On the Writing of Mandarin

The writing of a language is one of the most important part of civilization. Without it, there will be no knowledge or experience to be handed down permanently generation by generation. The unique writing of Mandarin is from top to bottom & from right to left. We don’t know why our ancestors chose to write it that way. With the advance of technology, we find that the Mandarin is forced to make change, some minor & some major. It is a part of evolution, struggle for existence otherwise it will fade away.

Most of us had experienced the changes while we went from primary school to the college. The first is the textbook of mathematics. Suddenly, the writing was from left to right horizontally. The purpose is obvious as the formula & equations are all horizontal & from left to right. The number is written from left to right, not from top to bottom or from right to left. It seems Chinese civilization was isolated for so long that it was out of tune in the world. The event of civilization tends to have chain effect. Since most of the natural sciences are based on mathematics, it is natural all textbooks of chemistry, physics etc are written in the same way. It is inconceivable to write chemical formula & chemical equations in any other ways.

Hieroglyphics might serve the purpose of communication for ancient people. But when the civilization advances, a higher & more abstract form of representation became more important. Phoenician alphabet was created & it was much more flexible & practical in commerce. With suffix & prefix, it is much easier to make new & composite words. But the most important consequence of this is the limited number of alphabet (26 in English). It makes the movable type feasible. In fact, since Gutenberg (around 1450 AD) invented a streamline process of movable type press, the old knowledge was made available to the mass & the new knowledge was spread much faster than that before. In China, 畢 昇 invented 活 字 版 around 1040 AD. But it was a block press, not a movable type press. It was not until last century that Chinese learned to use the movable type in printing. I think the main reason of the difference here is that the hieroglyphics hinders the use of movable type as the number of words is much larger.

The general order of writing (stroke) an individual Mandarin character is from top left to bottom right. For example, “三”, we write it from left to right for each bar and from top to bottom for three bars. With this, we’d think it must be natural to move to the right to write the next character, ie left to right as it is more efficient. Your hand will travel more distance to move to the left to write a new character. The right-to-left direction certainly slows down the writing. Other disadvantage is ink not dry fast enough that hinders the speed of writing as most people are right-handed.

The order of writing from top to bottom may not be that bad as from right to left. But it decreases the reading efficiency. Physiologically, the eyes are designed to move or scan horizontally, not vertically. It is easier to read a book written horizontally than vertically.

The most fundamental problem of the Mandarin writing is the input method to the computers. This problem actually existed when the typewriter was introduced long time ago. The problem gets worse when the technology advances. There is no consistent or unified way of the Mandarin input. The most popular way nowadays is pingying. People use English alphabet to input Mandarin characters. The long term effect of this is that people forget how to write actual characters. Although they still know how to read, they will lose the ability of writing when time goes by. When a language requires English as its writing method, it loses its orthogonality & independency. With simplified characters, pingying input & host other problems, the Mandarin, as a language, is in a state of chaos.

In this age of Internet & hi-tech, the Mandarin is struggling & limping. Will technology make a language obsolete? This is a good question. But we know human civilization is part of natural evolution. It will follow the rule of evolution: Struggle for Existence, Natural Selection & Survival of the Fittest.

I recently visited Taipei & Beijing. I found something interesting & amusing. I’d like to share them with you.

This is a panel written from right to left (中正紀念堂)



This is the panel written from left to right (中正紀念堂, same spot, different time)


This is a panel in the Forbidden City, no idea whether it is from right to left or left to write. The seal is in the middle of the panel aggravates the problem. It seems the original designer purposely tried to make a point here with humor.


This reminds me of one chemistry teacher in my junior high school (建中). He came the first day & wrote three big characters on the blackboard: 會乘車 . We didn't have any idea what he meant as we all knew how to ride a bus or bicycle. It turned out that his name is 車乘會. It was an eye opener, 車 can be a last name.