(Not an expert but) Chinese writing is hieroglyphic, wheres 'western writing' is phonetic. Western writing has a very small character set and is thus well-suited to a printing press, whereas hieroglyphics have thousands of characters (for thousands of concepts) but aren't fundamentally linked to the language like western characters are.

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mbs159 a day ago | parent | next [-]

> Western writing has a very small character set

If you include all of the Latin-script characters, Cyrillic, Greek, accent symbols and ligatures, you'd have over 300 characters, and that is a very conservative estimate

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UncleMeat 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Western writing has a very small character set and is thus well-suited to a printing press

This is vastly overstated. This was a widely popularized idea in the west but has largely been debunked by more recent scholarship that is less interested in demonstrating the superiority of the west.

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adrianN 4 days ago | parent [-]

Do you have links to relevant research?

	▲	UncleMeat 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Tom Mullaney at Stanford has a good book on chinese typewriters (this narrative is usually presented against both printing presses and typewriters) and is a good entrance into the intersection of chinese script and technology. History research is typically published in books rather than papers, so it isn't content I can link to directly.

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Nicook 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

this is why Mesopotamian and Egyptian writing are upstream of so much.