpler alphabet is listed in the article summary at the top of the page as a reason for why Gutenberg's printing press was so successful.
The "too many characters" thing is used to justify a huge amount of myths about asian printing technology. For example, people love to say that there were no Chinese typewriters because the alphabet is too complex and this is just straight up false. Tom Mullaney at Stanford has good writing on a lot of this.
Mullaney’s article is not uncontroversial. There are substantial technical challenges that come from the Chinese writing system; Chinese typewriters were highly limited compared to Western alphabetic ones. See discussion at https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=25776 for example
Academics whining about other academics pointing out orientalism is not unusual. I'm not familiar with Moser personally.
I am not a historian - I am only married to one. So I'll only say that from my personal experience interacting with historians who know Mullaney well (both professionally and personally) that his writing is well respected even if his social media presence is a bit much.
Tom Mullaney, as mentioned in my post, is arguably the global expert on the chinese typewriter and has done a lot of work on chinese printed and digital language technology. His books would be the starting point.
This is largely a myth. They are very different than typewriters for english, but not impossible to use. Functional typewriters existed for the chinese language long before simplified chinese.
Yeah I too am surprised at how often the alphabet is ignored or dismissed in these comparisons. Not only for printing but also for the development of the computer.
I havne't seen a good analysis of this but I wonder how much the impact of literacy has on the demand for books. Now in the Middle Ages in Europe, literacy wasn't universal. The monastic class, clergy, the nobility and certain professions (eg merchants) were likely literate but less so the general population.
A simpler and more phonetic alphabet clearly impacts literacy. Post-1929 Turkey is good evidence of this (where Turkish switched from the Arabic alphabet to what they use today).
Chinese is notoriously difficult to learn to read and write. Is it possible that lower literacy reduced the demand for printed works? Was literacy in China actually lower than in European countries 500-1000 years ago? I have no idea but it's an interesting thought.
Fun fact, you used to need a dedicated hardware to print Chinese character on screen before personal computer have enough memory and storage space to fit every characters in.
Arabic is cursive and usually but doesn't necessarily skip vowels in written form. A lot of Arabic words have the same 3 letter root (eg IIRC ktb for "book", "librarian" and others) and they're all written the same if vowels are omitted so you have to discern the meaning in context. Plus it has gender and case. Plus Modern Standard Arabic ("MSA") differs a lot from colloquial Arabic.
So there is a lot of inherent complexity in Arabic.
From a typesetting POV (both for the printed press and computers), Arabic's cursive nature is more difficult because the letters need to connect and the shapes can vary depending on what's next to them.
> One thing that doesn't get mentioned often is that the West had a "simpler" alphabet of 26 characters
This article has presumably mentioned it. It says:
> Answering this question is actually quite complex because it involves mechanical knowledge, metallurgy, mills and writing systems. I have read numerous articles on this topic, but I started to notice that everyone leaves out some different essential part of the story. Here I am trying to include all the factors involved.
The content is cut off in the middle by the paywall (which raises the question of whether it's suitable to be submitted to HN in the first place, if there's no workaround available).
To be fair, the term "paywall" is kind of misleading here; just by looking at it, it's hardly obvious that it also refers to things like "sign up" (or "disable your adblocker", etc). It's unfortunate that less opaque terms like "signupwall" are too awkward to supplant it. (Of course, if they did, we'd probably have the opposite problem, of people pretending something's not a signupwall because you can pay without signing up. If socialdemocrat has any suggestions for a term for this single concept that's etymologically compatible with both of those special cases, I'd quite like to hear them.)
It's not just the alphabet size, it's that you need many of each glyph to make a page, and it varies a lot. So also if you're using a Chinese character repeatedly in an essay, you're going to need lots of those glyphs to make that page, so you need really really huge collections of glyphs to make anything.
It's a game of scrabble essentially.
And in addition Gutenberg found an alloy using antimony, a metal nobody had any uses for in absolute, but was known to be toxic (anti-mony anti-monk killed the monks who volunteered for testing its toxicity, similar to the Jesuits with malaria, Catholic scientific testing). So he was a jeweller and he banged out an allow that slightly expanded when cooled, it was always the opposite until that point...I'm not sure if with bronze too. Antimony, tin and silver IIRC. So expensive glyphs, and further once the Americas started pumping out silver the economics of the printing press improved a lot, because it was silver-intensive.
Further, printing presses every now and then piss the fuck out of the ruler, when that happens the whole place gets confiscated so there go your millions of Chinese silver glyphs, and all the work into making them the typography, that's expensive. China is also centralized geographically, so censorship was too easily carried out, resistance was impossible. On the other hand in India it was too fragmented, no common language, also problematic for literacy, letters, glyph sets. Though they didn't do badly, China in terms of the development of books I would have to say did do badly, sometimes it's that simple. Invented paper, gunpowder, the compass, and gave them all away to Europe.
There's more to it, it made sense to have carved wood blocks in the context. I'll truncate here.
This is often cited as a reason why Printing press didn't get moving in cultures using Arabic script, including Turkish lands.
Of course we can print anything today. But in early days some of these things add additional complexity and barriers to what is already a very nascent tech and social trend.
I've often wondered if digital media is a factor in the way many East Asian countries have closed the gap with Europe when it comes to economic productivity.
