Slashdot Mirror
You Say Tomato, I say Fan Jia Qie?
Troodon writes "The Guardian
reports
on
James Murdoch's
speech (
"You Say Tomato"
) to the
The Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival. In which he argues that given the
near-exponential internet growth?
of the worlds most popular language,
Mandrin (835 millon compared to 470 millon English speakers) and the potential of both
Spanish (330 million)
and
Hindi
(300 million), that the assumption that English (well
american-english
) is both the inevitable linguistic and cultural lingua franca of the modern age is flawed. That tailored localised content rather than some unthinking americanized homogenization is the way ahead, that "English will [sic] not become the "default language" of the digital world"."
You're entering into flamebait territory...
Most Americans can use metric. Everyone who has taken a science course has had to learn the metric system. It might be difficult for us to have an idea in our head exactly what size 180 cm is but we do know how to convert or at least estimate.
And, languages, even British English, do evolve over time. Languages are created by humans and can be changed by humans. So it doesn't really matter that the Americans spell "colour" without the "u". We (Americans) all know they're the same word, and so does everyone else.
Oh yea Slashdot needs a spell checker.
Or I need to learn English
Whatever
Yes I can not spell...Wait....for a second there I almost cared.
Umm...many countries have networks thtat can easily stand on their own.
If the US were to disappear off the net, it would be noticed everywhere, yes.. but the global internet would persist.
THe internet is not something you control.. it's a bunch of computers hooked together, and people can put whatever they *want* up there. NO, you have NO degree of control because you 'invented' it.
Mr. and Mrs. Yahoo Pushbutton can't buy a Hindi, Mandarin, or Spanish keyboard
I agree English will dominate for a while, but how long do you think the classic keyboard will be around? I'm not just talking speech recognition, which is still problematic, but think of the variety of new computing devices coming out, like phones, webpads, organizers, etc., with touch screens and so on.
I for one would like something like a standard keyboard, but reconfigurable: ie all the keys would have little lcd screens, and the keyboard could change according to the app. There's something so... static and hardwired about keyboards, just the way teletypes and early displays were hardwired for one character set.
Oops, my bad. You're right, of course. He just lived here.
Anyway, my point was that there are some things that weren't invented by Americans.
Drop Esperanto in favor of:
http://www.interlingua.com/
-- From Denmark
Sorry, but you are way off.
Hindi is, and will continue to be for a long time, the official language of India. It is spoken by over 50% of the Indian population. No other Indian language, or English comes close percentage-wise.
English is indeed a unifying language - but only among the technological or otherwise educated elite. I use the word "technological" as an adjective here : the people who are trained in technology are very few in number, and they make more money than the average Joe. The average Joe speaks the regional language, and (most of the time) some Hindi.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
"juice"? I got the chow hai bit, but how'd you do your post translation?
Simple fact: the web is centered around technology. The greater percentage of web use is technology related. English speaking countries, namely England and the United States lead the entire world in the development of technology (by volume, not by level of technology: Japan leads there). We also buy far more than any other country. So doesn't it make sence for the people creating the technology and using the technology would talk about it's creation and use in their own laguage? Doesn't it make sence that anyone wishing to break into this economy must learn to use our language to do so?
English is the defacto standard not because we arogant Americans made it so, but because all other countries did. I say keep the moronic fairness freaks out of free trade!
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
I think you mean Elisha Gray. Although Bell patented the idea first, it seems that his final prototype version borrowed from Gray's incarnation.
I've been getting 5-10 spams in Mandarin per day for months. Occasionally I get a german or spanish spam.
However, the last counts and projections I've seen on use of the internet engish speakers are by far the majority, with growth in China expected to be very modest (possibly due to lack of infrastructure or the central govt deciding who to trust or places party faithful in the role of snooping email, content, etc.) I've already conducted business with chinese parties via the net, but all, of course spoke the language of commerce (English)
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
China's insular attitude, however, prevented their languages from becoming any sort of "World Language." This is still true today.
___
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
In addition to being the language of business for most of the globe, it is also well-suited to electronic transmission, because of the relatively small alphabet. English is easilly done with good ol' one-byte-per-character ASCII text.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Hello, :)
Theres nothing wrong with it, I just wanted to point out that I had edited the young Mr Murdoch's text from 'would' to 'will'. Out of context of the rest of the paragraph, it didnt seem to flow well.
Release the hounds...
troodon.net
No. America is currently leading the race, and America currenlty develops most of the things that YOU want to look at.
Believe it or not, some countries, even outsdie the use, are per-capita MORE wired than the US, and have LESS red-tape involved in rolling out high-bandwidth. Sure.. they might not be as economically viable.. but it actually costs less to lay cable elsewhere.
America doesn't fucking 'run the internet'. America runs those portions of the internet that are IN AMERICA.
and since the internet, upon which Berners-Lee and others collaborated at CERN, was invented by Americans, perhaps they should have only conversed in English.
Do you see how stupid this can get?
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
> it is not something that is purely American.
You give some good reasons why Americans might by stupid. But I see no argument why they should not be.
My experience with U.S. people is that their horizon is very limited. They just can't imagine that there may be more than one truth.
Of course there are also lot of bright U.S.-Americans. Those that actually crossed the border (without falling off flat earth). Anyway, discussing this on Slashdot is a bit like preaching to the choir.
Post tenebras lux. Post fenestras tux.
1) that's not what "sic" conveys (it's meant for an error acknowledged). The right puncutation for what you did is [] brackets.
2) The real "(sic)" should have come after "become" because obviously the correct word is "be". English is *already* the default language of the digital world; the question is whether it will continue to be so in the future.
First of all, Mandarin is a spoken dialect; the written language (which I presume is what we're talking about with the Web) is called "Simplified-Character Chinese", or just "Chinese". It can be read by speakers of other dialects (Cantonese, Shanghainese, Shantounese, etc).
(and yes, the poster above is confused, too. Han is a race, not a language)
Second, remember that Murdoch has a reason to suck up to the Chinese. Remember his father's remark that "satellites are an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regiemes everywhere."? Well that cost Star TV (Murdoch's Asian sat venture) access to the China market for a decade. Since then father and son have let no opportunity to make ammends pass. Consider this another brown-nose exercise.
The way to beat this is to create an entirely new language. Just as a great OS would borrow bits and pieces from all other good OSs, a new language could be built that implemented the best qualities of all known languages, both past and present, and could be patched where it needed.
This way, we could avoid the idiotic nationalism involved in such a change, and the resulting language would be better than any existing language. People would *want* to learn it. We need to give it a name. How about NewSpeak? Or is that already taken...
Knunov
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
Judging from the submitted text of this story, English isn't [sic] the language of the web now.
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
int main()
{
printf("English, the language of the digital world? Now where would anyone get that idea?\n");
return 0;
}
Based upon the approximate order of the figures at this link . Just over 1%, which contrasts to about the 22% of the UK population, acording to OFTEL (boo hiss)
troodon.net
...what's Mandarin for first post, then?
Find funky gifts
There is software in common use which makes this possible: first type in pinyin and then select from a list of characters. This is probably the only system that anybody young enough to use a computer uses and is also the simplest as most young people can already write pinyin.
I like cake
There are several systems enabling you to type Chinese in ASCII type characters, but they all require an extended character set. I'm thinking of Pinyin, which requires a character set which I guess could be compared to Czech...
It still isn't basic ASCII though.
Plus, inasmuch as one who has failed to learn usable written Mandarin with a number of years' effort is permitted an opinion, I'd say that Chinese really isn't a practical language in the way that, for example, English, French, German, Spanish, or any other comparatively standard alphabet is. There's a reason for this comment, and it's this; Chinese dictionaries are essentially one-way systems.
You can translate into Chinese using a dictionary and only get it slightly wrong, but if you find a written character that you don't know, there's only one way of looking it up; go find somebody Chinese and ask them how to pronounce it. Then you can look up the phonetic sound and figure out which one it is. But, and this is a big 'but', unless you know how to pronounce it, you have a problem.
You don't get this problem in languages with simpler alphabets (Russian, anybody?) because their structures allow you to make a correctly functioning two-way dictionary.
If you ask me, this alone is enough to make Chinese a fundamentally web-unfriendly language.
Therefore I think it is only fair that we have some degree of control over which language is the standard for the Internet. Seeing as how the U.S. was almost solely responsible for the creation, mass marketing, and globalization of the internet as we know it, the United States' official language should be the official language of the internet.
:P
Of course if the main language of the U.S. is chosen to remain as the official language of the net, don't be too surprised if the net becomes dominantly Spanish in a few years
Emerson Willowick: Thinker, Writer, Human Being.
Feel free to counter with individual examples.. they are the exceptions that prove the rule.
As for the future, having the lead quite often assures dominance.
Wonder if Hemos ever use a spell-checker?
Mandarin ("Hua Wen" or "Zhong Wen") is spelled M*A*N*D*A*R*I*N but Hemos spelt it Mandrin.
But anyway, what's the great hooha now to search for the "default" language for the Net?
I mean, if the Net survives for another 100 or even 100,000 years, things that we can't even begin to imagine today will come to their own conclusion, by themselves. Who cares if that "default language" is English or not? Maybe, it's a combination of both - that'll bring us yet another question - Do we call it "Manglish" or do we call it "Endarin" ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Drop Esperanto in favor of:
http://www.interlingua.com/
-- From Denmark
Looks a lot like spanish is on the way to become in 20, 30 years the official US language anyway. Mostly everything administrative is done both in english and is spanish, and there seem to be more people not able to speak english than not able to speak spanish.
;-).
But heh, maybe in 50 years ubiquitous translation technology will make language barriers inexistant (and, according to Douglas Adams, cause an impressive number of wars in the process
OG.
No gramar or spelling peeves here.
It's a joke, laugh.
Here is something fun for your French. www.techmag.net It's kind of slow and not many people write in, but slashdot is cool in french. You can even get in a premier post.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
You quote the numbers of Mandarin, Hindu and Spanish speakers as though that were somehow related to the point. English isn't widespread because it has so many native speakers. English is widespread because it is the language of the (current) World Empire. 1500 years ago "everyone" (who was anyone) spoke Latin. 1000 years before that, "everyone" spoke Greek. Today "everyone" speaks English.
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
You did punctuate incorrectly on purpose, didn't you?
Refrag
I have a website. It's about Macs.
