The Rosetta Stone revealed the picture-to-alphabet principle, e.g. a picture of a ‘vulture’ to represent the sound of the phonetic letter ‘A’. Today, using the alphabet, we can translate English to other alphabetic scripts on the computer. But can we ‘literally’ translate English to the Chinese ideographic script with the same alphabet on the standard keyboard? The answer is yes! But how?

In 1961, while treating children with primary dyslexia in Lansing, Michigan, I showed them Chinese ideographs instead of Rorschach inkblots in projective testing. What might they see in Chinese ideographs? English letters! That led me to ask the question, entitling this report:

"What’s on the other side of the Rosetta Stone?"

That intriguing but unknown question started me on my journey to the East more than 31 years ago, through many nations, cultures, languages and friends, in search of the answer. And today, I have arrived at the frontiers of the 1992 American Translators Association’s annual conference at San Diego to report some of the most exciting episodes on my expanding saga. And in this paper, I wish to share the exciting discoveries with my colleagues, fellow translators, language specialists and general readers with an interest in foreign languages, what I can now read clearly on the ‘other side of the Rosetta Stone’.

And what little I can read on the stone inspires me daily with ‘boundless enthusiasm’ for life and for language work!

1. INTRODUCTION

On October 21, 1982, IBM sent Mr. Mike Ferguson to interview me in Lansing, Michigan, as the originator of the world’s first Pinxxiee English/Chinese Computer System (13), which made an historical breakthrough on December 15, 1981, to overcome the translation barrier that has frustrated linguists and educators for centuries, and thwarted engineers and computer scientists for many years in designing a practicable and efficient keyboard to manage a large ideographic set of Chinese characters - more than 60,000 ideograms in all!

People at IBM were surprised that it was possible to manage all 60,000 characters on the same standard IBM keyboard without additional hardware. IBM wanted to check out that solution. This solution, I was told, should be named the "Marco Polo Bridge" for international communication and multilingual translation. I said, "Great, we should, indeed, commemorate Marco Polo for all the good interpretive works he rendered on China and compensate him belatedly for all the shabby treatment he received from Europe!"

Back in focus, IBM wanted to find out in person how I achieved this unique solution using only the small standard 26-letter keyboard that surpassed IBM’s own ultra-large 2,500-character Chinese keyboard on System/34. To provide a coherent historical account of the discovery, here is the unpublished account of my personal and private interview with IBM in 1982:

2. HISTORY OF THE DISCOVERY

IBM: Dr. Tien, were you born in China?

Dr. Tien: Yes, I was born in Beijing, China.

Q: Where were you educated?

A: I was raised and educated in three cultures. I went through grade school in China; finished high school in Europe, and attended college in America.

Q: How did you happen to come to America?

A: I came to New York as a member of a diplomatic family, after World War II, when my father was appointed as a part of the Chinese delegation to the United Nations.

Q: When did you become interested in language work?

A: I grew up with it! I began my schooling in 1936, and learned to write with brush-and-ink as a child in Beijing; later with a fountain-pen as a teenager in a British boarding school in Portugal. And later, I learned to touch type proficiently on a Remington at Adrian College, from 1947 to 1951.

Q: Very interesting. What was your initial reaction to the use of an American typewriter?

A: Like most educated Chinese, at the first contact with the typewriter, I wondered about the possibility of touch-typing Chinese ideographic characters like English. But I did not go into mechanical engineering, since I was interested in the pursuit of ideas and the study of philosophy, ever since my St. Julian High School days in Lisbon, where I went to school with sons and daughters of diplomats from some 21 nations.

Q: What effects did these early multinational contacts have on your thinking?

A: I made wonderful friends with students speaking a variety of languages and encountered teachers with different religions and politics. I had to learn different ways of thinking and doing things. Stimulating to my brain, to say the least! Encountering so many languages and contradictory ideas in the world, gradually I became interested in a simple question: "How does the mind work?"

Q: What did you find out first?

A: My academic advisor told me at Adrian College that if I were interested in studying the mind, I had better study the brain first. And so, I decided to go to medical school and graduated with an M.D. from University of Michigan in 1955.

Q: What did medical school teach you about the mind?

A: In the four years of medical school, no one seemed to be teaching me what I wanted to know. So I took a degree in neurology while studying psychiatry. Naively, I learned to chase the idea that mind is electrical.

Q: So?

A: I took up post-graduate studies in electroencephalography (EEG).