- Phase 1: Before movable type printing press - no strong advantage for either character set
- Phase 2: After printing press but before digital media - advantage Latin characters
- Phase 3: After digital media - no strong advantage for either character set
Phase 2 just happens to line up very neatly with the "great divergence" where Europe surpassed China in technology and economic output. Probably just a coincidence, or, more likely, one small factor among many.
This article spends a lot of time expressing that the Gutenberg printing press was better than Eastern printing presses. That's true. But why was the Gutenberg press better, given that there were eastern printing presses hundreds of years earlier?
I think a big part of the answer was that because of the difficulties in printing their languages, there was no big incentive to improve their printing presses. You couldn't look at it and say, "Oh, man, if I could just solve this problem, my fortune would be assured!" And so the technology languished.
And the result was, as the article demonstrates, a vast difference in literacy and knowledge storage/transfer in the West. And that's certainly not the only reason why the West diverged from the East, but it's a big factor.
Yes, and that crossed my mind. Japan may be the exception that proves the rule, though. The Meiji Restoration and rapid industrialization of Japan are special cases that, to my knowledge, no other nation in any part of the world was able to replicate.
The other East Asian tigers (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong) also are pre digital. Those took the Japanese model of investing heavily in infrastructure and education.
Medieval writing had diphthongs, strange, often regional abbreviations, and, based on what I remember from college, were difficult for someone used to reading Latin in current print form.
There was still need in Europe to standardize and simplify those things. That process was still underway well into the 18th century.
There was also the problem of spelling.
Early Latin print in Europe is similar to Chinese also in that it's written form was more or less understood by educated Europeans, but their spoken langues had splintered away and we're often not mutually intelligible.
We like to think of Johannes Gutenberg as inventor of the printing press and movable type in 1450. Yet, the first movable type got invented in China around 1040 by Bi Sheng. The types were made from porcelain material. Later wooden movable types were developed...
on wikipedia if you look up "movable type" you see a big discussion of the earlier work in China and Korea before moving on to Gutenberg.
if you look up "printing press" you get the Gutenberg story only, including that Gutenberg discovered an alloy for his type that was so good it remained unchanged for hundreds of years.
conflating movable type with printing press is a big mistake for this type of analysis, and that's before getting to the out of the box simplicity of movable type for alphabets a few dozen characters long vs the vocabulary required for Chinese writing.
(I happened to look this up the other day just to get the date that mass printing started in Europe, and I started with movable type so I had already recently discovered all the above points)
I think Gutenberg was simply in the right place and the right time. His bible was still Catholic but he was living in a part of the world where Protestantism would soon kick off; powered by his re-discovered printing press and movable type.
His part of the world was a patch work of city states, small provinces, and kingdoms. Germany as a country simply did not exist at the time. Many of those states were fiercely independent and interdependent (trade).
And some of them were prospering and featured a growing middle class, trade, and relative freedom. So, he was in a place that was relatively literate (for the time) and entrepreneurial. The combination of people capable and free to express themselves and a new technology to do that at scale created a perfect storm of information and soon revolution.
Aside from the complexities of their written language and its many characters; China and Korea were basically very old empires at the time they invented movable type. Their societies were managed in a very hierarchical way. They had the means to spread information but only used it to spread officially sanctioned information. So, it did not really catch on to the same level that Gutenberg's press revolutionized (quite literally) Europe.
> They had the means to spread information but only used it to spread officially sanctioned information.
You're making this up. There was a robust tradition of scholar-bureaucrats printing whatever the hell they wanted (usually red-blooded tracts against the Emperor when he didn't toe the Confucian line). Travel literature was incredibly popular in late Ming China.
Silly but genuine question: how to you use movable type without a printing press?
I mean, once you've arranged all your type onto a plate representing a page, what are you going to do with it except slap some ink on it and put paper against it? Is the difference that the Chinese just lay the paper manually over it rather than use a machine (the press) to do it?
Probably. Much like woodblock printing, which can be done with or without press.
Also a printing press would not lay the paper, it was "just" used to press said paper onto the type (which had been inked by hand).
You'd lay the type, then ink the type, lay paper on top (usually using a frame to ensure it's correctly positioned), move the assembly under the press then press it down.
Release the press, open the assembly, get the printed sheet out, repeat (minus laying the type).
That Gutenberg also invented movable metal type in europe, as well as a production process for reproducible quality metal type, are probably bigger factors than the press itself (though the separation of labor and mechanical efficiency of the press should not be discounted). But since he basically released the entire thing as a "movable-type printing system", the printing press is often used as a stand-in for the entire production process.
I think the answer is that you mostly didn't, because it was cheaper/better to just carve the whole page in wood, which then acts as it's own press, and was the widespread technique used in Europe for images and short text before people tried moveable type.
So it's kind of like, why didn't we use electric cars in the 1900s, the answer is we did, but since something else was cheaper/better at that moment given the context all the decades of industrial innovation happened around that model, until there was a reason to revisit it much later. I think the Chinese inventors were like those early electric car makers. Really smart inventors, but just missing some key supporting infrastructure or need. Just like printing in Europe was held back by lack of paper.