I am wondering, Will there be a time when knowing, just american english is not goog enough This Country does not focus on teaching its children multiple languages. I have freinds from out of the U.S. who learned to speak several languages as children. In the New World Economy They are worth more than most geeks because they can talk to more people... I think besides coding,peopl need to start learning how to speak other languages...
If we refuse to be flexible, we are in effect opting out of the game of life. The world moves on without us.
UTF is a compacted, variable-length version of UNICODE cleverly defined so that an ASCII string is also a UTF string (all the non-ASCII UNICODE characters set the sign bit in every byte, which isn't used by ASCII). The net effect is that the UNIX kernel can accept UTF strings for filenames, etc, without a single line of kernel code needing to be changed.
For the same reason as every other english speaker,so I don't have to learn another language. Sure, I can argue about english being a business standard and it's prominence as a second language, but when it comes down to it I know that I am functionally illiterate in most languages. Even after years of study, my ability in most other languages is limited to being able to count to ten and asking "where is the bathroom".
Seriously, the language of the future will be some horrible polyglot of mandarin and hindi with a bunch of english and spanish vocabulary. It won't be set up or dictated by any person or group, it will just slowly evolve from people all over the earth communicating with each other.Oh yeah, the esperanto speakers will still be trying to convince everyone to change.
This isn't meant to be an 'I told you so' but to highlight the fact in countries that have a lot of different languages (South Africa is included in this category) English tends to crawl to the top as a unifier.
Remember the some of the early student uprisings in South Africa were over the fact that English wasn't allowed to be taught in the tribal schools. It was one of the ways Apartheid worked...keeping the different tribes from organizing together.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
This is the best thread I have ever seen. Can't say I have read and understood. This is the future. Each person speaks his/her own language and the real-time interpreter takes over and translates it to the language you understand. Personally I would like to learn as many as I can...
Make Latin the default language, then EVERYBODY has to set their localization preference. This way, Latin makes a come back and no language gets more popular than another.
Just my two bits..
breech
yeah. thanks.
The way I see it, the original article was focussed on the "language of content" whereas many of the discussions have moved into discussing the "language of technology". I believe that they dont necessarily have to be one and the same.
English as the language of technology :
There is little doubt that this is true today. Will it be true for our lifetimes ? I would be willing to bet yes. Just one example: Developing programming languages and the supporting research in the field of compiler design in another language ( and then maintaining it ) is just too costly.
I would look for the decline of the english language as the language of international business and avaiation before it's decline as the language of science and technology. Since we dont see the first happening, I think we are safe in assuming that the second is far away.
Language of content:
Even if the internet was run by people proficient in english, there is little reason why the content cannot be in another language. I think the author of the original article was pointing out that global businesses must be in tune with this in order to run truly global businesses. Makes sense to me.
The difficulty arises when the two merge. How do you design a good GUI for another language when clearly the widget set and font system was designed by someone only for english. This is where there is bound to be great oppourtunity for people with multi-lingual skills. They will design solutions which will use english-based programming paradigms to create an english free user experience.
So, things will just co-exist. Just as it has in India. Even though a lot more people know hindi than english ( Btw, two-thirds DONT know hindi !!) english remains the the dominant language of big business, higher education, legal system etc. People might prefer Daler Mehndi to Sting but the license plates of their cars use english letters.
i was never one for syntax. but you get the gist.
where did i screw up? it's been 4 years since i last spoke the language.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
The reasons why I think this researcher's conclusions are illogical are several. First, English is one of the most widely spoken languages. Second, curriculum in most foreign schools now require learning english. Third, perl, html, c, java, xml, even python are all based on the english language. If you want to program, you have to know english. It might not be THE spoken language of choice for many people of the world, but it is definitely the language of the web. Heck, the Linux source is in english (well, the comments anyways, but you get my point).
witty sig goes here
Keyboards are trivial to replace.
Splitter cables are easy to come by and cheap.
I can't immagine that some company isn't already making a few dozen different _cheap_ keyboards for everything from Korean to Vietnamese, let alone Japaneese and M. Chineese.
If you're American, when is the last time you used a British keyboard? (If British, reverse the question.)
Code is different, though.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
You see, I believe one of the things computers should be able to do is overcome the limitations of the human ability to learn languages (quite difficult and time-consuming after about age 10) to let people communicate with each other, at least in text format. If services like Babelfish can translate crudely between European languages now, how long will it take before there's a version that can do it between Hindi and English, or Hindi and Mandarin for that matter? Not long, I hope.
For a start, here's one interesting link: WorldLingo. (Featuring Japanese-to-English! I don't know how well it works.)
Freedom: "I won't!"
It is easy to see the early colonial powers have a strong influence on the language with French being taught in quite a few central African countries and English in the southern African countries. While Chinese will undoubtedly have a large impact on the internet if and when a bulk of China comes online, the basic fact that a sizeable portion of the Chinese population live without electricity, we cannot count their entire population as netizens.
Also, according to the factbook, English remains one of the most used languages in India while the official language is only spoken by 30% of the population.
While English will always be dominant in one form or another, I don't think anyone will actively allow it to become the only language of the net. At least I hope not. There are just some things that need to be in the original language. French euphemisms need to be in French. A Russian novelist is better when read in Russian.
Ideally, the globalization of languages on the net will mean more Americans are exposed to different languages and while not necessarily being able to speak and write in them, but be able to comprehend them to some degree.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
www.techmag.net
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Sorry, that sounds like a regular "U" not "Ü"
If you want a wowel that seems unpronounceable to english speakers, try "U" as pronounced in northern europe. Ask Linus Torvalds how he pronounces "Linux" or his own name...
(Damnit, I know I had a link to a soundclip with him somewhere)
All opinions are my own - until criticized
I have no problem watching Tarantino in German translation.
If you can't get the meaning through to another language it is probably a poem.
If not, well, who cares. German literature is completely meaningless in international comparison because they are basically just old farts complaining about incompetent readers.
Post tenebras lux. Post fenestras tux.
I've been reading news reports that indicate something like 700,000 Chinese troops are in Sudan, ready to support the Islamic government against a Chritsian insurgency.
So, perhaps we'll have Mandarin Chinese taught in African schools, sometime in the future....
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Hey, how come is it they won't let you register domain names with arbitrary Unicode characters in them? Why can't you buy www..com? Yes, this is perfectly valid: the name is UTF8-encoded and then %-encoded as part of the URL (and the DNS specifications do allow binary data). If I didn't mess it up too much, (your browser should show this as two Chinese ideograms) means "China" in Chinese (disclaimer: I don't know Chinese).
Before such languages as Chinese and Hindi become truly usable on the Internet, support for the Unicode standard will have to make much progress. Click here to see how badly your browser supports Unicode.
A few years back on SNL -Weekend Update Norm McDonald gave this report:
"It was anounced today that the official language of all aviation pilots around the world will be English. Turns out that all the other lanquages are just weird."
"It's all right, it's ok. There's something to live for" - Uncle Bill
An example: Japan is also part of the high-tech world: even though it is not in Europe or North America, it is where a lot of the technology in "high-tech" western Europe and North America comes from.
The same thing can be said to a somewhat lesser degeree of South Korea and Taiwan. Hong Kong and Singapore are also highly developed.
I like cake
Time flies like an arrow
There was a great explanation about the "common languages" of history posted on Slashdot a few months back (maybe longer -- I tried searching for it, but I can't even remember which story it was commenting on). If anyone can find it, please post it, I think it is a very relevant bit of information. As it is, I'll try to summarize:
I can't remember what the poster said about earliest history, but by the time of the Roman Empire, the lingua franca was Greek. Sure, the "official" language was Latin, but it wasn't really spoken in the far-flung corners of the Roman Empire -- but Greek tended to be, so everyone spoke Greek and whatever their regional language happened to be.
Then came French, and its dominance lasted for centuries, up to very recently. Every foreign dignitary spoke his or her native language, of course, but how does a government official from Prussia discuss politics with the ambassador from England? Through French, of course.
Only recently (last hundred years or so) has English become the lingua franca of the age. It's not the most-spoken language -- it is the most wide-spread (spoken in the most places). (As the poster above mentioned, it is the most common second language.) The pervasiveness of the Internet and its foundation within an English-speaking culture only serves to further the spread of the langauge. And I'm not even going to address how much like the Borg the English language is, assimilating pieces of damn-near every language it comes in contact with.
Not to unduly state harsh stereotypes, but most of the scenes of rural China I have seen (like on travel documentaries, the Discovery Channel, etc.) depict areas and a culture barely emerged from the Middle Ages: these people barely have electricity and running water. Again, I'm not passing judgement; history is filled with the wonderful exploits of the Chinese, from writing to gunpowder to architecture and military conquest. But I think the total number of Mandarin-speaking people in the world is a misleading statistic, because I doubt even half have access to a computer, and fewer still have access to the Internet.
"I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. I'm all out of bubblegum." MSE USC APX AIA CSI CASp
Apart from the second language argument, much of the technological innovation comes from countries who either speak English or have it as a dominant second language.
I don't see China designing new Microprocessors, or encouraging the kind of free thinking needed to compete on internet time. For the most part the high volume contenders are mostly rural and second world (?) in nature.
Murdoch is probably pandering because he wants to move into China. Let's face it when it comes to online business Murdoch has shown so much acumen that his ventures to date have been an utter disaster.
I love these broad, sweeping statements made by people who have experience with at most two or three languages, all of which are European ;)
Try learning Japanese. Then try learning Chinese. Next, try Thai.
Japanese is easy to speak, a real bitch to read. Chinese is about as hard to read (a lot easier if you know Japanese), but a lot harder to speak for someone who doesn't have any experience with tonal languages. Thai is easier to read than either Japanese or Chinese, but is tonal, so it's about as hard to speak as Chinese. Korean is about as easy (or slightly easier) to read as Thai, but about as hard to speak.
Thus, coming from a European background, you would find Chinese and Japanese the hardest to read, and Chinese/Thai/Korean the hardest to speak.
Face it, there's an awful lot of different languages out there, and no generalization will apply to all of them (or even a majority of them).
I agree with the words but disagree with the sentiment.
It won't becouse it has...
The failing is the notion that the default language has yet to be selected...
Reality is that language was picked in the 1980s..
The alternitive is Babblefish or some similer agent.
English in my view sucks eggs...
But shear numbers in the real world won't budge the vertual world.
To be exact it's broken english... not American english.
The masses may not speak it.. but thats where the Internet is.
Most websites have a US or UK flag for the english version.. or are english by default.
IRC channels function in much the same way.. mostly english.