Q: With all these activities, did you ever practice medicine?

A: Yes, I did hang up my shingle in East Lansing, right across from the Michigan State University campus and set up a very active practice in psychiatry and neurology, and served as a medical consultant for Lansing Child Guidance Clinic. And in 1961, while working with children suffering from dyslexia, I discovered by serendipity the first language fragment of what I named "Pinxxiee" (pin-shay, meaning phonics/graphics), a fragment of the second Rosetta Stone! (Ref. 3, 4, 5)

Q: What is this second Rosetta Stone?

A: To begin with, in 1961, I did not know a thing about the first Rosetta Stone, let alone the second Rosetta Stone! As a matter of fact, I never heard of it, until I saw the first Rosetta Stone in the British Museum with my family some years later in London.

Q: Then, how did you know you discovered anything?

A: At that time, I did not know what I had discovered. I did not unearth it from the ground, but I uncovered it from the mind.

Q: Doctor, let’s get real, then how did you discover it?

A: Well, while I was working with dyslexic children, I used projective tests. One day, I had a hunch and substituted Chinese characters for inkblots in the Rorschach test, and asked a child, "what might this be?" I wanted to find out if the child could see what I saw -- inverted and/or distorted English letters hidden in Chinese ideographs! The child did!

I knew it was an exciting finding, even though I did not know what exactly I had in my hand. Certainly, I did not know this Pinxxiee fragment was part of a large stone, and a basic link to the Rosetta Stone. I remember writing to the Encyclopedia Britannica's research department, to find out if anybody had ever done research of deciphering Chinese characters into English letters. The answer came back negative. No, nobody, to their best bibliographic search, when Britannica sent me the reference list. I did not even know at that time I was searching for the first Rosetta Stone.

Q: You have fired up my curiosity! How are these two Rosetta Stones related?

A: The first Rosetta Stone shows an inscription in Hieroglyphic, Demotic and Greek, commemorating the Ascension of Ptolemy in196 B.C.. It was unearthed in 1799, at Rosetta, Egypt. Later, Champollion (1790-1832) deciphered it and unlocked the literary treasures of ancient Egypt (Ref. 2.)

The original Rosetta Stone revealed the picture-to-alphabet principle, e.g. the picture of a ‘vulture’ to represent the sound of phonetic letter ‘A’. Today, using the alphabet, we can translate English to the alphabetic scripts of other foreign languages, like Spanish, French, German or Dutch.

On the other side, the second Rosetta Stone also has three scripts, Ideographic, Pinxxiee and English. It discloses the alphabet-back-to-picture principle, e.g. the phonetic ‘letters’ can draw pictures or represent ideographs. Thus, I cracked the ideographic code of Ancient China (Ref. 7, 8, 16).By serendipity, I discovered a global education alphabet for all written languages, and a new language tool for multilingual translation work.

Q: But what did you do with your discovery at first?

A: Armed with this new language tool, over a period of 10 years, in the evening hours after my medical practice, I began to translate hundreds and thousands of Chinese characters into English letters, one by one. I did more 10,000 ideographs by hand, just for the joy of seeing hieroglyphic ideographs in their alphabetic forms (Ref. 9, 10). The language data slowly grew and became large and unmanageable database, until I decided to go back to school again.

Q: Now, what did you study this time?

A: The demands of my two needs merged into one. To understand the mind as being electrical and to manage a large amount of language data, I needed to study electrical circuits, systems theory and pattern recognition models, and all leading to the study of electronic computer! (Interestingly enough, computer is translated to diaan nnaao, meaning electric brain, in my mother tongue, Mandarin). After four years I received another master’s degree in electrical engineering from the Michigan State University and gained some knowledge of computers relating to the human brain (Ref. 6).

Q: Seriously, did you find any relationship between the computer and the brain?

A: Yes, in some ways. They are both information systems that use languages. The languages used could be similar, that is binary, encoded in yes’s and no’s, or 1’s and O’s, or to a Chinese mind yins and yangs. That answered superficially my earliest question: "How does the mind work?"

Q: Why superficially? Did you go to school again?!

A: Because the idea that mind is simply a linguistic series of electrical pulses of yins and yangs or a hologram of negative and positive electricity opened up a new frontier of knowledge, the field of computer psycholinguistics with the brain as an information processing system. In 1969, I knew of no school that taught such a course. There was no school to go to, so what could I do?

Q: What did you do?