> European printing presses of around 1600 were capable of producing between 1,500[47] and 3,600 impressions per workday.[3] By comparison, Far Eastern printing, where the back of the paper was manually rubbed to the page,[48] did not exceed an output of forty pages per day.[4]
Wikipedia has some contrasting info in their woodblock printing article though:
> only Europeans who had never seen Chinese woodblock printing in action tended to dismiss it, perhaps due to the almost instantaneous arrival of both xylography and movable type in Europe. The early Jesuit missionaries of late 16th century China, for instance, had a similar distaste for wood based printing for very different reasons. These Jesuits found that "the cheapness and omnipresence of printing in China made the prevailing wood-based technology extremely disturbing, even dangerous."[42] Matteo Ricci made note of "the exceedingly large numbers of books in circulation here and the ridiculously low prices at which they are sold."[43] Two hundred years later the Englishman John Barrow, by way of the Macartney mission to Qing China, also remarked with some amazement that the printing industry was "as free as in England, and the profession of printing open to everyone."[42] The commercial success and profitability of woodblock printing was attested to by one British observer at the end of the nineteenth century, who noted that even before the arrival of western printing methods, the price of books and printed materials in China had already reached an astoundingly low price compared to what could be found in his home country
Also interesting that the Korean moveable type was highly restricted, as mentioned elsewhere, so it's partly industrial technology and commerce but partly lack of censorship the Westerners are surprised by.
> conflating movable type with printing press is a big mistake for this type of analysis,
Innovation on the movable types was a key part of Gutenbergs system and creating the movable metal types was an inseparable part of the Gutenberg innovation. The article mentions a bit more than my short summary too.
I think the mistake actually is to separate them in your analysis of the analysis. To get a working product Gutenberg created an integrated package with both.
It specifically mentions the innovations in creating the movable metal types themselves under "Advantages of Gutenberg's Printing Technique". A much better metal alloy and a hand mold, allowing for much faster creation of new metal types than the Chinese alloy and technique.
> European printing presses of around 1600 were capable of producing between 1,500[47] and 3,600 impressions per workday.[3] By comparison, Far Eastern printing, where the back of the paper was manually rubbed to the page,[48] did not exceed an output of forty pages per day.[4]
The point of the article is to describe the printing press as an advancement of the technology of movable type. It is also important to point out that the press was really just one of many components that made the Gutenberg approach superior to the techniques that existed in Asia at the time.
Watt had a model steam engine, with a glass cylinder, but couldn't scale it up in iron or steel. When he tried, there was a gap of up to an inch between the piston and cylinder, he had no way of filling the gap. It was when Wilkinson came along and used his new boring machine to make a precision cylinder that Watt was able to complete his engine. There are a lot of things that had to precede Watt's success.
In the same way, there are a lot of details that tend to get ignored in the Gutenberg as Great Man narrative. They did get enumerated, and it's important to keep those details in mind as they were the decisive factor, and Gutenberg was just the hacker who managed to successfully combine them in an effective manner.
If you’ve not watched it, go find James Burke’s “Connections”. It takes this idea writ large; technology is almost always standing on the backs of giants before you and changing one thing which pushes the ball a bit further forward.
First Nicola Tesla for electricity, then transistors, then programmable microchips, then operating systems, then video games and because of them GPUs came into existance, them machine learning, then GPUs because more programmable because games required more and more freedom in shaders, then eventually deep learning, and now stable diffusion.
"The right man at the right time makes all the difference."
And the model Watt had wasn't the first steam engine. He got his start repairing a steam engine of Newcomen, an inventor who died before Watt was born.
Watt invented the steam engine in a similar way to how Bill Gates invented the computer.
This well-actually explanation is redundant. The context is already Watt's role as non-inventor:
> Gutenberg served the same role for printing as James Watt did for the steam engine. Neither of the men were the original inventors of the concept, but they made improvements so radical that they made the technology transformational.
I think that a better analogy would be individual germanium transistors vs. a printed circuit of silicon transistors. Similar principle, but a big leap in practicality.
Connecting the dots is a feat in itself. By your measure, nobody can ever claim to have invented anything because they didn't first create the universe.
Calling Gutenberg a James Watt to Chinese printing press designs is... questionable. Afaik he was not aware of Chinese/Korean designs that he could have improved upon. Also, the Chinese designs arguably weren't presses, since they rubbed paper against a type - the screw was one of the many important innovations by Gutenberg. The article would benefit from focusing less on the "race" between Europe and China (which arguably wasn't one, but two largely separate developments) and more on the technology.
It was because, Gutenberg did not invent movable type. That was already in use in Europe. A high chance that technology came from Asia. Hence Gutenberg took an exiting technology and improved it. Gutenberg did not invent the screw press. Almost identical presses were already used in paper making. This was about combining a variety of technologies into one better system.
> The years go forward but you want to read it backwards to understand it's meaning.
I don't really get what you mean with that. Prices dropped rappidly within 60 years. Bar graphs are maybe not the best pick here, but I definitely read this graph forward to understand its meaning.
Flawed premise IMHO. Printing is a tool which evolved to keep pace with the sophistication of the societies using/developing it. The Southern Song dynasty came close to an industrial age, but was held back by a belief system (confucianism) that privileges cushy stability over ruthless progress. This, in part, prevented the emergence of a product-and-service-hungry bourgeoisie. The level of technological progress of a society is mostly determined by its culture.
The Song dynasty was not anywhere near an industrial age. China never went through a machine revolution with great proliferation of the usage of machines as in things like windmills, water wheels, clocks, trip hammers, screw presses etc: https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/the-missing-chinese-mach...
China had machines, but they were used at a much smaller scale and had no way to expand in usage thanks to unsuitable geography and climate in China.