On IRC I personally tolerate chatter in any language as long as at least two people speak the language. If only the speaker knows what he is saying then I'll get annoyed.
But I'm the rarity...
Not all IRC channels are english of course.. just the majority..
Usenet.. how many people twitch to read (or even type) "This is an international newsgroup please use english"... It's irritating but thats the way it is.
The Internet is... in short... United States centric... It's foundation is in english.
expect to see more and more non-english websites.. irc channels.. and newsgroups...
But at least for now... to be involved the language is English...
Once the net is larg enough to support a more diverse language base this will cease to be....
And then we'll all need BableFish built into our web browsers....
I don't actually exist.
Philosophy, physics, maths, medicine, theatre, democracy, well civilisation basically, was essentially invented by the ancient Greeks. I therefore submit that all the above activities should only be conducted in Greek. Entaxi, vlaka?
Greeks may have been the forefather of Western Civilization, but I doubt they should be given credit for all civilization. Some asain civilizations have been around for a lot longer. I believe even Egypt was around longer. It was the Romans that brought civilization to every one when the conquered most of the known world (except the scots and Ireland).
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
Indo-Germanic, to be precise. Never mind that this kind of linguistic relationship is hardly sufficient to make a language easy to
learn; do you consider Hindi an easy learn?? Just nitpicking...
The nitpicking continues...
I guess it's a bit US-centric to believe the influence of English is due to the US
I doubt that I'm US-centric given the fact that I'm German and never lived anywhere else than in Europe. You may be right about the Commonwealth, though. The point I tried to make is that the dominance of English is due to economic and political reasons, not due to the fact that it's easy to learn.
One of the easiest explanations I have seen for English speakers on how to pronounce "Ü" is as follows:
Put your mouth in the postion to say the "oo" in say "moon" - now without moving your mouth say "ee" as in "lean".
Hope that helps...
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Funny. That is Thüringen, a former part of the GDR.
Post tenebras lux. Post fenestras tux.
interlingua is simply based on the most known words in the 3 largest languages of European origin.
Learn more here: www.interlingua.com or
www.interlingua.org
-- From Denmark
The 300 million Hindi speakers is actually only 30% of the 1 billion people in India. Forget about the internet, this language can't even dominate one country, or even knock English out of their own government.
From the CIA World Factbook
"INDIA:
Languages: English enjoys associate status but is the most important language for national, political, and commercial communication, Hindi the national language and primary tongue of 30% of the people, Bengali (official), Telugu (official), Marathi (official), Tamil (official), Urdu (official), Gujarati (official), Malayalam (official), Kannada (official), Oriya (official), Punjabi (official), Assamese (official), Kashmiri
(official), Sindhi (official), Sanskrit (official), Hindustani (a popular variant of Hindi/Urdu spoken widely throughout northern India)
note: 24 languages each spoken by a million or more persons; numerous other languages and dialects, for the most part mutually unintelligible"
This sentence no verb.
Don't know about you guys but it would just seem sooooo wrong to type http://diagonalpunto.org (That's slashdot in spanish)
Dammit Jim! we've been here before! -- Bones.
That's not the correct way to produce HTML, anyway.
To get an ü you write ü
ö is ö
Uppercase letters are written like this: Ä = Ä
Another important one is ß = ß
Post tenebras lux. Post fenestras tux.
I think discussing if english will be the language of the web is a moot point. Because of historical reasons it will have strong english roots, but calling it english?
I don't think chinese or hindu will replace english for technical (ascii, keyboards etc...) and political (the US control the web) reasons. But I'm sure that the language will be transformed by all those non-english people.
When most people barely speak a foreign language, they usually take their own language and translate the single words. This gives very mixed results. The problem is different languages have different gramatical structures and different cultural contexts. Programs likes Babelsfish fare so poorly because they don't understand what they translate and so cannot map the cultural references etc...
In short, translation is not easy. There are not serious automated tools, and most people cannot make good translations, so they will make bad translations. Economically, it makes more sense to get used to the bad english of people around the world, than teaching them correct english.
Will you call the resulting thing english? if it pleases you. You can also pretend that english is just some bad french and german slapped together. IMHO the resulting language will be some wierd esperanto with the following characteristics:
- Not spoken (people write bad english)
- Uses simple ascii/latin character set.
- Politicaly Correct (foreign speakers are not the only driving force, think about marketoids and lawyers).
- Very simple grammar (the kind you can map into any language).
- Context independant vocabulary - the kind of stuff programs like Babelfish can translate.
- No clear or stable spelling - english already has two variants, and spell-checking is out even on
./.
In broader sense, maybe there will be no human internet language (in the sense that somebody speaks it), but merely some virtual language. Imagine, in a few years all people will surf in their native language with on the fly translation.It will be nice for me, I will be able not to worry about the diferent spellings for the same word between French and English.
Surprisingly enough, it worked ;) I've never tried posting in Japanese on Slashdot, mainly because I assumed that it wouldn't pass the codes correctly, but now that I think about it, some people have been using usernames with umlauts, etc. - no reason why EUC or S-JIS shouldn't work, then (although I think you'll find that Slashcode would choke on JIS; not that I've tried it, but I think it would probably strip out the escape codes.)
But this is only because English is the language the United States, which the most powerful nation on Earth at the moment, and not because of any mystic superiority of the language. But as you Brits should know, it is easy to go from the master of the world to obscurity in an amazingly short amount of time. If the United States becomes obscure, well, there will be no reason to stick with English.
You seem to have a bit of trouble with your statments. Basically they're crap and unfounded. Well guess what... In India (Where Hindi is spoken!) The universal language of trade, in all provinces is you guessed it, ENGLISH. Look it up, but even the Hindi speakers of the world realize that the language of global business is alwaysthe language of the man with the $$$.
You seem to be suggesting that english is spoken in india because they all reckon that english is the language of choice because The U.S. is the most powerful nation in the world, with the strongest economy(Thus the man with the $$$).
Erm, bullshit?!
First, india is a nation of over 1billion.
You take any area containing 1 billion people and there will be several languages there to get all those people speaking they'll all need one language.
i.e, Hindi is the National language of India, but there are 24 other regional languages there, accounting for the primary languages of 70% of the population.
The reason English is spoken in india is because it was ruled from 1858 - 1947 by the British Crown. Hence all the official institutions were undertaken in ENGLISH. In order to get anything done, the people in india had to speak english to their British authorities
It's not because the population of india sat down and thought learning english would be a good way to earn some money from all those rich nations.
In addition, india's earning money fine at the moment;
Modern India
Fastest developing Economy. Seventh Largest Country in the World. Largest Democratic Society in the World Till recently adopted Mixed Economic policy. One of the world's top 10 industrial powers. Approximately 6% per annum economic growth. Acquired break-through in all major fields. New reforms speeding up the economic progress.
And as for that very cheeky reference to How many of those Mandrin people do you think are still living in huts, with no electricity or running water?
I take it you mean the chinese, because mandarin is just a language.
Well, china has the second largest GDP in the world, with only 10% below the poverty line., as opposed to india with 37% and america with 12.7% below the poverty line. And these are all the CIA's offical statistics, so allow for US ballet stuffing and figure adjustment.
Next time don't let your bigoted preconceptions get the better of your reasoning and opinion.
ref: CIA WORLD FACTBOOK 2000
Hmm... ok, here are a couple of examples. I'll bet much of the hardware in the computer you are using right now was made in Taiwan. Furthmore, I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of your consumer electronics items (TV, VCR,CD/DVD player) were made by Japanese companies.
I'm a gnu world man.
Here's the deal on Hindi.
There are something like 200 separate languages in India. There are at least an additional 500 dialects of these languages. The variations in these dialects are so great the people in one village have trouble understanding people in the neighbouring village, even though they speak the same language. Historically, Indians tended to marry and socialize with in the same language-group and tiny kingdoms, so not a lot of effort was made in communications.
Although Indians now tend to be multilingual, there really wasn't any common language in India. Then the British came along, grouped all the princedoms in the Indian subcontinent into a single country, and created the government and international business there. So English became the language of business and law, and therefore education because you needed English to get ahead.
Hindi didn't really become a national language in India until the movie industry took off. (Fun Fact: the Indian movie industry, by volume, is bigger than Hollywood.) Hindi movies -- splashy musical formula-films -- became immensely popular. So people learned and used Hindi to understand the movies better. (Seriously.)
Currently, English and Hindi are the only nationally spoken languages in India. State languages (i.e., Gujarati in Gujarat, Bengali in Bengal, etc.) are widely used and spoken at the state level.
I can spell. I just can't type.
For example, a Mandarin businessman would read a letter out loud in his language, and it would sound totally different from how a Cantonese girl would pronounce it, but mean the exact same thing...although they cannot carry out a conversation with each other, they CAN write down what they want to say, and the other person will understand it.
So, the number tally for Mandarin speakers is accurate at ~835 mil, but the number of people who would be able to interpret a Chinese webpage is in the billions...think Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese, any Fukien, any other dialect of Chinese, and some Japanese (the script has been partially borrowed).
Of course, this number will still be far less than the total Chinese population of the world, because only literate persons would be able to use the technology.
Indeed, French is meaningless compared to Mandarin, Hindi, English, Spanish... But don't forget French is spoken in Switzerland, Belgium, Canada and most of Western Africa. I'm not even counting all former or actual French colonies.
It's important that information can reach those who don't and/or can't get to learn English. You'd be amazed by the amount of people who can't speak English, even in industrialised countries, and I don't see a valid reason for marginalising those people...
As long as there's real translators, things will be fine. And it should provide good jobs to those who can master several languages. Heck, I'm working on a site that's supposed to be in a dozen languages or so, and lemme tell you the translators take big bucks...
.max
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
Let me just point out that once upon a time there used to be a Russian Empire that subsequentially became the Soviet Union. The SU had almost 300 inhabitants, most of whom spoke Russian at native level. And it had been virtually the lingua franca in the rest of the Eastern Block (approx. 70 millions), but the standards of Russian there were way worse than inside the SU even though Russian had been a mandatory subject in the elementary schools. The slavonic people learned it pretty good, nevertheless (Polish speak Russian very well, since it is close to their native language, and most of Poland has been a part of the Russian Empire). :-), etc.
English may very well share the same fate if the American economy encounters a major crisis, which is not as impossible as it seems to be, taking in consideration the declining standards of education in US. /. discussion (note, that it has 32 letters :-).
It's quite interesting, that the article ignored Russian completely.