A: My original interest in "How does the mind work?" persisted and pervaded continuously my entire professional life. I began to teach myself the new subject, psycholinguistics. I read Wittgenstein, the foremost modern philosopher of linguistics, who proclaimed that there was no direct way of understanding the mind other than through languages. The science of psycholinguistics became my natural pursuit.

Q: What is psycholinguistics?

A: In psycholinguistics, I ask myself more questions. Questions like these:

1. If I read a different language, is my mind different?

2. Using the Chinese ideographic language as an example: since I learned a graphic language first as a child, is my mind significantly different from others who learned a phonetic script first?

3. How does the Chinese mind process and understand their ideographs? In what ways is it different from the English phonetic script processing?

4. Why did the Chinese written language remain ideographic?

5. Is the Chinese ideographic script really different from the English phonetic script?

6. Can the ideographic script be trans-alphabetized? That is, to use Wittgenstein’s metaphor, can I change a ‘rabbit’ into a ‘duck’?

7. How can the Chinese ideographic script be computerized?

8. Can we ever touch-type a Chinese poem or letter on the standard IBM keyboard like we touch-type English?

9. How does the brain relate graphics to phonetics?

10. How does the brain work in integrating graphics with phonetics to produce thoughts and our conscious mind?

Q: Have you arrived at any conclusions, yet?

A: Yes, some. I discovered a new field of work within psycholinguistics that I named psychographics (Ref. 16).

Q: What is psychographics?

A: The study of how the brain translates pictures into graphics, graphics to phonetics, and from phonetics back to graphics. In other words, how to translate what’s written on the hieroglyphic side of Rosetta Stone into scripts written on the ideographic side of the Rosetta Stone.

Q: What’s the practical value of your discovery?

A: We can now truly touch-type Chinese ideographic script like we touch-type English phonetic script with the same word processor on the same small standard 26-letter PC keyboard (Ref. 11, 13).

Q: What are your predictions for the future in this field?

A: I have three:

1. The Pinxxiee Theory will help bring unification of all written scripts, pictographic, ideographic or phonetic under one alphabet, the TiENSTROKES® Graphic Alphabet for global education.

2.Based on the Pinxxiee Theory, as international business increases, we will have many more bilingual word processors and we will be able to touch-type in our own native language and print out to any other selected languages of the world. That is, there will be personal multilingual machine translation systems using the standard small keyboard (Ref. 19).

3. The machine translation systems will never be 100 per cent automatic, but there will always be personal machine trans-editing systems, enormously powerful, but professional translators will be guiding them like pilots guiding jet planes.

IBM: Now, Dr. Tien, can you summarize succinctly all these exciting findings, both practical and theoretical for our readers?

Dr. Tien: Yes, in one line:

"We can read what’s on the other side of the Rosetta Stone!"

3. WHAT’S ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ROSETTA STONE

The world’s languages written in the TiENSTROKES script.

I will now present my findings of the past ten years (Ref. 13, 14) beyond the theoretical discussion, especially the translingual innovations and creative methodologies of TiENSTROKES Pinxxiee Language Technology, as applicable to Chinese character input, in terms of speed, accuracy, learnability, and zero rate of code duplication. Moreover, the Pinxxiee Language Technology transforms Chinese square ideographs into linear, computerizable, computerized, readable, Pinxxiee language, in accordance with the methods of innovative psychographics teaching methods. Pinxxiee is not merely a code, but a computerized and computerizable translanguage. Its innovation goes far beyond a mere input method of Chinese characters (Ref. 15, 17, 18, 19).

The basic building blocks of Pinxxiee Language Technology turned out to be the TiENSTROKES Transcodes between world’s written languages. The TiENSTROKES is the Global Education Alphabet (Ref. 3, 21) for all written scripts. The TiENSTROKES alphabet can be easily mastered by neuro-association between the 10 English phonetic letters, simulating 10 corresponding Chinese ideographic strokes,

which can be easily learned with a TiENSTROKES alphabetic mnemonic:

"Video Hot Line,

Jets Your Time!

Goes Perfectly,

Comes Zigzag!"

4. DISCUSSION

The TiENSTROKES Graphic Alphabet is both human-readable and learnable as well as machine-readable (Ref. 4, 5). The Pinxxiee Codes are also contained in the Pinxxiee bilingual and multilingual transcodes for human as well as for machine translations (Ref. 20, 21). The Pinxxiee English/Chinese Word Processor is now realized in software: PX 2001 (Ref. 18). The same TiENSTROKES Pinxxiee Bilingual Keyboard is also available for touch-typing Chinese as well any other phonetic scripts, like English (Ref. 7, 8, 9). The Pinxxiee Multilingual Keyboard for machine translation will be available for special projects (Ref.21). The introductory TiENSTROKES Game and Language System Module are now available for learning the Translingual Technology, without the use of computers, for beginners (Ref. 20).

