Tools of the Scribe: How Writing Systems, Technology, and Human Factors Interact to Affect the Act of Writing Brian Roark et al. Springer (2025)
The world’s oldest writing system still in use, that of Chinese characters, dates from about 1200 bc. It has survived almost as long as its even older predecessors. For instance, cuneiform — comprising wedge-shaped marks inscribed in clay tablets with a stylus — was used in ancient Mesopotamia until the first century ad and Egyptian hieroglyphs remained in use until the fourth century ad. Moreover, Chinese characters were central to the development of writing systems in several other cultures, notably those of Japan and Korea.
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Yet today, millions of people who speak and read Chinese have forgotten how to compose many of the traditional characters by hand, relying instead on simpler phonetic and digital equivalents. This controversial trend in China, generally known as character amnesia, opens Tools of the Scribe, a stimulating and original, if technical, book by computational linguists Brian Roark, Richard Sproat and Su-Youn Yoon.
The book explores how “the implement, the medium, the writing system and the writer” interact to produce text. The authors analyse the linguistic structure of writing systems ranging from ancient cuneiform to modern alphabets; the technologies that have shaped writing in both the past and the present; and the processes underlying computer-based ‘scribes’, including large language models. Although their main focus is on technology, the authors draw on research in many fields, including psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, ergonomics, anthropology and speech and language pathology.
Writing evolves
Chinese characters illustrate this interaction between implement, medium, system and writer vividly. Their first incarnation was in ‘oracle bones’ used for divination during the Shang dynasty (about 1600 bc to 1046 bc). Notches were drilled and chiselled into the surfaces of turtle shells and ox scapulae, such that when heat was applied, cracks would appear. These cracks were interpreted by a diviner to answer questions posed by the Shang king. The answers were often written on the bones using symbols — many of them recognizable antecedents of modern Chinese characters.
Subsequently, during the late Shang (about 1250 bc to 1046 bc) and Western Zhou (about 1046 bc to 771 bc) dynasties, inscriptions on bronze vessels were used to record ancestor worship, royal decrees, military victories, land grants, marriages and family histories. Then, during the latter half of the first millennium bc, the characters evolved into a more complex calligraphic form, painted in ink with a brush or pen on bamboo or paper: an art form still practised today. In ad 868, Chinese script was used to write the world’s oldest extant printed book: a paper scroll known as The Diamond Sutra, which records a dialogue between the Buddha and a senior monk.
The script’s complexity increased over time, from some 4,500 characters initially to roughly 47,000 by the eighteenth century. Today, almost 100,000 characters are listed in Unicode — the international character-encoding standard. However, around the start of the twentieth century, the system hit a technological barrier: the typewriter. The first commercial typewriter, designed for simple Western alphabets, was launched in 1874. By contrast, several attempts to commercialize a Chinese typewriter, beginning in 1919, were unsuccessful owing to the quantity and complexity of Chinese characters.
Many university students use chatbots powered by large language models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, to help write assignments.Credit: Alamy
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