The push for eliminating Russian begun as soon as the Russians lost their dominance. Nevertheless, in that region the national TV stations broadcast movies in Russian without subtitles, the language of science and technology is still Russian (LUG meetings are usually in Russian
The metodology of spreading Russian is actually better than the one of English, one just has to look at the illiteracy rates in the English speaking countries and in the former SU. The standards of Russian are also way higher there, than the standards of English, even in U.S. themselves.
Russian has also all the features mentioned in the article and in the subsequent
He misspelled 'localised.' The correct spelling is localized.
"Those who would sacrifice freedom for a little temporary safety deserve neither freedom nor safety" -Ben Franklin
Why aren't there translators built right in to modern programming languages, so that I can write it in English, but if you are a Mandarin speaker and want to read my code you simply have to hit a button (or whatever) and it translates the results into the Mandarin version. We are not talking a lot of actual words here. Most computer programming languages probably have no more than a couple of thousand "words" in use. A lot of flags etc could be kept the same.
This ought to be just as true of Operating Systems. I imagine the Chinese government is busily redefining the text in "Red Flag" Linux for instance.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Usted está no haciendo caso del existance de las herramientas tales como Babelfish. Sé esto no es una traducción perfecta pero soy seguro que usted puede entenderme OK.
I would have to say that binary and mathematics are the true digital language... Half of my prof's here don't even speak real english, but we communicate just fine using math concepts... The foundation of the new electronic frontier--one russian C++ professor at a time--okay maybe english isnt my first language either...
mov ah, 0
mov al, 13h
int 10h
mov ax, 13h
int 10h
Indeed, French is meaningless compared to Mandarin, Hindi, English, Spanish... But don't forget French is spoken in ... Canada.
... just behind Tagalog. Your first statement is dead on. Particularly with Mandarin and Hindi, which are 2 and 3 behind English respectively.
Well, just to pick nits, French (Quebecois, actually, which real French speakers regard as a bastardized creole) is spoken in Quebec and a couple nearby pockets. In the majority of the country it's a nonentity.
For instance, here in Vancouver French is the 49th most common native language of children enrolled with the Vancouver school board
This is a fairly complicated topic. First of all, in many areas of China mandarin is not the language commonly spoken by the native people.There are many "dialects", a misnomer in that dialects of Chinese are dialects in the same sense that Spanish, Italian and French are dialects of one another- many Chinese dialects cannot be understood by Mandarin speakers. For example, say we are in Shanghai. Local people all speak Shanghainese to each other (Shanghainese is one of the main Wu dialects, which are spoken in east-central China). Shanghainese and Mandarin have about the same relation as English and German, or possibly more distant. Still, everybody in Shanghai is taught Mandarin in school, and most television is in Mandarin. Plus, written Chinese is more or less the same no matter what dialect you speak, although there are some minor differences.
On the mainland, most everybody has to study a "second language", actually a third language(the favorites are English(probably over 90%) Japanese and Russian);however, people there have the same problems that Americans have in that they have little chance to practice speaking and small chance of ever going to another country where they have the chance to interact with native speakers.
In addition, Chinese English instruction is more focused on written language anyway. As a result, many educated people can read and write quite well, but if you talked to them would have more difficulty in communicating.
I like cake
Cantonese, Malayalam, and Portuguese?
No. It's English. Nearly all educated Mandarin and Hindi speakers also know English, and the don't always know Cantonese or Malayalam.
Jackie Chan once made a movie where he played a man from mainland China, so he insisted on doing it in Cantonese, with subtitles for the Hong Kong audiences. His cantonese was so bad that no Cantonese speaking people could understand a word he said. His English, by contrast, is very good. This is typical of Mandarin speakers, because Hong Kong was part of the English commonwealth for a long time, and a great deal of Chinese speakers use English to bridge the Mandarin-Cantonese language gap.
Also, Portuguese only matters in two countries: Portugal and Brazil.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Here you go:
Your version:
ca c'est tres amuse. mais je suis american - donc...vas tu faire enculer!
My version:
C'est très amusant, mais je suis un Americain - donc vas-te faire enculer!
Remarks:
In case you see in me a grammar Nazi or so, don't be mistaken...I barely know the grammar of the languages I speak/write: I do it by feeling and that works quite well.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Aside from that, the article says that Murdoch is a "Media magent" damn right, he seems to attract it like iron filings doesnt he. I note his sone also says that it needs to be less monolithic and more tailored to the country, of course, introducing a game whose format is being sold all over the world isnt monolithic imposition? We can say goodbye to local individualities in the Murdoch world.
Sorry - my keyboard can't product an umlaut without copying one from a previous post.
:), the accents have disappeared. The spoken communication barrier is gone.
But getting back to my original point -- everyone who speaks English has h{is|er} own dialect/accent which might make it slightly incomprehensible to others; most of those differences dissolve in the printed word.
E.g. I work in the Physics & Astronomy dept. at the University of Pittsburgh. I'd say about 40% of profs/post-docs/grad students are not from the USA and their native language isn't English (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) I often have trouble understanding their English through their own accents. I suspect that some might have trouble understanding me through my Pittsburgh accent'n'nat.
However, the primary means of communication is through e-mail. Although the vocabulary might be different (different dialects of English learned, as well as the fact that they are Physics people
I suspect the same would apply if I were working in a non-English speaking country; my spoken Spanish is bad and my German is even worse; but in print (read: e-mail) I could get by.
DrQu+xum: Proof that the lameness filter doesn't work.
So what you're saying is, because I don't speak German or Gaelic, then I have no chance at understanding my German or Gaelic cultural ancestry? Gimme a break! That's the kind of nationalistic bullshit that Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, and the rest of the kooks all admire.
I have great respect for my cultural heritage, but I don't let that run my life.
Face the facts. Nationalism has no place in the global community, which is what the Internet is. If you don't like it, get offline.
You should be able to read the Chinese characters in this post if you're using IE or Mozilla and have a Unicode font with Chinese.
Otherwise you can look it up in .gif at this cool Chinese character site and hear it pronounced here (when it's back up?).
I've done some work with Hangul for our Korean employees, and though its somewhat straightforward, the problem is that pages become "binary", so you have to treat them like images, even though when you load 'em up in emacs they're not, and it handles it. Having said that, it's still a bunch of fun dealing with different character sets.
I work rather closely with several people whose native language is Mandarin. When they talk amongst each other about project details, they'll often speak Chinese, but a fair amount of the vocabulary is English -- as they've explained, there simply are some concepts that don't translate.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
That's correct; and by the same token, Japanese is actually #2. Over the years I've had contact with lots of Japanese and even picked up a little of it. Everywhere from arcade games in the early eighties, fighting games in the 90's, and recently comments in the Sega code for the Dreamcast SDK.
As far as the internet is concerned, the majority of it is hosted in the United States (and in fact, most of that is probably in California). The people making the web pages speak English; their customers speak (mostly) English, and their employers expect them to write in English. Hence, it dominates.
I suppose it's not terribly fair, but there you go.
When referring to your nationality it sounds awkward to me to omit the article ("un")...I could be mistaken of course
:)
There's no problem with that, any more than there is omitting it in English.
"Tu" and "Te" would both be translated into english as "you", but they are different. Unfortunately I lack the grammar lingo to explain the difference.
Tu == subject. Te == object. Yes, it's more complicated than that, but let's start simple
IIRC, the "zhe" sound is not native to English, and words that use it (garage, corsage, massage, etc.) are actually of French origin.
Also, sometimes words from other languages are used to apply more precision... "Boredom" does not describe the weary unhappiness of a dull life as well as "ennui".
Other times, the original word and language fits the concept so well that there is no point in translating it. No language that I know of quite has the equivalent of the German word "schadenfreude".
In the case of technology, the English words are used just about everywhere, (except France, where they insist on making up new "french" words for everything that gets invented, just so they don't let any of that vulgar English creep into their language).
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
How many of those 800M Mandarin (Chinese, I believe) have net access, anyway? Or 300M Hindi speakers (although I would give them a better chance than the Chinese)? Why is that? Partially politics, mostly economics (okay, these are tied together).
Wasn't there a discussion a while back concerning the effects of English on programming? Most languages I've seen (well, all the ones that are'nt assembler!) use English keywords. Why is that? :)
These Mandarin-speakers probably have more important things to worry about than what language their net access is in-- like escaping the secret police for instance. People will probably try to say that the 'net is a great democritizer, but remember that the Chinese government censors the net at the backbone!
Actually a lot of people in HK do not speak mandarin they only speak Cantonese and English, and the ones that do a lot of them speak it only so-so and have accents. People in Guangdong and are different because in the PRC everybody has to learn putonghua; however, still most people have an accent. It is almost always easy to tell when a native cantonese speaker is speaking "guoyu" because their tones and pronounciation are different from standard. This goes both ways, of course, as you can also usually tell a native mandarin speaker from the way they speak cantonese and the words that they use.
It's not that one is easier than the other, it's that they are different languages.
The reason that more cantonese speakers speak Mandarin than Mandarin speakers speak Cantonese is that Cantonese is a regional "dialect", whereas Mandarin is the national language: now most every young person in all of China and Taiwan all must learn to speak Mandarin, but only people in Guangdong and HK speak cantonese. For people in other parts of China, there are a lot of other Chinese "dialects" that you rarely hear about, and usually people only speak their own one really well, but at the same time they speak mandarin with an accent.
I like cake
AFAIK, English is the worlds biggest second language. If two people from different countries want to communicate, english is the most likely common denominator.
As you are introduced to the larger world, t makes sense to learn the language used there. In order for this to be Mandarin, you'd need a massive influx of Mandarin speakers _and_ people learning to speak Mandarin as their international language. Not likely at the moment, but certainly possible later if China makes a big push for internet access for all. If, instead, they merely contine introducing people to the internet in dribs and drabs, the slow conversion will continue.
_____
My Journal
(a) Ooi! Jangan tindak begitu kasar loh!
(b) Aye! Pu yau che' yang mah...
(c) Hai! Anang nuan pahit angat!
(d) Aya! Lei moh kam yong mah!
(e) Ooi! Mai ane kuan lah!
(f) Hey! Don't be so harsh!
Other than the "western" languages, there is also:
(a) Malay/Indon : spoken by 300M people of Malaysia,Indonesia,and Singapore
(b) Mandarin : spoken by, say, 800M?
(c) Iban : spoken by about 1M people in the jungle of Borneo
(d)+(e) Cantonese and Hokkien : Spoken by southern Chinese (including Hong Kong).
(f) English.
