The Russian group includes four languages, Russian, Servian, Ruthenian and Bulgarian. The character in which these languages are written is known as Cyrilian, an invention of St. Cyril in the ninth century, and is based on the Greek character, to which its resemblance will be noted. The languages written today in the Greek and Cyrilian characters correspond almost exactly to the present limits of the Orthodox Greek Church.
The use of the Arabic character also corresponds very nearly to the geographical limits of the Mohammedan religion. Seven languages written in this character are represented, Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Sart, Urdu, Malay and Tartar. Of all the languages now written on the typewriter, the Arabic group presented the gravest mechanical difficulties. The Arabic character, as written, is not subject to any of the usual rules. It has in its complete alphabet over one hundred individual characters; it writes backwards, i.e., from right to left; the characters are written on the line, above the line and below the line, and they are of various widths, requiring full spacing, half spacing and no spacing at all. Here indeed was a medley of problems well calculated to tax ingenuity to the limit, and the Arabic typewriter is a crowning triumph of mechanical skill.
The Hindu group shows the ancient Sanscrit and four modern Hindu vernacular languages written in the same character, which is known as Devanagari. These vernacular languages are Hindi, Marawari, Magadhi, and Marathi. The Hindu vernacular machines, especially the Marathi, are having a considerable sale today among the native princes and potentates of British India.
The Japanese (Katakana) sample is interesting mainly as a curiosity. It does not write the complete Japanese language—only the syllabic system known as Katakana. This is read from right to left in perpendicular columns. In order to write this character on the horizontal lines of the typewriter, the type are laid on their faces and, in reading, the lines are held in perpendicular position.
After reviewing this formidable list of eighty-four languages, the question naturally arises, “Are there any written languages that it does not include?” Yes, there are, and this collection of typewritten samples has steadily grown until it now includes more than 150 languages, while the number of different non-Roman characters now written on the typewriter has increased from eight to twenty. There are two important languages, however, which still lie outside the pale of the writing machine. These are the ideographic languages, Chinese and Japanese.
The ancient Japanese language was originally phonetic, but the syllabic signs are now commonly intermixed with ideographic characters of Chinese origin.
Chinese is a strange language. It has no alphabet or phonetic signs—only ideographs. These ideographs are literally word pictures, and there is a separate picture for every word. There are from 40,000 to 50,000 of these ideographs, and to write each one at a single stroke would require a typewriter with many thousands of keys. Can the problem ever be solved of writing this language on a practical typewriter? Some inventors claim they have already solved it. It seems hard to credit, but the typewriter developments of the past and present warn us not to call anything impossible that is demanded of the writing machine.
Meanwhile the Chinese and Japanese buy typewriters—thousands of them; not to write their own languages, of course, but other languages, usually English. And they are coming to use these machines, not alone for foreign correspondence, but for business correspondence among themselves. The time saving service of the typewriter is so great that they find it “worth another language.” And this brings us to what many will regard as the most interesting of all the achievements of the typewriter. The steady growth of English as the commercial language of the Far East is a well known fact, and of all the influences that have caused this growth, one of the most important is the writing machine. Thus it may be said for the typewriter that it has not only facilitated the use of language but it has been no mean influence in determining the spread of language itself.
What is to be the future of this remarkable mechanism, which in fifty years has transformed the whole world of business, and has wrought such fundamental changes in our modern social order? As we pass the fiftieth milestone of typewriter history, it is natural, not only to review the past, but to think of all that time may hold in store. That the future of the typewriter will be wonderful, more wonderful than anything we have yet known, is certain, but what new forms it may assume is for no man to say, for the futility of such speculations has been demonstrated by all human experience.
On the mechanical side such forecasts are obviously impossible. The most farseeing typewriter man of today knows that the mechanical progress of the next fifty years is a sealed book to him—even as the history we have just recorded was a sealed book to the pioneers of 1873. Even on the side of its application to human needs, it is hard to forecast the future progress of a machine, the use of which is already so nearly universal. We know, however, that this fact does not impose any limits on future development. Even if the reign of the typewriter today were complete and absolute, and the pen had become as obsolete as the stylus, there would still be new worlds for the writing machine to conquer. The need which first called the typewriter into being, the problem of clerical time and labor saving, is always with us; it changes its form, but never its essence. The enormous time-saving the machine has already achieved is only the promise of more time-saving, and when every writing task has been annexed by the typewriter, it will be more than ever its mission to perform these tasks with ever increasing efficiency, increasing accuracy, and increasing speed.