This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, have been stashing away special Allusiobits all year, when the people who appeared on the show said interesting things that I couldn’t fit into their episode because there wasn’t room or it was not about language - waiting, just waiting, for this, the annual Bonus episode! This year we’ve got something called the ‘universal blank’, which actually does not refer to my emotions; we’ve got tricorn hats, poets with migraines, and why Boston cream pie isn’t a pie. And so much more.
Read moreAllusionist 153 In Character transcript
we think of all the important transformative game-changing global technologies in communication, like telegraphs, typewriters and computers: none of it was really designed with Chinese in mind. They were all for alphabetic, precisely English language.
HZ: It seems a bit unfair for China to be left behind by writing technologies, given that China had the movable type printing press centuries before Europe.
JING TSU: A fact they will continue to flaunt! That is the question; that's why the catching up was doubled with this memory of “How did we get to this point? We were leading, how do we now end up chasing someone else's writing system from behind?”
Allusionist 140 Num8er5 transcript
STEPHEN CHRISOMALIS: It's very hard, I think, to imagine that we didn't have to do this at all. We could have just not done it.
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