The point is that most people elsewhere, by virtue of being non-native English speakers, speak more than 1 language if they want to communicate with other people in the world.
As for single-language speakers, the worst offenders are Americans and English (and French hehe), just because they don't need to speak another.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
Let not lose sight of the fact that it's a waste of time to quibble about whose typing method is faster, the important thing to remember is that a QWERTY keyboard CAN be used and IS being used to type Chinese, already for several years and is a viable method for chinese to use a computer.
I like cake
does anyone else see the problem with this?
many non-english languages have characters that aren't part of 7-bit ascii....
and isn't mandarin based on a huge array of symbols? since obviously this isn't gonna happen via raw text, it really becomes another language entirely when transcribed with phonetics... and where does the inflexion go? how can we be sure what we think the word is is really what the author intended?
true, english does have this problem to an extent, but in a language where a half dozen unrelated words are pronounced exactly the same other than the tone of your voice....
correct me if i'm wrong, but i haven't seen a standard system for writing inflexions with text.
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
Everyone should learn Lojban. It is a language designed to be logical, clear, and easy to learn. There is no reason that the world should not pick a good language to standardize on.
Take a look at what the most common *second* language is for all those Mandarin, Hindi, and Spanish speakers.
Next, note that Mandarin is extremely difficult to touch-type; there are a few Big-5 word processors out there, but it doesn't have anywhere near the support base of *any* of the European languages, with their repeatable phoneticization and limited character set. Hindi has many of the same problems - look how many Indian programmers there are, then look at what languages they write in. English-derivatives, right.
English has an installed-user base in computing that dwarfs the other natural languages.
English also has a head start because it is already in place as the language for aviation.
The XYZ-language will become the default language of the world/culture where it is used most. At the moment the digital world has the most English speaking inhabitants, regardless of how many other speaking people are in the world in total. I don't see more than 470 million Mandarin speaking digital world users in the near future.
Western-Canadian(I assume) Guy,
There are 1 million French-speakers in Canada who don't live in Quebec.
Even if Quebec disappeared entirely tomorrow there would *still* be more French-speakers in Canada than any other language except for English.
(Chinese at 3/4 million would still be 3rd). There are whole communities of French-speakers that speak interesting and different forms of French from that of the Quebecois that you are so casually dismissing.
"Real French speakers" do not regard the French spoken in Quebec as a creole. French in Quebec is a full version of the language with many of its own characteristics. You either a) don't know what a "creole" is or b) are making a slur. Language rivalry between Quebecers and French people is similar to the rivalry between American and British English. Noone in either country genuinely thinks the other is speaking a creole. Lame-ass jokes aside.
[We don't come from a planet. We come from a grid sector.]
Boy you can tell /. has a predominant west coast or maybe southern crowd, given all of the posts about spanish becoming the main language of the US. Come to the midwest, you would be lucky to find more people speaking spanish than german, chinese, japanese, etc.
Funny and I thought Perl == Paid employment recently located
I guess that would be true if we had language develop without widespread communication. In the western United States. There is little to no accent difference between Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Oregon and neighboring states. Comparing this to the eastern seaboard of the United Stated where each of these much smaller states has a significant difference in colloqialisms and pronunciation. Compare this to countries like England or Germany. These countries are geographically much smaller than the US, and have a more diverse dialectal shift.
Why?
Most likely, beacause the West of the US was settled with reliable transcontinental communication. The orginal thirteen colonies were relatively isolated. Likewise, England and especially Germany had villages that were so isolated that they developed their own local brogue.
As more folks learn English, they will be exchanging information and ideas with Brits, Irish, Aussies, Canucks and Yanks. The differences will be noticable, but they will not be obstacles.
In Taiwan it is supposedly different: they have their own keyboard that uses their own writing system that is derived from chinese but is nevertheless a way of phonetically spelling chinese words. I don't think that many people outside of Taiwan use this system, but in Taiwan they have computer keyboards with this writing on the keys.
I like cake
Danny
I have written over 900 book reviews
I was not being nationalist at all. What I mean, is the more languages you learn the more you will have access to different cultures, and the more chance these cultures will persist. And yes, you need the language to access the culture. Try reading Goethe in english, or Montaigne in chinese or Shakespeare in french, and you will see what I mean.
And you're German. Of course it was the easiest for you!
I'm a gnu world man.
Well, well, isn't this an unexpected story from The Guardian:) The real point is that the Web (&Internet for those who know the difference) uses whatever language it's users want to use. The induhviduals and corps who make websites want to attract a target audience. They will post in whatever language[s] suit this aim.
How are you going to stop them? Language police? Don't laugh, there already is in Quebec, and I wouldn't be surprised if France moved that way. But many commercial websites are multi-lingual already.
The real point is that even if English isn't the first language of the world, it is just about _EVERYONES_ second language.
Okay, more specifically, the total buying power of all those who understand the Chinese that was originally of the Han people will overtake the total buying power of those who understand the language originally of the English people within the next 20 years.
In comparison Africa's total population is much smaller, and there is no comparibly dominant language.
It's not China who will overtake the world but profit motivated people who will place China at the top of their marketing priorities.
Total market size is what counts the most.
(at least for manderin .. :)
...
Did you ever see chinese people typing chinese ? It is VERY complicated, and there are a NUMBER of methods typing them.
The problem among those is, that you have to learn quite a lot, before you can type chinese on the computer
Samba Information HQ
Of course there is no single language of the digital world. Duh! English as a language is enjoying wide spread use because the bulk of the cash is sitting in English speaking countries. If folks are learning English as a 2nd language, they are doing so in order to trade with the US and Britain.
And before the left wing around here goes after me with pitch forks and flaming torches, I should add that theres nothing either new or evil about this. It's the natural relationship that language and trade have had for centuries. Now that trade has moved into the cyber realms doesn't change the fact of where the cash is located.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
We do still use greek symbols for both math and physics... ;)
Cue mass panic among freaked-out members of Christian right.
Unlikely. First the obvious: Mandarin is extremely difficult to learn and has a problematic ideographic writing system. But also you have to understand that all these Asian cultures basically hate each other. I can't see, for example, Japan or Korea suddenly deciding to adopt Mandarin some day. English is an excellent choice as an international language in Asia simply because it is culturally neutral.
Why? Because it is becoming so widely used (= embraced and extended) by non-native speakers, that it will become too wide to grasp as a first language. Too complex for every day use.
What we will see is the development of "American" and "British" (and australian and so on). Languages that stem from what we today call english, but develop their own grammar and vocabulary.
Todays english will evolve as an intercommunication tool between people. A language for scientific papers, diplomats, tourists and other border crossing communication. Not for people.
Just like Latin died as a natural language, but survived as a diplomatic/scientific language, while branches like Italian and Spanish survived.
All opinions are my own - until criticized
I agree that many old software can't handle non-English languages well, but modern ones are likely to have no trouble with them. (GTK/GNOME ones are a good example.)
Isn't pornography the universal language?
"I am Master of Nothing."
From some page in China (I haven't checked their source of authority, but the figures match those I have seen elsewhere, e.g., from Richard Lederer):
"The statistics of English are astonishing. Of all the world's languages (which now number some 2700), it is arguably the richest in vocabulary. The Compendious Oxford English Dictionary lists about 500,000 words; and a further half million technical and scientific terms remain uncatalogued. According to traditional estimates, neighbouring German has a vocabulary of about 185,000 words and French fewer than 100,000, including such Franglais as le snacque-barre and le hit-parade."
... It'll wipe out everything in it's way...
:)
Why do I think that? Many reasons:
1) I can't speek for other languages, but as one of those 300 Million Hindi speakers, I can tell you this; Very few people speak pure Hindi anymore. If you walk around India, you'll notice people speaking in a combination of Hindi, English, and possibly whatever the local language is (Marathi for where I'm from).
2) English is the language of commerce.
I don't have any hard numbers, but I'd wager that most of the worlds international business takes place in English.
3) English is the language of Science.
Much of the worlds Scientific output happens in English, or gets quickly translated into English, so that it can be shared w/ scientist world wide. There are very few world class scientist (in any field) who do not speak/read/write English. Doesn't matter what country... they do English.
4) The English speaking world (mainly America) produces more printed/published material than any else... by a wide margin. This has implications on the spread/sharing of ideas/stories/myths/CULTURE... I used to love watching the Scola TV network... I'd watch news broadcasts in some language that sounded like gibberish to me, and a few times a min. they'd throw out an English word... it was quite ammusing. (I'll never forget hearing something like this: "bla bla bla bla bla Sex bla bla Sex Education bla bla Penis bla bla bla Fucking bla bla bla Sexual... etc")
-Vik
Languages like Mandarin or Hindi *do* have high numbers of speakers, most of whom would like to learn English. What's the future of learning Mandarin if you speak Hindi, or vice versa? The answer is "esoteric knowlege" in both cases, where the future of learning English is obvious: you can open the world's doors. :)
No, I'm not a monolingual American--my first language is French and I can muddle along pretty well in 4 other languages. Trade-wise, they're only important in terms of being polite to people whose language isn't English.
What part of "A well regulated militia" do you not understand?
This reminds me of the old joke:
Q: What do you call someone who speaks three languages?
A: Trilingual
Q: What do you call someone who speaks two languages?
A: Bilingual
Q: What do you call someone who speaks one language?
A: American
Perhaps it's time we admit that the North American continent isn't the center of the planet. For examples from history of those who lost thier perspective, consider the Babylonians, Alexandrian Greeks, Romans, and the various European maritime empires (no offense intended). The point is that the surest way to become irrelevant in the long run is to assume that it can't happen.
Ob-Tech-Relevance: Anybody remember the days of IBM's dominance? How about Microsoft's?
Quiere eso decir que tengo 5% de posibilidades de que alguien entienda lo que estoy escribiendo? Supongo que la probabilidad crece si resto los 2000+ millones de personas que hablan solo lenguas asiáticas, pero no dramáticamente (7%). Aunque si considero que /. es leído principalmente por habitantes de países cuya lengua es inglesa (o al menos eso parecen pensar los editores en vista del tipo de artículos que publican últimanete) las posibilidades decrecen otra vez. Y decrecen aún más si considero que los 300 millones de hispanohablantes se ubican principalmente en América Latina, donde probablemente un fracción menor de la población tiene acceso a Internet si se le compara con otras regiones del mundo. Now moderators, I dare you to say this is Offtopic. Even more, I dare you to get the modaration right for once...
