The next meeting of the Japan History Group (JHG) at the Institute of Social Science (ISS), University of Tokyo, will be held on Monday, 15 April 2019, at 6:00 PM in No.1 Meeting Room (Dai-ichi Kaigi-shitsu), 1st floor of the Main Building of ISS, Hongo Campus.


Presenter: Raja Adal Yellen (Assistant professor, University of Pittsburgh)


Title: "The Birth of the Modern Global Script Regime: From the Typewriter to Unicode"


Discussant: Takehiko Hashimoto (Professor, University of Tokyo)



Astract:

Within a few years of the first working version of the Unicode Standard in 1993, the scripts of all national languages and of 97.6 percent of the world population became writable on any Unicode-compatible device. Subsequent versions of Unicode have standardized over one-hundred scripts, opening the door to an unprecedented diversity. Yet the scripts used by the world's languages at the beginning of the twenty-first century are very similar to those used at the beginning of the twentieth century. By 1993 the modern global script regime was already settled. This paper introduces the two alliances that contributed to this settlement. The first is between the nation-state system and new technologies of inscription. It saw literate elites transition from established writing systems like Chinese and Latin to national languages that could guarantee a sufficiently large market to warrant the development of modern inscription technologies from the printing press to the telegraph to the typewriter. Scripts that could not be typed became unmodern, effectively relegating them to the handwritten margins of the new global script regime. The second alliance was between the typewriter and new methods of information management. For this, the Japanese typewriter is particular revealing. Like the Chinese and Korean typewriters, it was an extraordinarily slow, expensive, and generally dysfunctional device. Yet its commercial success highlights the central role of the typewriter in inaugurating new practices of textual production, consumption, storage, and circulation that were essential for an industrialized society like Japan. This paper seeks to provide both a global view of the birth of the modern script regime using the database of SIL Ethnologue and a more focused understanding of the revolution in scriptural practices spearheaded by the typewriter through a trove of documents from the Mitsui Mi'ike Mine spanning half a century from 1889 to 1940. In so doing it understands the writing regime in the twenty-first century as heir to scripts and practices of inscription from a century earlier.



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Dr. Naofumi NAKAMURA
Professor of Business History
Institute of Social Science,
The University of Tokyo
naofumin@iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp <mailto:naofumin@iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp>

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