Description

Book Synopsis
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST

A New York Times Notable Book of 2022

What does it take to reinvent a language?

After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology.

Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who reinvented the Chinese language, among them an exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, a Chinese-Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao's phonetic writing system, and a computer engineer who devised input

Kingdom of Characters Pulitzer Prize Finalist

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    A Paperback / softback by Jing Tsu

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      Book details

      Publisher Penguin Putnam Inc
      Published 17 January 2023
      ISBN-13 9780735214736
      978-0735214736
      ISBN-10 0735214735
      Also in:
      Communication studies Historical and comparative linguistics

      Description

      Book Synopsis
      PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST

      A New York Times Notable Book of 2022

      What does it take to reinvent a language?

      After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology.

      Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who reinvented the Chinese language, among them an exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, a Chinese-Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao's phonetic writing system, and a computer engineer who devised input

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