I think it was more the other direction. Protestantism was based on the idea that people should read the Bible themselves rather than have priests interpret it for them as had been traditionally done. This was impractical before printing because hand-copied books were so expensive. Cheap printed books led to the possibility of these movements being successful.
It goes both directions. Without the printing press, the rise of mass religious movements prioritizing literacy would not have been possible. But once the printing press was there, the religious movements pushed literacy forward faster than it would have gone without them.
The Communists came pretty close to dumping characters in favor of Latin script (pinyin). And this actually happened in Vietnam, although we have the French to thank/blame for that.
More important was writing in vernacular. Learning a writing system is comparatively easier than learning a new language. For a long time people needed to learn a new language to write.
We're going back to hundreds/thousands of unique characters. See the growth of icons and emojis, and Unicode's rush to invent endless new "characters".
Lucky our printing technology has moved past moveable type and mechanical typesetting in recent years. My printer is not that new and can already print all extended Latin characters and maybe even some emojis.
From time to time, people ask for D to support Unicode operator code points. I decided it wasn't a good idea, as it makes code more difficult to type in, and there's the problem of text processing programs' (like editors, printers, etc.) support for non-ASCII being rather unpredictable.
It took millennia for us to go from emojis to characters and the few societies that did ended up dominating the world because of the increases in efficiency. Now we're heading in the other direction because literacy is too hard.
Obviously we're not. Icons and emoji aren't characters -- you don't need them to write words and their meanings are relatively self-evident as opposed to letters where you have to learn how to pronounce an otherwise mostly arbitrary squiggle.
And aside from emoji (which is demand-driven), Unicode isn't inventing anything, it's codifying things that already exist.
All I can say is LOL to that. Even the original Mac icons required someone to tell you what they meant first, down to today where half the icons on a car's controls make no sense, and of course there are the laundry icons, which people can probably guess correctly half of them.
> letters where you have to learn how to pronounce an otherwise mostly arbitrary squiggle.
Yes, we learn the sounds they make in first grade. Then we can sound out new words, and look up the meanings of words in the dictionary. Not so with icons. There's no sounding them out. There's no way to look them up in a dictionary. If you can't guess what they mean, you're out of luck.
> arbitrary squiggle
The letters are all derived from icons. The letter A is a bull's head and horns turned upside down. Phonetic alphabets are derived from icon languages, and are a great invention.
> Unicode isn't inventing anything, it's codifying things that already exist.
Not true. As for emoji, there is no difference between them and icons.
No, they're both on the same continuum. The original Chinese characters were emoji, which literally means "picture characters" in Japanese, and emoji today are already evolving beyond their original pictorial meanings -- for example, an eggplant isn't just an eggplant anymore.
This is one of the most absurd things I have ever read, but in an extremely funny way!
I think you're trying to make the argument that both Chinese characters and emoji are pictographs. Yes, a few Chinese characters originated as pictographs (a tiny minority of them), and emoji are one form of pictograph, but that... doesn't make Chinese characters emoji, not even "the original ones". It doesn't even put them on the same "continuum" -- one is stroke-based logograms that represent individual syllables of words, the other is pure artistic illustration.
You seem to be trying to redefine the word "emoji" into something it's not, your own idiosyncratic personal definition. But that's not how words work.
Unicode is primarily concerned with standardizing existing characters in the majority of the language systems of the world. The big exception are emojis and a small number of usefull icons, the power button icon comes to mind. Its story of addition to unicoe was shared on Hacker News some years ago. As far as I know the only area of invention and growth are emojis.
Another common fallacy in economic historians / "rise of the west" research is to compare the most developed parts of Europe (after 1700, typically the Low Countries and England) with 'all of China.' By doing this, they exclude the poorer parts of Europe and include the poorer parts of China to give the impression that "the great divergence" (sic) was early and foreordained
I don't really believe that, as using chinese characters would lead to a much higher information density compared to using alphabet, which in turn would've tuned out to make books much lighter and being able to print more pages on one sheet, compared to two with the same informational value in western languages.
I once saw an old YouTube video that claimed that some hanzi are super obscure and even native Chinese have to look them up sometimes when wanting to use them, and gave the example of "sneeze".
I asked my Shanghai born coworker, who led the local Chinese friendship society, about this, and he furrowed his brow and said "...shit, actually, yeah, I'd need to look that up myself."
This is merely one anecdote, of course,
There's information density, but there's also information accessibility. And the trick is finding the balance between the two.
Having 8000 characters (in simplified Chinese) may be information dense, but how accessible is that information? E.g., a typical Chinese university graduate will know, on average, 3 -4K of them, and no doubt ones that are unused will atrophy over the years.
The balance between density and accessibility is always ongoing.
E.g., I find reading presentation slides with a transcript far more information dense than watching a video of that presentation, but some people find it far more accessible in video form. And then for complex discussions, I find video calls far more information dense than Slack message or email exchanges.
Recognizing and writing characters are different skills. Chinese people typically recognize far more characters than they can write (this has become much more severe in the electronics age, because most people input text using the pinyin Romanization, so they don't write by hand any more).
In addition, if you're reading a text and you come across an uncommon character, you can often figure it out, both from context and by recognizing elements in the character (which give hints about the pronunciation and meaning).
> some hanzi are super obscure and even native Chinese have to look them up sometimes when wanting to use them, and gave the example of "sneeze".