In fact, the substance of TiENSTROKES PINXXIEE Language Technology was hitherto undisclosed until this present paper. I am describing a translation language technology based on the Pinxxiee Theory, the derived PINXXIEE Language Technology, TiENSTROKES Alphabet, Alphabetic-Ideographic methodology for computerization, including Chinese Character Input, Teaching Module and its translingual code, i.e. the Transcode for machine translation and its associated language technology (Ref. 10, 11).

PINXXIEE Technology is an historical invention, a method of transforming alphabetic symbols into graphic symbols, and Chinese ideographic characters are only a subset using this technology. I have given this invention the project name: Pinxxiee Rosetta Stone (Ref. 19, 20, 21).

In short, PINXXIEE Language Technology is a set of new innovations and inventions, the Golden Cable between languages, applicable to Chinese or ideographic character input, to computers or to education, to bilingual word processing, to machine-machine data transfer and computer translation works, to multilingual man-machine translations; and surprisingly, it is a universal Golden Cable, a PINXXIEE DOS, that facilitates information transfer via Corpus Callosum (Ref. 12, 14, 16) between the two hemispheres of the human brain, and as well as across the Pacific Ocean!

The TiENSTROKES Language Technology, with its innovations and inventions, is more than a simple method of inputting Chinese characters into computers. The Pinxxiee’s TiENSTROKES technique is to resolve the apparent ideographic-alphabetic dichotomy. Previous to this current discovery, there existed an inherent contradiction in programming an ideographic software with alphabetic tools such as computer editors, compilers and various other software utilities. Hence, the need for innovations and for creative solutions not only to input ideographic characters into the text but to input ideographic characters into the computer programs that run the word processors. Necessity is the mother of invention. The previous Pinxxiee word processing methodology is a byproduct of a new translation language technology for graphic character input in general and for Chinese character programming in particular, within the same alphabetic universe of the TiENSTROKES Alphabet (Ref. 21).

Although the graphical aspect can be handled using the available programming tools, the real difficulty lies in dealing with the thousands of available ideographs which need to be specified in program statements and data structures for prompts, menus, help displays, and such that can only be logically solved by the TiENSTROKES PINXXIEE methodology. And not by arbitrary codes as shown by the literature cited. TiENSTROKES can access according to various characteristics such as meaning, as well as radical shapes, phonetic (e.g. Pinyin, or English) pronunciations, and by arbitrary Arabic numbers with a mixture of shapes and sounds and tones (Ref. 11).

5. CONCLUSION

TiENSTROKES PINXXIEE Language Technology promises an extraordinary potential for improving the process of software development for China and for international use in machine translation. In objective analysis, this technology discovered, invented and created, simultaneously a fundamental unifying technique for representing script and orthography that bridges the otherwise enormous gap between ideographic and alphabetic languages. This technology makes it possible, for example, to use a readable, systematic (i.e., readily learnable) and unique representation for each English letter or for each Chinese character, or for any character of Indo-European alphabet or of ideographic languages.

Most importantly, TiENSTROKES PINXXIEE TRANSCODE can produce natural language dictionaries (Ref. 9, 10, 1.2, 15, 17) for machine translation for any language pair, e.g. English/Chinese, of the world’s languages, with flexibility and ease of expansion and update. Accordingly, three-dimensional bilingual dictionaries are needed to achieve acceptable machine translations between languages. TiENSTROKES Transcode dictionaries have these capabilities and characteristics.

6. SUMMARY

In focus, the TiENSTROKES Global Graphic Alphabet on the Pinxxiee Rosetta Stone created a basic translation tool in ‘the transformation of the English phonetic alphabet into Chinese graphic strokes and back to phonetic letters!’ In other words, we have the language technology that will enable us to touch-type on standard keyboard in our own native language and print out to any other selected languages of the world.

With the TiENSTROKES Alphabet, it is easy to use conventional ASCII encoding for representing text entries in databases, prompts in programs, in teaching and self-training manuals, in away that is much more portable than other schemes, and intelligible for multilingual translation systems and for global education.

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