Oh really? Please enlighten me! Or are you talking about the Chinese learning various dialects then counting Mandarin as a second language? Ditto for the Indians learning Hindi?
At the risk of offending linguistic purists, I am specifically excluding dialects and unofficial languages. I count learning the offical language of the native country as the first language. Of course, there are large numbers of people who never learn this offical language. But I maintain that English is the most common second language using this definition.
You know why I don't believe it? Indian is the second largest film production region in term of quantity, (HK is third), yet they make very little english speaking movies.
Saying english is what everybody speak has as much true in it as china speak decend english because we learn english as the foreign language in school. Yeap, only what's in tv and movies counts.
CY
--I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else's fault.
This is interesting: typically the people with the most money control what's what. I'd presume to say that since the people "in control" (America, UK, Asia) mostly speak or can speak English, that the Internet would therefore be in English. Conveinent for me, I'm American.
However... 99% of the Internet is the average guy's website, or the website of a multinational company appealing to everyone. So no, the default language of the Net won't be English.
In fact, the Internet shouldn't HAVE a default language.
Come on, we've got computers! Imagine easy-flow translation. I send an email, pick French, and it shoots off to a translation system, then shoots off to my French friend. (ok, I don't like the French -- let's pick the Japanese instead;)
When mail from France comes to me (in French) it's automatically converted to English. From my point of view, it's all been English. To them, it's all been French. Websites would work the same way. Browsers are capable of sending nationality data, and servers are capable of sending the appropriate data back.
And if I use GoLive to make a website, I want the website to be saved automatically in different languages so that ANYONE can read it.
I know translation isn't the best yet, but we can make it the best and make it work, right? This is the Internet and the information age. If anything, I think it makes it EASIER for more people speaking more languages to converse.
Imagine realtime translations for instant messenging?
I just wish English a grammar had.
:-)
Chris.
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
To make the obvious computer OS metaphor, English is more like Linux, rather than Windows.
Windows is more like Latin than English. If a new concept was encountered, a Latin-based version was created, rather than adopting a foreign word (this is a broad generalization of course, and perhaps French would be a better example). Besides, like Latin, Windows is a dead language.... :)
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Even the samurai
have teddy bears,
and even the teddy bears
Even the samurai
have teddy bears,
and even the teddy bears
get drunk
A telling factor is thatby far most words that are borrowed are adapted to the phonology and morphology of the target language, and can even end up unrecognizable from the original in a few years.
Computers were first developed for using the Latin alphabet and variants, and are most easily adapted to languages compatible with that. Other writing systems are somehow mapped to that, which is inconvenient, confusing, and prone to standard-problems. It's not surprising that most Internet communication takes place in the default Latin context... if and when voice-oriented content becomes more common and usable, there will be fewer reasons to limit oneself to a certain alphabet.
There are something like 5000 languages spoken in India alone. The country has so many different cultures - many of which hate each other - that its doubtful that Hindi will even completely take over there, much less on the Internet. Again, English is a good culturually neutral choice of language.
(I got this from David Crystal's Language Death).
Danny
I have written over 900 book reviews
India is probably the most culturally diverse country on earth, with thousands of languages spoken. True cultural imperialism would be ramming Hindi down everyone's throat in India. Because English is not associated with any particular cultural group, it makes an excellent neutral language choice.
Except, of course (more to the point of my previous post) search engines. I cannot (without knowing my search engine more intimately) search for all permutations and combinations of "colourise"
Dialect produces similar problems, though less in impact, to language.
Primary language people would be more abundant where American Engish is concerned, whereas Brittish English is known as a secondary language by quite a large number of international people (since a number of countries were at one stage also British colonies)
I was having a hard enough battle at University at one stage to try and convince the web designer to actually support English!
Just like I'm having an uphill battle with most applications to start using metric, and English-UK spell checkers and grammer. Not to mention pains with printing on A4 vs. Letter!
:)
My R0.02 (Aprox. $0.00)
;)
Insert obligatory Al-Gore-Invented-the-Internet The-Chinese-are-Buying-our-Government joke here.
--G
Ok, maybe not, but I believe that language will "merge" into one big language eventually, greatly sped by the Internet. It won't be pure english, but will probably be greatly influenced by it.
Besides, I've always hated the fact that it is said that American's speak English. We speak American. (Which is a far cry from English, in some people's cases.)
Vulgrin the MAD
I sig, therefore I am.
Yeah but guess what? The people building and innovating the internet hardware, software, languages etc. aren't the 800+ million speaking Mandarin, the majority is coming out of the US and Europe where english is quite prevalent. I'm not some radical pro-english individual, but these comments lack any point what so ever without taking other factors into consideration. It's the same as saying "Yeah there are more hockey fans in Canada" but why do you think that there are so many more NHL teams in the US? The value of the American dollar holds a hell of a lot more weight than any number of people speaking a language and that is the loudest voice.
... so I think all male TV presenters should be made wear kilts.
An American also invented the telephone - should everything that isn't America's version of English be banned on that medium?
First of all its India. Your right though, it is the second largest film production region in terms of quantity, but your assuming that they are all written in the same dialect of hindi.
Half of my coworkers from my previous employer are Indian(eleven to be exact), all but one of which were born in India. Two of them didn't speak hindi at all, even though they were both born there. Of the remaining nine, only two of them could understand all of them, the rest could either have one of those two translate for them or they could speak english. They chose to always speak english, because of that reason.
What people don't realize is that India and China are monstrous countries where the different regions are almost completely different civilizations with different beliefs, cultures, and language.
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."
Well, according to what I was told at school, it was a mexican, Gonzalez Camarena, who developed what became the first color TV... so, from now on, all male TV presenters should speak spanish while wearing kilts :)
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
I wonder how this topic will be discussed at the Spanish Slashdot, http://barrapunto.org?
Random Musings at Rum Smuggler
I live in sothern california. I dont think spanish will become the default. Why? We have a lot more than just spanish speekers. We also have a pretty decent asian community. A good example, I used to work in an area of california that had a huge asian community. (consider the fact the company I worked for was Korean data systems.. hehe). A lot of the text on buildings WAS NOT english (or spanish). Even the text that WAS english had some weird funky asian looking font :).
:)
There are many parts of cali that seem like totally differant countries. Some feel/look like mexico, some say.. japan. (ever been in an asian market? In California?
Luke
Evidently, you've never seen a lot of what Asia offers up. My girlfriend is Taiwanese and I have watched tapes of some of the most popular shows that her relatives send to her parents. A lot of it has the production quality of local cable channels. The only way we have been entertained has been by laughing at its gaudiness and silliness.
Obviously, this is my opinion and based off of a small sample. And I'm certainly not saying that all entertainment out of Asia is crap. I have avidly watched Hong Kong cinema and Japanese Anime for years and consider it to be superior to a lot of the crap Hollywood has churned out. I have begun exploring some of the other offerings of Asian cinema too. But they definately put out their share of bad programming.
I guess it depends on what shows they want. America has some great TV programs and we have some absolutely horrible ones. I just hope they don't go for the dreg like most Americans seem to.
-------
We want some answers and all that we get
Some kind of shit about a terrorist threat
- Ministry
Not that I want to compare America running the Internet to the power struggle in Africa, but remember the numbers there during apartide? What, 10-20% of the population was white and they were controlling the other 80%? Numbers don't matter, it's who has the power...
By the way, my impression of the new leader of Mexico is that he is really cool. Mexico is a resource-rich country which has only remained poor so long because of government corruption. I got a feeling that they will be a very rich country in a couple decades, so taking Spanish classes may be a good idea for most Americans anyway.
Amen to that! As you said, we've got lots of resources, but way too much money have gone to corrupt people in power. We're all hoping that'll change, slowly at first but with enough oomph to get us out of the 3rd world classification.
Regarding the learning of spanish in the US... well, english a required course here in Mexico, and from what I've heard it was mainly because most of the $$$ came from the US, so we had to had a common language in order to do business.
But lately, now that mostly everyone I know around here speaks english (at least enough to get understood), there's been a bigger interest in learning new languages, such as french, german and japanese. The reason's the same: more money's flowing in from non-english speaking countries than before.
It's basic economics, simply. If you want to broaden your markets, it's easier to do if you speak their language.
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
Cuando a un mensaje como este no le quiten puntos de moderacion solo por estar en espanol, sabremos que el ingles no es el idioma oficial de las nuevas tecnologias. Mientras tanto, es casi necesario saber ingles para poder estar al dia con el desarrollo tecnologico...
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
Is this where we say "well, duh!"?
He's in the media business, and is predicting things relevant to the business. I'd be surprised if he gave a speech about cabbage farming rather than media!
This is the arrogance he was hinting at - the failure to look to the future, and sticking with good ol' English! Sheesh! Did you actually READ the speech?
Ok, you've scored a couple of points with me now!
Important info:
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net
http://dieoff.org/synopsis.htm
http://www.peakoil.net
And he quotes some pretty weird number for English. Most estimates put English and Spanish head-to-head for native speakers in the 300M area, and English far more ahead than 470M for native + second language speakers. For example, one can look at the SIL Ethnologue and its list of the top 100 languages (counting native speakers), and they actually count more Spanish speakers than English.
My guess is that whoever gives the 470M figure has a very liberal definition of what "English" is, and includes speakers of English-based creoles.
Esperanto might be a good choice for a few reasons. Besides many reasons often mentioned concerning why Esperanto is useful as an international language (such as how fast and easy it is to learn), there are a few concerning technology you don't hear very often. One is that every letter is always pronounced (no silent letters), and is always pronounced the same way. This would make voice recognition software a heck of a lot easier to implement I suspect. There are also no exceptions to any grammatical rule ever, and I believe there are only 16 rules. It is also very easy to create new words using the rules that everyone immediately understands, which is a good thing considering how often new technical terms arise. It sounds to me like this would be an easier language to implement AI verbal communication in. Does anybody know if this would make a difference, or if anyone has experimented with it?~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Artificial intelligence or natural stupidity?
Artificial intelligence or natural stupidity?
Guess which wrote this...
"Mandarin is extremely difficult to learn"
Really? From whose perspective? Like most languages a one-year intensive course at a university in China is enough to read newspapers, write expressively communicate orally reasonably well.
"you have to understand that all these Asian cultures basically hate each other"
Just like European countries until very recently.
You have to remember, the guy who gave this speech has a great deal riding on whether what he's saying comes true or not; his company's website indicates that his job is to produce content for Asian markets (ironically, a quick scan of the website shows that they offer plenty of American shows and movies)
And his premise is pretty much wrong because, for good or ill, English is already the international language, and was long before the internet came about.