喷嚏 is the example always used because it describes a common thing that is rarely written about, and there is no other, more frequently written character with the 疐 component that could remind people how to write it. So when handwriting, one might substitute 喷㖷 instead.
Most obscure characters are simply obscure because they refer to an obscure thing, like not being able to spell the name of a village you've never heard of.
And characters for non-obscure things made of obscure components are usually common enough that people get enough practice writing them. E.g. 藏 "store/hide" contains 臧, an archaic term for "good" that now mostly occurs in ancient idioms and as a rare surname. But hardly anybody seems to have trouble writing 藏.
> I once saw an old YouTube video that claimed that some hanzi are super obscure and even native Chinese have to look them up sometimes when wanting to use them, and gave the example of "sneeze".
Isn't that also the case in other languages? Most people don't know all the words in a dictionary for example, and a word is roughly analogous to a character in Chinese.
In most languages with alphabetic writing, if you know a spoken word, you can write it. But in Chinese and Japanese, people might know a word, use it daily, being able to read it, and still forget how to write it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia
It varies in alphabet languages too. Plenty of native English speakers can’t spell words they can speak. Chinese is not much worse than English in this respect.
There isn't such a thing as a spelling when you write down what you hear. We can still understand each other despite the spelling of center and centre being different.
The real advantage that Chinese writing has is that it bridges very different, mutually unintelligible variants of the language.
Imagine a common "Germanic" or "Roman" script that would be comprehensible to any literate person that speaks any Germanic or Roman language. So the same book could be read by people in San Francisco, Berlin, Oslo and Amsterdam without the need to learn any new language.
This might be one of the reasons why China is still one country with one central bureaucracy, which is nigh impossible to establish in Europe, all the EU-wide initiatives notwithstanding.
But it comes with a high bar to clear as to what "literacy" even means. Westerners are fully literate in their native languages after several years of elementary school; the same cannot be said about the Chinese.
I thought so, too. Until I was in Japan for business, where I saw some books that were translated into Japanese Kanji. The books were significantly larger in every case than the English versions.
Japanese writing is made up of a mix of 3 different scripts, kanji, hiragana and katakana.
The hiragana and katakana are syllabaries and don’t have the information density that you get with kanji.
I don’t imagine you’d get Japanese books that are more compact than their English counterparts because per sentence Japanese texts are comprised mostly of hiragana and katakana with a sprinkling of kanji.
Chinese on the other hand is all hanzi, and that does provide significant information density.
I used to have the lord of the rings in both English and Chinese on my bookshelf. The 3 volumes in Chinese where about the same thickness as a single volume in English (width and height were approximately the same) and this was with a much larger Chinese font required for legibility.
There’s no language called “Japanese Kanji” since it’s just a regular part of the language, but the books are larger simply because Japanese is an agglutinative language whose famously long suffixes outweigh whatever information density advantage using the characters has.
Kanji is the script. Anyhow, one thing I noticed was that Kanji characters were printed significantly larger than ASCII, so that accounted for a lot of it. ASCII can have a pretty small font and still be perfectly legible - apparently not so with Kanji.
Kanji is part of the Japanese writing system, it's not the entire thing. "Translated to Japanese kanji" is like saying "translated to English consonants".
> Kanji characters were printed significantly larger than ASCII, so that accounted for a lot of it.
Japanese books also have a lot more whitespace and are generally smaller than western books. I disagree that the font is much larger -- the books I read have a font size that is practically identical to most western books (the difference is that CJK characters are more boxy and so they may appear larger).
> ASCII can have a pretty small font and still be perfectly legible - apparently not so with Kanji.
You can print kanji pretty small and have it still them be legible to native speakers (just look at the first video games that used kanji instead of just using kana -- the effective font size is tiny).
Kanji is not the only script in the written Japanese language, in fact it’s not even the most used script by a large margin. Kanji usually makes up less than 30% of the text while kana is around 70%.[1] Both kana, which are phonetic syllabaries, are also larger than ASCII, so chances are you confused them with kanji.
I've often thought, what if early CRT hackers (or, say, Apple) had designed fonts where characters could have widths of 1, 2, or 3 units, such that (for example) "W" and "M" would be 3-wide and "i" an "l" and "." would be 1-wide. Might this have lessened the desire for variable-pitch fonts, and sped GUI innovation in general ?
How does increased information density help with literacy? If increased information density would increase literacy, couldn't we solve analphabetism with switching to writing in gzipped latin alphabet?
Let’s not forget Aldus Manutius. His orders of magnitude cheaper books than Gutenberg made books available to regular people. He can be seen as inventor of paperback books.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldus_Manutius
Overlooked in the article: the Yuan/Song invention of movable types made of tin, which melts at low temperatures similar to that of Gutenberg's type metals. But they didnt catch on due to the poor ink adsorption.
I knew about that but didn't think to include it has it wasn't widely used and lacked many important components. Not just the ink. A key advantage of Gutenberg's alloy was that it neither shrunk not expanded. That is what gave quick accurate duplication of types.
Wood cuts and bronze types were worth mentioning as they were widely used in China and Korea.
Indeed, you are right, most innovations are more about timing and adoption rather than invention.
I think though that the point about shrinkage is the large change between casting and room temperatures (and maybe during pressing?); the differences in thermal coefficients (per degree) are significant but not that huge.
