Reading about the last remaining telegraph stations in China closing a few months ago, we were excited for another look at the topic from the angle of the challenges overcome to adapt sinographs to telegraphy and more broadly to mechanical reproduction—ironically having invented the printed word but challenged with technology made for alphabetic encoding and decoding.
To overcome or work within the conventions of Morse code, the four-corner system (四角號碼檢字法) was put in place for characters based on cardinal shapes as an ununqiue identifier but winnowing it down (0000—9999) to a contextual range of possibilities that operators could interpret and pass along. This shape-based method (with help of gun-boat diplomacy and special entrepôts) declined with the reliance on telegrams but has seen a revival in numerical texting shorthand to limit the range of possibilities with natural word order. Much more from Language Log at the link above.
