Chinese typewriter

A Chinese typewriter is a typewriter that can type Chinese script. Early European typewriters began appearing in the early 19th century. However, as the Chinese language uses a logographic writing system, fitting thousands of Chinese characters on the machine needed much more complex engineering than typewriters using a simple Latin alphabet, or other non-logographic scripts. An ordinary Chinese printing office uses 6,000 Chinese characters. Chinese typewriters, and similar Japanese typewriters invented by Kyota Sugimoto, which use kanji adopted from the Chinese writing system, started to appear only in the early 20th century. There have been at least five dozen versions of Chinese typewriters, ranging from sizable mechanical models to sophisticated electric word processors. rdf:langString