As for oil based inks-- that too was widely used in China-- for seals. In fact sealpressing and pressprinting is the same process, wouldnt you say? Have not found anything indicating the Chinese made that leap (en masse, of course).
Finally .. antimony is kind of the unsung hero here. Its the magic element that the Chinese didnt know about.
There was an article publisher here a while back discussing that Chinese progress was limited due to not having invented glass so scholars ability to remain productive after their 40s was diminished due to the lack of reading glasses, perhaps this was a factor as well.
As others have said it seems obvious dealing with about two dozen characters well adapted for engraving is easier than dealing with several thousand (at least) more complicated characters.
I'm surprised this doesn't mention Mongolians or Kublai Khan anywhere, as they ruled China at the time and were the ones who introduced Asian printing techniques to Europeans in the first place, and allowed Gutenberg to make his first printing press.
The reason europe succeeded, was mostly internal competition. A million thiefdoms, preying up one another (mostly in germany, italy and the balcans) with some economic save heavens (great britain, the netherlands) this was basically a free market of rulers. If a ruler did not cut it, the micro-nation would fall behind and be gobbled up.
If a ruler was against a invention, you would pack up, move into the town behind the next hill were some upstart youngster would welcome the new things - because he had a expansion planned.
So fierce competition and wars destroy entrenched interests and landlords of stagnating stability (church, guilds, etc.). To push inventions, one need - in a civilized manner, recreate those conditions.
Bullshit. Truly, what nonsense. Europe spent centuries stagnating under the rules of multiple fiefdoms in constant attrition against each other for power, wealth, territory and so forth. Many other parts of the world did likewise for long stretches of time and in both cases, only moderate technical advancement that happened very, very slowly. It was only when certain very specific conditions of government stability, property protection, legal transparency and basic respect for individual and human rights helped certain states become prosperous. This was further helped by these states accumulating enough capital under conditions of prolonged internal peace to invest in aspects of wealth-facilitating public infrastructure. What you claim is the diametric opposite of basic reality. Asia during much of the middle ages at times fulfilled conditions of state stability, but it often did not coincide with certain other systemic requirements for widespread markets to develop. Instead, the stability was of an autocratic and arbitrary type that facilitated stagnant top-down paternalism.
There was stagnation after the fall of the Roman Empire while new states and systems were trying to establish itself. However the later medieval period was full of innovation. It was far more active in using machinery than Roman Empire and China:
The idea that no innovation happened in medieval Europe is severely overstated. I think it stems from the fact that medieval Europe had less production of literature, science and arts than Rome and Greece. Yet in terms of practical inventions, medieval Europe, did a lot more.
I never said that Europe didn't advance during the early and later middle ages, only that it advanced slowly compared to what happened when the industrial revolution occurred. Its arrival heavily correlates with many of the factors I described in my comment above for greater wealth and development. I don't think it's a coincidence that the industrial revolution started in the UK, one of the most peaceful and stable of states in the world at the time. Though of course, there are other factors that im missing which influenced the development of modern markets.
I probably didn't understand you original point well, and I not sure I understand it still. The point was that competition between states spurred innovation. But of course if all those states are constantly on the verge of collapse then I agree not much will happen. I would argue that in the later medieval period most European states had achieved a lot of stability which helped prosperity grow.
Yet in relative terms, I would say Europe was still embroiled in a lot more wars than China even during the industrial revolution. Think of the 7-years war, Napoleonic wars, American war of independence.
Why the industrial revolution happened in Britain is of course a big topic onto itself. I have argued before that it could in fact ONLY have happened in Britain due to the geography, resources and climate of Britain: https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/why-england-industri...
1. France and the Netherlands lacked the coal and iron.
2. Germany didn't have the right kind of coal, and no as ideal conditions to dig canals and utilize water power as Great Britain.
If you sort of go over a checklist of needed prerequisites, you are pretty much left with Britain. Sure it could have happened elsewhere but then only after a number of other innovation had happened. At the technological level the world existing in in the mid 1700s, Britain was really the only candidate.
Internal stability is of course always good, but Italy, Spain, France, Greece etc could not possibly have started an industrial revolution no matter how peaceful and stable they had been. They just lacked the resources, climate and geography to do so.
> The Thirty Years' War from 1618 to 1648 was one of the most destructive wars in European history, directly responsible for the death of an estimated 4.5 to 8 million soldiers and civilians, with some areas of present-day Germany experiencing population declines of over 50%
That wasn't a constant thing though, and China despite being unified had far more bloody civil wars with more people dead.
But sure Europe being fragmented did lead to more wars, which is bad. On the other hand those wars mean European military technology advanced quicker, and the existence of multiple political units meant that different ideas about religion, science and society was far more difficult to suppress than in a unified China.
The price China paid for its unity was a far more oppressive regime. To keep such a huge empire from falling apart a lot more state power had to be exercised. At the time of the 30 years war the average Europe was generally a lot freer.
One could say there was a tradeoff. Europe "accepted" more violence for more freedom. China "accepted" more peace for less freedom. What you prefer depends on your values and ideological beliefs.
Sure competition and allowing things to fail can, under the right circumstances, generate great advancements. But given the context of human history, it seems that decentralized feudal societies caused about as many technological revolutions as communist societies...
It is a bit of a stereotype that nothing happened in medieval Europe and Greeks and Romans did everything. That is nonsense. Medieval Europe saw a massive increase in the use of mills and machinery, that never occurred in the Roman Empire or China: https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/the-european-mill-revolu...
