Bismarck Daily Tribune

TYPEWRITERS IN CHINA.
They Are Used There, but Not For the Native Language.

Typewriters are now made for use in nearly a hundred different languages, and they are sold all over the world, but there is still one great nation which, for a very simple reason, has no typewriters that write its tongue. That nation is China.

The English alphabet has twenty-six letters, the Russian thirty-six.
The typewriter produced for the Russian market is the largest made, but no typewriter could be made that would begin to be big enough for the Chinese language, which has no alphabet, but is represented by sign characters, of which there are about 50,000. Of the great number of words found in the English language only a small proportion are used for the ordinary purposes of speech, and the same would be true as to the characters used in the Chinese language, but the number of Chinese characters commonly employed is still far greater than could be put on any typewriter. So this nation of 400,000,000 people has no typewriter in its own tongue.

But that doesn't mean that no typewriters are sold in China. More and more Chinese are learning other languages besides their own, and Chinese merchants and resident foreign merchants use typewriters, and they are used in legations and in consular offices and in banks and shipping offices and colleges and by missionaries, by various people. Altogether there are sold in China a good many typewriters.—Washington Post.