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<blockquote data-quote="Heretic Apostate" data-source="post: 1904277" data-attributes="member: 696">Question:&nbsp; The fact that (it being my understanding) Chinese is a word-based alphabet, rather than a letter-based alphabet (like English) or a syllable-based alphabet (like Korean), would you consider this to have been a stumbling-stone in the development of the Chinese printing press as a practical application?&nbsp;Just think about it: assuming you go for the moveable type in English, that means you have to cast 26 different symbols (assuming no capitalization), as well as punctuation, all in different quantities (e.g., the letter &quot;e&quot; will appear a LOT more than the letter &quot;q&quot;).&nbsp;But what about Chinese?&nbsp; Don't they have something like a few thousand symbols?&nbsp; Wouldn't that seriously slow down the use of cast symbols?&nbsp; Sure, you can fit more per page (since each symbol means an entire word), but wouldn't you lose production time when you found out you're missing a &quot;horse&quot; symbol and a &quot;plow&quot; symbol, for that text on agriculture?&nbsp; Stop production and go cast a few more symbols, only to have production halt again on the next page?&nbsp;(Personally, I am more inclined to like syllable-based alphabets, so there's no pronunciation confusion...&nbsp; See the whole &quot;how do you pronounce 'drow'&quot; thread. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin&nbsp; &nbsp; :D"&nbsp; data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> )</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Heretic Apostate, post: 1904277, member: 696"] Question: The fact that ([u]it being my understanding[/u]) Chinese is a word-based alphabet, rather than a letter-based alphabet (like English) or a syllable-based alphabet (like Korean), would you consider this to have been a stumbling-stone in the development of the Chinese printing press as a practical application? Just think about it: assuming you go for the moveable type in English, that means you have to cast 26 different symbols (assuming no capitalization), as well as punctuation, all in different quantities (e.g., the letter "e" will appear a LOT more than the letter "q"). But what about Chinese? Don't they have something like a few thousand symbols? Wouldn't that [i]seriously[/i] slow down the use of cast symbols? Sure, you can fit more per page (since each symbol means an entire word), but wouldn't you lose production time when you found out you're missing a "horse" symbol and a "plow" symbol, for that text on agriculture? Stop production and go cast a few more symbols, only to have production halt again on the [i]next[/i] page? (Personally, I am more inclined to like syllable-based alphabets, so there's no pronunciation confusion... See the whole "how do you pronounce 'drow'" thread. :D ) [/QUOTE]

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