The development of advanced plate armor, gunpowder weapons, mechanical clocks, medieval cathedrals, innovation within glass making, lenses, spectacles etc suggest medieval society was plenty capable on innovation. Both earlier Greek city states and later medieval Italian city states demonstrated a large amount of innovation.
I would rather say that large monopolies outcompete smaller competing units in the short term but loose in the long term. We can see that in markets as well as in comparison between China and Europe. Fragmented Europe was at a disadvantage for several hundred years until that fragmentation started paying off.
Most history books endorse some version of this theory. It's not some libertarian revision, and it has absolutely nothing to do with communism (which didn't exist in any recognizable form anywhere in the world until the 19th Century and not in China until the 20th)
There are two main downsides to centralization.
1) A single ruler means the whims of that ruler can have major impacts on the development of society. When the Ming abandoned their treasure fleets, there was no alternative power to step in and continue expanding maritime commerce. The emperor was so powerful that their monopoly on trade decided the course of history for the whole region: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_treasure_voyages
2) A unipolar power structure inherently seeks to maintain the status quo. When you have a dynasty that already has unquestioned authority within its borders while also having no plausible rivals outside them (at the time of the "great divergence" the Mongols had ceased to be a threat), ANY change leads to a loss of status and power for the ruling elite. Any commercial activity or technological advance was measured by whether it benefitted the emperor or hindered him.
None of this is to say that there weren't substantial downsides to the decentralized mess of European politics. In earlier time periods, the centralized model helped China to be the richest region on earth while Europe was one of the poorest, but post-Renaissance, competition between European states drove innovation and pressured those states to expand or die. Both of which led to Portuguese ships sailing into Guangzhou in 1513 rather than Ming ships sailing into Lisbon.
Just remember that the situation which caused the Opium Wars was that since the 1300s or so, China had exported more than it imported, so the world's silver tended to settle in China. You can see the Spanish empire as a scheme to move silver from Mexico and Peru to China the long way via the Dutch.
The Honourable East India company settled on opium as the one commodity which might settle their balance of payments problem. The period when China was poor was 100, 150 years in the 19th and 20th centuries, linked to specific bad governments (Great Leap Forward, cough).
Author here, sorry about the paywall, I am trying to experiment with different ways of growing my readership and subscribers. You can get past the paywall by signing up for a 7-day free trial. It can be canceled at any time. If this really rubs you the way then I am making this draft link of the whole article available for a limited time: https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/bc1449ba-7e0d-43b6-8d53-...
Some of the questions popping up here regarding significance of different components of the Gutenberg invention is addressed in a linked article:
This discusses technologies existing in Europe at the time but not in China, which Gutenberg could leverage to create his printing system.
To clarify the point here isn't to suggest a civilization or society is superior to another. It is a discussion about printing systems, not people or languages.
Glaring paywall in the article obscuring the actual statement/conclusion aside, I recommend reading "The Chinese Typewriter
: A History" by Thomas S. Mullaney (ISBN 9780262536103). The book covers a lot about Chinese language(s) adaptation to an Information Age crisis brought by technologies based on primarily Western/Latin alphabets, and how some of these adaptations paved the way for Chinese language's integration into the information technology world of today.
I recommend approaching these topics without predetermined judgement on whether a language is inherently superior or inferior. Such biases are the last things we need in today's world full of division and tribalism.
Yep this is the winning strategy. Actual historians rather than random software engineers dabbling in history writing essays with minimal citation. I find it baffling how little the software community seems to care for the expertise of historians. There are so many books written by professionals who have spent thousands and thousands of hours on these topics that are available for access.
You can read the rest of the article by signing up for a 7-day free trial. You don't have to be a paid member.
The article isn't suggesting one language is superior to another, but that one printing technique was a superior to another at some point in time. If one cannot recognize that then we are getting a bit too touchy when discussing history of technology.
The point here is to understand why the printing press had such an impact Europe, while existence of movable type in China and Korea did not have the same impact. It is about understanding historical developments.
Nothing touchy about pointing out the risk of misinfo. And the book I mentioned is exactly about historical developments, as some of the most commonly used Chinese typewriters heavily resembled movable type printing press up until they were replaced with computers. A real book with real research instead of a bite-sized paywalled blog article.
In a day and age where Chinese language content occupies a significant portion of the Internet, there are still people who claim the non-alphabetical nature of the language is somehow a conspiracy at monopolizing knowledge. What's so touchy about recognizing some people being stuck in 19th century mentalities (not the author of the article, but the crowd these articles inevitably attract) are perhaps not the most credible?
As the article author I want to point out that my aim is to popularize and present different angles on a variety of topics. I am not trying to do original research and thus I don't think it is fair to compare my writing to that. Also my writing isn't primarily about printing. I am trying to cover more broadly the period from 1500 to 1700 where one saw European powers starting to dominate world affairs.
Understanding why Europe rose to prominence requires looking at several different aspects such as development of glass technology, mechanical clocks, navigation, gun powder weapons and printing. If I was writing and publishing a book then that would be my topic. Naturally when printing isn't really the main topic of the book, but part of a larger narrative then you cannot cover that as extensively as a book which is ONLY about printing which is what you are talking about.
My writing isn't concerned with Chinese typewriters as that would come at a much later date when Western dominance has already been well established.