That said, he did bring up some good points. To tell you the truth, -I- can't bring myself to watch American TV, and I've lived here my whole life. I don't know how the rest of the world gets so addicted to it.
--
First, English is a Germanic language, not a Romance language. Though the fact that so much of its vocabulary is of French origin helps it to straddle the boundary between the two (very helpful in its spread).
You've basically articulated something I've long thought about languages: they are basically GPL'd. English uses this to its advantage to absorb useful words and phrases from other languages. If someone else thinks up a good word, we're not too proud to use it. It is a dynamic, growing language. Contrast this with French, where the gov't of France attempts to stagnate the language.
Anybody who reads of any language becoming "default" or "standard" should be insulted. Take pride in your language, and have respect for others. If you want me to speak your language, I want you to speak mine! If you want somebody to understand you, LEARN THEIR LANGUAGE! You'll learn more than a language, but all about many cultures!
disclaimer: due to ignorance, this poster requests that those who speak languages other than English translate so that all may hear the wisdom that is Andrew Dvorak;) ..
Something else that is worth pointing out is that most technology terms are in english, even if the rest of the sentence they are in is not. It's very weird, reading foreign marketing literature and not having to translate the whole way...
The internet was created in America. I see no problem with the "digital world" existing in any language, it's up to the speakers of that language to implement it and make it work. This talk of the digital world being "flawed" because twice as many people speak Mandarin over English seems very socialistic. Everyone has equal opportunity to develop the digital world, and no one is going to stop anybody. I don't assume that english is going to be the default language of the digital world, but I don't look at the demographics and say: "Oh, no! Twice as many people speak Mandarin and we need 2/3 of the web pages on our server to be in Mandarin." Perhaps I should, perhaps if I did my web pages would be useful to a larger audience--but *"HOLDING ME ACCOUNTABLE"* for doing that, as the article states, is a socialistic standard and infringes on my rights to publish what I want to publish. I would be happy if every language group was represented, but that is not necessarily my RESPONSIBILITY, and this speech seems to preach that it should be.
We like our language to be dynamic and growing. French is stagnating that that's one reason its being gradually displaced by English around the world.
Right now, English *is* the default language of the Internet, and once a tradition is set, it is a hard thing to break...
The consensus I got from the discussion (YMMV) was that programming was a universal concept, that even though the labels may differ, the language constructs themselves remain the same.
Given that, how long does it take to learn those labels, even if they are in a different language.
IMO, the language barrier to the programming languages themselves is only a minor speedbump. When you start to consider the documentation and manuals, though, it becomes a larger obstacle. But you cannot write off the value of a like minded community, Linux being a formost example. Who needs manuals when you can ask your buddy or hop on IRC and get answers?
The only other obstacle for non-English speakers is the technology that is widely available. But many countries are closing the gap at a surprising pace.
How long before The Seminal Programming text for the language / paradigm of your choice is in a language you don't speak and you have to rely on babelfish until someone decides to translate it?
Bleh!
"With that despicable government they've got?"
European powers expanded rapidly while under the authoritarian rule of aristocracy.
The US did pretty well with slavery.
Don't be naive.
"Sic" is Latin for "such," and used to mean "I know this is wrong, but that was exactly the way it was, dammit!"
Don't know about you guys but it would just seem sooooo wrong to type http://diagonalpunto.org (That's slashdot in spanish)
Ack! I'm not sure I can comment on my own comment (would that get a +1: Multiple Personality moderation, or a -1: Mental Disorder?), but I thought it sounded funny to have a spanish version of slashdot.
Then, down there on the latest comments, Mzilikazi wrote about the spanish version, barrapunto.org.
Memo to self: read all the comments before posting anything on Slashdot.
Having said that, I'll go visit the place now. Hopefully it wont be slashdotted by the time I get there (now wouldnt that be ironic?).
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
How is Korean pictographic? I can read and write Korean, but other than hanja (Chinese characters), it is not pictographic.
Korean characters do not carry any intrinsic meaning, like hanja do. They simply represent syllables, like Japanese kana.
Either way, I agree, hangeul is a much more logical and easier to read phonetic system than Japanese kana systems (which are also easy for non-speakers to read and write). This is particularly so because the syllables are more descriptive and complete.
< tofuhead >
It is still the dark of night.
Ah, one of my favorite pet peeves. You've completely misunderstood the way Unicode works on web pages; but it's not really your fault, it's because Netscape Navigator is completely broken in this respect (it's far more - and far worse - than broken, in fact).
Neither the HTTP headers sent by Slashdot nor the preamble of the HTML file specify a character encoding. Therefore the encoding is the default encoding, i.e. ISO-8859-1 (aka latin-1). What you've written, then, is not "sayonara" but "comma cube comma ae comma E-grave comma c-cedilla". If you see anything else, your browser is broken! You've posted Shift_JIS-encoded data in an ISO-8859-1-encoded page and that doesn't make sense.
Now this does not mean that you can't have Japanese in HTML, even if the page is encoded as ISO-8859-1. Indeed, "at the bottom", every HTML document is written in Unicode, and every Unicode character is available, if not readily though the encoding (not necessarily UTF-8), then at least through SGML numeric entities of the form &#xxxxx; (where xxxxx is the decimal form of the Unicode character number). Consequently, the correct way of posting "sayonara" is "" (which I've written as "㇁よなら"). Again, if you see anything else than the hiragana for "sayonara" here (or perhaps a transcription of it, e.g. with lynx), especially if you see latin-1 characters, again, your browser is broken.
The brokenness about Netscape is that it assumes that numeric SGML character entities are to be interpreted in the current document encoding, and that is completely wrong. They should always be interpreted as Unicode character numbers. So this has somehow led to the conception that the basic HTML character data is in the character set of the encoding, which it is not! Fortunately, Mozilla repairs this brokenness, hopefully before any serious damage is done.
I posted another comment on this article to the effect that you can even have valid Chinese characters (in my example, , i.e. "China" in Chinese) in the host name part of a URL. It just happens that such domain names are not given out, but there is nothing wrong with it.
For more examples of Unicode and to see how badly your browser is broken, follow this link.
Sorry about the rant. .
The info on interlingua.com is biased as well as esperanto.org ...
Too true! As I mentioned in another post, language is similar to religion in the fervent, deep-seated (not to say irrational) conviction it inspires in people. And that's understandable--speech is usually one of the first truly complex things a human learns in his or her life, and it's closely tied to personal identity. Threaten, or even question, someone's language, and they usually react as if you had attacked them personally.
I have no personal animosity toward Interlingua, but historically it has been promoted mostly as a reaction (and alternative) to Esperanto, not as a language whose individual characteristics merit its existence. The Interlingua folks probably had/have good reasons for promoting the language, but I haven't heard any persuasive ones. I shall similarly research it at the site you give, however. Fermita menso naskigas senvaloran frukton!
Tell me, why I should be listening to this media baron in waiting?
F
First of all its India.
And that means what, exactly? That it is somehow unworthy of consideration?
No it simply means that the person I was replying to used Indian as a noun. It was a petty correction that was ultimately not necessary and inexcusable.
Second, most films from India are in Hindi, with smaller film industries throughout India producing films in other major languages like Tamil, Bengali, Telegu, etc. While there are regional dialects of Hindi, there is an official Hindi as adopted by the government of India and taught in nearly all schools. Hindi films from Bombay tend to use Bombay slang and terminology, but are otherwise not in "hindi dialects" as you say.
That was the whole purpose of my post. To inform the person that not all Indian movies are made in Hindi. The poster was under the assumption, even couldn't believe that Hindi may not be the same to all Indians, simply because it was the 2nd largest film producing country in the world.
I never once purported my example to be anything but a small and insignificant sample. I am not foolish enough to think that my experience was the work of National Geographic. However, it illustrated a point, that not all Hindi speaking Indians can communicate effectively.
As many others have pointed out in this thread, there are a large number of major languages in India, and literally hundreds of local dialects. While Hindi has been pushed as an "official" national language, due to the vast linguistic, cultural, and even political differences of the subcontinent (keep in mind India as a country did not exist until 53 years ago) it's simply not possible for it to become a de facto standard in the same way as English in the United States.
There are many from south India who will not learn Hindi on general principle, or if they have to learn it, will not speak it. I won't get into the reasons for this here. There are also huge differences in accents and of course regional variations in the use of the language that might make one speaker less than intelligible to another.
This is pretty much all I was trying to say, granted I did a poor job.
Your point seems to be that Hindi is not as significant as English, for two reasons. The first seems to be: "first of all its India". I won't waste much more time by discussing the ethnocentric, xenophobic, uneducated, and possibly even racist innuendo of this statement.
That was not my point at all, and my first statement has already been explained. You can either accept that or not, but the choice is up to you.
The second reason appears to be that because Hindi is not usable between your sampling of eleven out of over 300 million speakers that it must not be tenable as a major world language. It is, in fact, a major world language, but I don't think anyone was discussing it as a possible replacement for English. If that was your argument, you could have chosen a more obvious reason for this (and a much safer one, given your lack of any knowledge of the subject), such as its more complicated and undersupported character set.
I never once said or even implied that. My sampling was merely to make a point that simply because India is the 2nd largest film producing country does not mean that Hindi is a pervasive language in India.
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."
Actually, a Canadian invented the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell born in Brantford, Ontario.
You must now end all phone conversations with "eh?"
While I will not begin to say anyting about Sanskrit as I willingly admit my ignorance of the differing levels of linguistics, I will reiterate the information in the CIA World factbook that in India English is the language used in government and in newspapers because of the sheer diversity of languages in that country. Sanskrit isn't widely used, AFAIK.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
In case this wasn't perfectly clear: my post contains several Asian characters. These should appear as such no matter what the "document encoding" is set to.
I think there are just as many posts that seem to glory in the idea that English would be displaced. Obviously there is a lot of anti-American sentiment out there.
no its not, not even close
Everyone just needs to bite the bullet and learn Esperanta. It is very easy to learn, even for a dumb American like me.
.mincus
The figures given by the author ignore second languages. Sure, there are millions of people speaking other languages, but most of them do not speak
each others, but many speak english as a second (third?) language. A more important datum would be the number of people who can read english. This would (for better or worse) dwarf any others.
If things continue as they are, I expect the following to happen: regional web pages will be targeted at regional languages. International
web pages will be in English as it is the common denominator. Perhaps there will be multiple versions, one or more in regional languages and one in english.
