Riding the wind of rebirth

"For example, the word 'laser' in English is actually an abbreviation for 'Light Amplification By Stimulated Emission Of Radition,' which is difficult for non-professionals to understand at first glance."

"But Chinese allows everyone to understand the general meaning accurately and vividly."

"There is an old Chinese saying, 'New wine in old bottles.' This ability of the Chinese language, in the face of today's era of technological explosion, allows it to express new things accurately and vividly, no matter how many or how fast they emerge."

"The efficiency I just mentioned is the horizontal manifestation of the efficiency of Chinese characters. However, we should not ignore the vertical efficiency of Chinese characters, that is, their 'semantic stability' that can transcend time and space."

"Phonetic writing systems record sounds. When the pronunciation changes, the spelling letters must also change accordingly, otherwise the writing and the sound will become disconnected."

"For example, if a modern Englishman were to read a classic text written in Middle English, he would find it very difficult to deduce the meaning of the sentence from the pronunciation of the words in the text."

"When a modern Chinese person reads 'Quiet Night Thoughts,' a poem also passed down by the medieval poet Li Bai, even though the pronunciation of modern Chinese is quite different from that of medieval Chinese, the information conveyed by the poem remains almost unchanged. The modern person can directly experience the time and space of that medieval night created by the poet."

"It would be a miracle if you didn't write this speech." Mai Xiaomiao's speech won rounds of applause from the attendees. Vice Minister Liu was sitting next to Zhou Zhi, patiently listening to the speech on stage. When he heard this part, he couldn't help but clap softly in response. His eyes were on the stage, but he whispered to Zhou Zhi beside him, "Why don't you go up and speak yourself?"

“Everyone has their own expertise,” Zhou Zhi said with a smile. “I do basic work, but Xiao Miao’s research represents the future. What we want to show the world is the huge application prospects of the Unicode standard. I know absolutely nothing about that kind of work.”

"You're too modest." Vice Minister Liu shook his head slightly: "The Y2K problem is still troubling us. To completely avoid this problem, we now need to upgrade, patch things up, and come up with solutions."

"Now our Unicode has completely solved the problem of unified discourse power for Chinese characters. The losses avoided are at least tens or hundreds of billions. It has resolved a hidden major problem in our future information industry. We held a preparatory meeting some time ago, and everyone gained a deep understanding of this issue. At least now we don't have to suffer from the character code chaos like Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and New Zealand. It has also paved the way for the future 'going global' of Chinese characters and Chinese character domain names."

This is indeed a serious problem. Before Chinese character domain names existed, if we follow the same path as before, Chinese character domain names could become chaotic. Chinese character domain names that work perfectly in mainland China could appear as unrecognizable gibberish in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and Singapore. Furthermore, software in these different regions might be completely incompatible and unable to resolve Chinese characters.

For example, if an app is from Hong Kong, it might display as gibberish on mainland devices, requiring transcoding software to convert it into another version, which would undoubtedly increase the workload significantly.

If this inability to decode each other occurs in the core code, it could even cause the program to malfunction, creating a significant obstacle for China's software industry to expand overseas.

All of the above problems have been completely solved by the current unified code Han character library. This was something that was missing in the previous national information industry plan, and it is an undertaking that Zhouzhi led to complete after his rebirth.

With the booming development of the information industry and the increasing popularity of the Internet, the importance of this matter has become increasingly prominent, and it has made many bigwigs break out in a cold sweat when they think about it.

Fortunately, someone in the government anticipated this problem and solved it, thus eliminating potential future troubles.

However, the meaning behind Mai Xiaomiao's eloquent speech on stage seems to be even more profound.

“Every stroke of a Chinese character carries important information, but this extreme efficiency also brings many problems.” “First of all, there is the difficulty of learning. It generally takes a person many years of study to master the ability to read and write Chinese characters. We can even divide this problem into three parts. There are many foreigners who have lived in China for many years. They can even use Chinese to communicate fluently, but they are still unfamiliar with reading and cannot write at all.”

"This phenomenon is much simpler in phonetic character-based writing systems. As long as you know the pronunciation of a word, you can roughly write it based on the spelling, making it much easier to learn."

"For the information industry, similar difficulties will be encountered when inputting Chinese characters into information systems."

"Fortunately, our Unicode and Hanzi input method conveniently solve this problem. The word association function of the input method even skips the step of the inputter having to know how to write. By using Pinyin and the selection list provided by the input method, as long as you can read and recognize, you can complete the input in the information system."

"With a more perfect input method solution, the input speed of Chinese characters now far exceeds that of English characters. What used to be the biggest bottleneck has now become a manifestation of the superiority of Chinese character input."

Another round of applause erupted from the audience.

"Is there any research data to support this?" Vice Minister Liu asked again.

"Yes. The fastest input methods now allow skilled users to type two to three hundred Chinese characters per minute. Many systems, such as post and telecommunications and banks, have proven this through their internal skills competitions."

"As for English typists, even clerks and customer service staff who have undergone long-term intensive training can generally only reach 120 words per minute."

Vice Minister Liu stopped speaking and simply nodded in satisfaction.

"In summary, we have now solved the 'human' aspect of human-computer interaction, but we are facing a second major challenge, which is the 'machine' aspect of human-computer interaction, namely, enabling machines to understand Chinese text commands."

"Because Chinese contains a huge amount of information, it often leads to the phenomenon of 'one word having multiple meanings.' Therefore, the true meaning of Chinese words cannot be separated from the words themselves. Instead, it needs to be combined with the connecting words above and below, or even the connecting paragraphs, in order to accurately interpret and understand them."

"In other words, in order to achieve such a huge information carrying capacity, the Chinese language relies on its grammar and syntax to construct a profound logical system. This logical system, together with the characters themselves, can accurately express the true meaning."

“For example, characters like ‘太’ and ‘土’ may have more than a dozen different meanings. Constructing an information system that can understand Chinese is far more difficult than constructing a character-based writing system.”

"This is also the key reason why the information industry has so far relied on character-based text, which has better logic and is more straightforward and concise, for processing."

"Secondly, the meaning of Chinese texts is often a process of 'co-construction' between the author and the reader, which is particularly evident in ancient Chinese literature." (End of Chapter)