I didn't actually know that there are people who think Chinese letters are a conspiracy to monopolize knowledge. That is a very bizarre belief indeed.
I certainly use slightly tabloid headlines, but they are a reflection of what the article is about and I think it will become clear to anyone reading through the article that isn't meant to be some kind of civilization scorecard or competition. I have seen a MAGA republican retweet the article, but if they follow more of my writing I think they would be rather disappointed. I am generally promoting a fairly leftist view in my writing, so not really what would appeal to conservatives.
I didn't even realize the article was behind a paywall. Have you tried considering the use of extensions that bypass such artificial restrictions, especially scientific journals?
The linked article is the ad for the actual article, which requires you to be a paid subscriber to this person's substack. If you read the linked article only, you also didn't bypass the paywall.
Good catch. A pet peeve of mine. Using "times" for a decrease in size is not too bright. I attribute it to laziness, because (apparently) nobody wants to actually form the word "sixtieth", not even mentally.
It makes no sense. 100% cheaper would be free. 60,000% cheaper would imply they pay you the cost of 59 books to take it off your hands. That's quite a sale.
Because that's what "times more/less" means. 2 times the cost is 200% the cost. Half off is the price times fifty percent (1/2). A sixtieth isn't 60 times anything in any direction.
You can think of "twice cheaper" as meaning "twice the amount for the same price", so "60 times cheaper" means you can buy 60 books for the price of 1.
While that has a logic to it, I don't think that's the logic or meaning of the terms as they are generally used in English. If you mean 98% cheaper, say that, not 60 times cheaper. Two times or three times the price means you multiply it by that integer value. For "less" or "cheaper" people use percentages or fractions. Using an integer for cheaper is wrong, IMO.
While I accept this may not be common usage in English, I am quite certain no one would take "60 times cheaper" to mean "you would literally be paid 60 times the price to take one item". That interpretation makes no sense at all (except if doing some real mental gymnastics to translate common words mechancially into math and then execute the math).
Stil, the phrase itself is just not silly and wrong. It's only uncommon.
The reason it's not silly/wrong is that you can say, and people often do, that something is "much cheaper" than something else, and that clearly means that it is less expensive. So, the language already accepts that a thing becomes less expensive as it becomes cheaper.
So, if it becomes twice as cheap, it becomes half as expensive. Similarly, as something becomes less cheap, it becomes more expensive, so you can also say that something is half as cheap as something else, so it's twice as expensive. There is no ambiguity, it's just an uncommon way of quantifying price changes. Without the speicifc quantifier, the relative comparisons are actually quite common - it would be cheaper to buy X; is not as expensive as Y - common phrases.
"X times smaller/cheaper/etc" is a very common phrase in English with a very well understood meaning (1/Xth the size/price/etc). It doesn't really matter whether it makes sense to you.
It's a strange article. The author conflates 'printing press' and 'movable type' in the second paragraph, but then admits that the printing press in Asia wasn't a machine at all and was entirely manual. The innovation was not in producing the type plate, but in automating the production of printed pages.
Author here, they are conflated for good reason. The printing press is really an advancement of the movable type system developed in Asia. What Gutenberg did wasn't really about the screw press as I elaborate on here:
The screw press already existed in Europe and was widely used. Reducing Gutenbergs invention to just being about using a screw press does not do justice to what he did. It was really about combining several techniques to advance printing. Better alloys for types. Better system for duplicating types. Better ink. A lot of the advancement could have been made even without the printing press itself. And the printing press without these advancement would have made very little improvement.
Was it? As late as the 18th century, European visitors to China kept remarking on how cheap books were there and how many people had them.
Movable type was suitable for the Greek and Latin alphabets, but not for Chinese characters or Arabic flowing script. The Chinese had great success with woodblock printing.
Chinese usually gives the same information with shorter text. Those who play TAS [1] usually switch language to Chinese so that the dialogs could be skipped with the shortest time. And ancient written Chinese 文言文 is even shorter. So I may argue that we don't have that much to print.
colonialism might have happened the other way round (coming out of China) if just a few variables are changed. The article argues I think that Gutenberg’s innovation was one of those variables.
The way I think of China in comparison to Europe is basically, what if the Roman Empire survived until modernity - i.e. a central government for territories the size and importance of Europe and North Africa combined. This kind of centralistic system would probably also have continued Antique knowledge on a similar trajectory, but then stagnated, since fragmented societies with enough wealth to spread around simply create more opportunities to revolutionize various scientific fields.
So yeah, I think you can see it as something not up to a few variables, but you could also, as an example, pinpoint it to the Mongolian invasion creating the Yuan dinasty, which basically adopted Chinese culture and continued the empire, rather than fragmenting it like what the Germanic invasions did to Rome. This might have come down to a couple of decisions by Kublai Khan.
"Germany" was not really doing much of anything for most of the 15th century but the Hanseatic League was certainly a precursor to poor political theories about who "owned" the Baltic areas.
Chinese or Korean, on the other hand, needed many more characters. Creating the movable types for them was not an easy feat. Certainly more difficult than with the German equivalent.
In particular for Korea: Hangul [0], which is a "simpler" language that gradually took over Hanja [1] in Korea, was "created" only in the 15th century, not before. Earlier than that, even if Korea has the equivalent of "printing", the complexity of it was higher than the one experienced with the west alphabet.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja