The Revolution of The Chinese Script

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

History

4.7 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 23 August 2022

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What does it take to reinvent the world's oldest living language? China today is one of the world's most powerful nations, yet just a century ago it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, left behind in the wake of Western technology.

Jing Tsu is a cultural historian, linguist and literary scholar. Joining Dan on the podcast, Jing tells the story of China's most daunting challenge as a linguistic one: to make the formidable Chinese language - a 2,200-year-old writing system that was daunting to natives and foreigners alike - accessible to a globalised, digital world and transform China into a superpower in the process.

This episode was produced by Hannah Ward, the audio editor was Dougal Patmore.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Every household will get help with energy bills this winter.
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0:24.0	Find out more at gov.uk forward slash help for households today.
0:32.7	Hi everyone, welcome to Downs and I'm Cisteria.
0:34.2	Have you ever talked about China?
0:35.3	You've heard me talk about China a lot in this podcast.
0:37.4	We're all fascinated by the rise of China.
0:39.8	What's it mean?
0:41.0	What's the future hold in terms of the relationship between China,
0:44.2	its neighbours, China and the rest of the world?
0:48.1	But today I'm talking to a guest about a very particular aspect of China's rise.
0:52.9	In fact, an aspect without which it would have been impossible for China to embrace modern technology
0:58.2	and grow into such a gigantic economic and technological powerhouse.
1:03.7	Because what we're talking about today is the Chinese language,
1:07.3	the Chinese script.
1:08.1	Now think about it.
1:09.3	The Chinese script is made up of something like 80,000 symbols and characters,
1:15.9	of which through a 4000, I needed for every day communication.
1:20.8	How, in the 19th century, 20th century, did you communicate using more code,
	...

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