Alphasyllabaries:
Chinese is the only major language with nothing like an alphabet. Unlike Thai or Japanese, it doesn’t even use consonant-vowel sequences written as a unit – alphasyllabaries – but consists of many and varied characters. The typewriter jokes derive from 19th-century social Darwinists who saw Chinese as more primitive than Indo-European languages, and the opposite of English, with its neat set of 26 characters. And printers long complained about the incompatibility of Chinese script with movable type, forgetting it was invented in China 400 years before Johannes Gutenberg introduced it to Europe. [“A typewriter like no other,” Douglas Heaven reviewing The Chinese Typewriter: A history, by Thomas S. Mullaney, NewScientist (23 September 2017)]
