--- Damon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > >--- Damon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > >Or that it was a medieval German that invented the printing press. > > > >The chinese invented the printing press. That german just copied it. > > IIRC the Chinese version used wooden blocks where the text was fixed. The > German version used a pallete composed of individual blocks of letters. The > > Chinese may have developed something similar, but the European version was > clearly superior. Yet another sign of cultural stagnation? >
That is a common misunderstanding. The text of Chinese are charachters per word. Although many of the same "radicals" are used for differnt words, the arnagment and size are different. Further more to really be comparable to a western language "word" chinese must at times use more than one word. Therefore, these groups of words were blocks themselves. In the begining blocs per page were created, but it became easier, and quite obviouse for each "printer" to begin cutting into older pages and rearanging the the charachtes -pictograms-. This was more efficient due to the language itself which would require about ~10,000 seperate blocks to print all possible sentences given 3000 common chinese words. ===== _________________________________________________ Jan William Coffey _________________________________________________ __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month! http://sbc.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l