Learning Your 爱比西s: Translating Chinese into Morse code!

How do you translate Chinese into Morse code?

In the late 1800s, China was connected to the international telegraph network, and this was the big question! Morse code was originally conceived for transmitting English, and while it was extended to support other alphabetic languages, this didn’t work out of the box for character-based languages like Chinese.

In this talk, we’ll walk through the different encoding schemes used to convert characters to Morse code, their tradeoffs, and how some of the challenges are relevant to us still today!

Transcript

1. Learning Your 爱比西s
   Translating Chinese into Morse code!
   @thisisfranklin, !!con NYC 2020
   

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4. The Chinese Telegraph
   Code of 1871
   Take the most commonly used
   characters (~5,400)
   Map each of them onto 4 digits
   (0000 to 9999)
   Image: Obsolete Chinese telegraph code, Viguier 1872, Wikipedia
   

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5. The Chinese Telegraph Code of 1871
   https://translate-chinese-into-morse-code.glitch.me/
   

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6. Implications
   ● ~3,000 unused spaces
   ● Verbose and slow
   Image: Obsolete Chinese telegraph code, Viguier 1872, Wikipedia
   

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8. Plaintext vs secrets
   Saved money by having words that
   meant more:
   ● “Toothbrush” (secret) for
   “telegram has been delayed in
   transmission”
   ● “Gasping” (secret) for “send the
   goods that are ready, and
   expedite the remainder”
   To recoup costs, priced “secret”
   messages higher per word
   

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9. Trigraphs?
   4 digits 104 10,000
   4 letters 264 456,976
   3 letters 263 17,576
   A fancy word for “three alphabet letters”
   

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10. Trigraphs!
    冬
    0392 → ----- ...-- ----. ..---
    apb → .- .--. -...
    

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11. Trigraphs!
    

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12. Unfamiliarity with Latin characters
    a: 爱 h: 鴟 o: 窩 v: 霏
    b: 比 i: 藹 p: 批 w: 壼
    c: 西 j: 再 q: 摳 x: 時
    d: 諦 k: 凱 r: 阿 y: 喂
    e: 依 l: 而 s: 司 z: 特
    f: 夫 m: 姆 t: 梯
    g: 基 n: 恩 u: 尤
    

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13. Trigraphs!
    冬
    → 爱批比
    → .- .--. -...
    Plaintext and Secret Telegraph Code–New Edition (Shanghai: n.p., 1916)
    

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14. To compare...
    I like eating baos
    .. / .-.. .. -.- . / . .- - .. -. --. / -... .- --- ...
    我喜欢吃包子
    205308232970067605451311
    ..--- ----- ..... ...------- ---.. ..--- ...--..--- ----. --...
    ---------- -.... --... -....----- ..... ....- ......---- ...-- .----
    .----
    hbrtkurtgwicdwwddh
    鴟比阿梯凱尤阿梯基壼藹西諦壼壼諦諦鴟
    .... -... .-.- -.- ..-.-. - --..-- .. -.-.-.. .-- .---.. -.. ....
    Disclaimer: trigraphs are illustrative and not from actual code books
    

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17. Thanks!
    @thisisfranklin
    https://translate-chinese-into-morse-code.glitch.me/
    Sources
    ● The Chinese Typewriter, Thomas S. Mullaney
    

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