The Wubi Effect

In this episode of Radiolab, hosts Jad Abumrad and Simon Adler explore the history of Chinese language computing and its impact on technology and culture. The story begins with China's struggle to adapt the Chinese language to Western computers in the 1970s and 80s, threatened by the Latin alphabet-centric design of early computing. Professor Wang Yongmin's invention of the Wubi Method, a way to type Chinese characters using a standard QWERTY keyboard by breaking them down into components, saved the Chinese character. However, the adoption of pinyin, a phonetic input method, gained prominence due to government promotion of linguistic unification. The episode further delves into the QWERTY effect, demonstrating how the layout of the keyboard can influence preferences, and concludes with a discussion on the implications of AI-driven cloud input on language and thought.