Face it, English is the lingua franca of the Internet. Look at any MUD, or heck, even humble (heh) Slashdot.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
No, I am not trolling here. English is a beautiful language, and it's richness and coherence make, for example, the English poetry and literature so beautiful. English has also a fairly nice sound (as opposed to German). But it's learning curve is Windows. If you think, English is suitable for scientist (for example), then listen to some scientific jargon and see how hard it is to understand -- in English. Listen to a seminar in English and then in French, both done by two non-native speakers, preferably with a strong accent. I do not speak Esperanto, but if I had to choose, there would be a common artificial language.
Best regards,
j.
Here I sit in front of my Taiwanese wife computer with Windows Millenium in Chinese (strangely, Millenium is already widely available in Asia) with a small chinese written recognition pad (available for less then a 100$CAN) sitting just next to my keyboard.
;-)
The program that handles the recognition for that pad is VERY advanced and works very well (I know, since I'm learning chinese and it can recognize my butched characters).
For example, this is my name in chinese (written using the above mentionned pad):
¥îäO
The chinese characters display quite well on MY computer (at least in preview mode...) and that's whats important. My understanding is that they are encoded in UTF-8 too. Is Japanese display tech inferior?
Don't underestimate the technology available to chinese (particularly the technology produced in Taiwan where your MONITOR and MOTHERBOARD were probably manufactured) in their native tongue.
And yes, there's a LOTS of chinese dialect (apart from mandarin, my wife speaks cantonese and taiwanese) BUT everyone learns mandarin now so it should be quite widespread by the next generation of chinese. Plus, who cares how you talk it: the written language itself is standardized and that's what's important.
Why would the internet need One Language?
With initiatives like Babelfish, I suspect the future holds a multilanguage internet, with translational functionality built-in in your browser.
...we should all be speaking Manderin right now. Or it should be an international business standard. But it's not.
Obviously there is something more to the prevelance of English on the Net then just the number of people speaking it.
Perhaps simple things like...
1-English speakers invented the Internet.
2-It's too damn hard to type in Chinese.
3-The majority of net users are English speakers.
4-*Insert some common sense fact here*
It's kind of sad that somebody would present such an idea without addressing some of most basic, obvious facts.
Again, English is a good culturually neutral choice of language.
:)
Because everyone hates the Yanks and brits?
(I'm a dumb american just trying to be clever)
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
A little in to the conversation, he told me how he knew a couple words in an older dialect so that he could talk to his grandfather -- but not enough to be really useful.
To drive this point home: I'm an English major. His spoken English was superior to mine.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Regards,
j.
From Spanish mandarín, from Portuguese mandarim, from Malay mntri, from Sanskrit mantr, mantrin- counselor, from mantra, counsel
(from dictionary.com, most sites seem to have the same history of the word, although opinions seem to differ whether the word came into English from Spanish or Portugese)
I like cake
Mr. and Mrs. Yahoo Pushbutton can't buy a Hindi... :)
Given the number of keyboards that had rather elegant (even if I couldnt understand it) permentent blue ink characters scrawled upon the keys in the computer labs at my university, is this really an issue?
troodon.net
thanks, both of you :)
troodon.net
It has already been pointed out numerous times that a large percentage of the industrialized world speaks English as a second/third/fourth language, and this is certainly a huge advantage to using it as a 'universal' net language.
However, one thing that it seems many people have overlooked is how 'unenglish' English really is. The beauty of English is how easily it incorporates words from foreign sources. English is not a Romance language, yet there are countless Romance word roots that have been incorporated due to various influences over the centuries (damn Normans!) Not to mention influences from fellow Germanic languages, Norwegian, Indian, various Native American, Japanese, Chinese, etc., etc. It is exactly for this reason that the English vocabulary dwarfs any of its competitors (1.2 Million words in the OED and counting...)
In actuality, English only retains a handful of words from the original language. Even Middle English texts over a few hundred years old are near-unreadable for many modern readers (Chaucer, for example), and Old English is completely undecipherable (the original Beowulf comes to mind). Compare this to Mandarin, for example, where the same texts have been widely read for thousands of years, and have changed minimally (simplified symbology being the only relatively modern change that I am aware of...)
The oft-quoted advantage of Latin is its 'deadness'. As there is no change in the language, texts will be understandable by all speakers ad nauseum. Similarly, the French academie (or however the hell they spell it) has made a concerted effort to reduce the change in that language, with a certain effect. However, it is this resistance to change that makes it a poor candidate for a modern language of technology (witness the CDROM debacle... it took several years for the academie to accept CDROM as a word, and when they did, they franco-cized it into cederom, or some such beast, making it unintelligible for many people who already understood the acronym. I wonder what they've done with DVD...) Similar protectionist facilities exist in many of the other, 'competitor' languages.
English will be a very powerful language for a long time. Not only does it enjoy a large installed base, and is already considered the de facto language of science and the internet, but it also has a open development facility that far outstrips many of its competitors. The looseness of authority (thus, adaptability) in developing new vocabulary is precisely why it is already the language of choice for science, and it is for this reason, as well as for the many aforementioned, that English will retain its dominance for a number of years to come. Whereas nearly every other language in the world struggles for protection from outside influence, English welcomes new and foreign diction with open arms.
Of course, for all I know, we could all be speaking Klingon next year.
My bad! You are right, of course.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
The Japanese upper class had historically spoken only Mandarin, and left the women and "uneducated" to speak japanese. So size matters little, right? What's perceived as "trendy" and "important" is what people really want to speak. Someone correct me, but don't a lot of country's ruling classes speak English, because of it's "superior" perception? (Just like all governing Europeans spoke French in the 18th century)
lf.o
English is going to become the dominant language, as it is right now for several very simple reasons.
A)Right now the U.S. is basically the controller of the internet. If the US were to drop off the face of the earth, it would be one hell of a long time before the rest of the world got back to the point where they are today. This may irritate some people, but it's factual. Being that the U.S. basically controls the internet (or at least a very great majority of it's connectivity) - its people get to speak with a pretty loud voice when decisions are made.
B)Newcomers to the game have to play by the rules that have already been established. Perhaps because of ethocentrism, or just plain stubbornness, i don't see anyone in the near future getting up and shouting "hey, why don't we create a standard language for the web - let's make it Mandarin, or how about Spanish."
Yes, there are, and always will be, culturally specific domains out there. I have no beef with this. But to hypothesize that the internet is going to go in direction x just because there are more people in china is ludicrous. If we follow that logic, then China should be the internet leader, the wealthiest country on the face of the earth, and all web sites would be made in either Mandarin or Cantonese.
Actually, if the world (not just the internet) doesn't eventually evolve into a singular language use...it's pretty obvious that things will continue just as they have for centuries: billions of people speaking hundreds of different languages.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Interlingua is interesting, but it's not a valid replacement for Esperanto. Do some research, and use common sense, and you'll come to the same conclusion.
During my childhood, I have learned three foreign languages (Latin, English, and Classic Greek, in that order; German being my native language), and I've made (pretty lame, I must admit) attempts at French, Italian and Russian.
:-) really painful.
English was by far easiest to learn. Period.
It was even easier than Italian, after 6 years of Latin in school! The grammar is amazingly simple yet powerful. You can actually communicate with a comparatively small vocabulary. I figure this makes it the perfect choice for a second language to learn.
Quite frankly, I find learning a language as complicated as e.g. Russian (or German, I guess
--- The light at the end of the tunnel is probably a burning truck.
To paraphrase Henry David Thoreu, the state ultimately doesn't rule by convincing logic or reason, but because it has enough people working for it who can beat the crap out of you.
lf.o
Indonesian is spoken by more than a hundred million people, but not as a first language (and there are only about 75 million speakers of Javanese).
Portuguese is probably the tricky one for most peopple - most of the speakers of Portuguese live in Brazil.
Of the Chinese languages other than Mandarin, Yue or Cantonese has about 70 million speakers, while Wu has about 80 million. (I recommend Ramsey's The Languages of China for anyone interested in Chinese languages and linguistics.)
A great source for linguistic facts is Ethnologue.
Danny
I have written over 900 book reviews
There is no standard entry method for Chinese, no really standard way for encoding it, either. If you want to support Asian languages you have to support multiple input methods (Big5? GB?), multiple fonts (Simplified vs Traditional words?) et. al.
If you're interested, O'Reilly have written a book on Asian language processing - it's a really thick book, and it only deals with typing in and handling the 30,000 characters you need to deal with just to have a basic vocabulary. The ASCII character set can be memorized.
There is no substitute for blasting out text on an ASCII or ANSI terminal at 80wpm - trust me, you don't want to be reduced to typing wo3 bu2 shi3 etc. and selecting from a menu of five characters with a mouse every time you hit the space bar,.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
The usefulness of a lingua franca is a function of two factors. The first factor is how much that language has spread. Mandarin loses on this point; it is concentrated extremely heavily in one region, and slightly dispersed elsewhere. On a map it would be one giant blotch with little splats everywhere else. The second factor is the number of speakers. Esperanto loses here; it is widely dispersed, but too widely dispersed. On a map it would be an invisible layer.
An ideal lingua franca should be both wide-spread and common. On a map it would look like a uniform greyness. But there's one more thing to consider: this map is a weighted map. The language of the plebians is not as important (in this context) as the language of the patricians. So we must weight this map by the importance of the individual speaker. Remarkably, English in this era, like French in another, Imperial Chinese in another, Latin in another and Greek in yet another, is in this position at the moment. The educated classes of the world speak it. In fact, one could argue that to be an educated non-native speaker of English is to have learned it.
The fact is that the majority of the speakers of Chinese and Hindi are lower-class on the global scale. The same holds, to a somewhat lesser extent, for Spanish. The cultured classes will not give up their lingua franca for a new one spoken by the poor. And they will definitely not trade it for one spoken by no-one.
English is the language of the global culture. It is the language of science. It is the language of art. It is the language of diplomacy (well, French still persists a tad, as Latin does in law). It is even displacing native tongues; I work with two native Indians, both who have spent almost their entire lives in India. They speak little more than pidgin Hindi, but near-perfect English.
Of course, English will one day go the way of every other language. Many learn French still. Latin is studied by another bunch--generally a bit weird (I say this having taken years of it; anyone who has taken Latin can understand my meaning, I think--we're a strange fraternity). Greek is barely known nowadays, outside church, archaeological and linguistic circles (and I say this having gone to Greek Orthodox church most all of my life). English too will fade. Some day it will be a language of study, then of curiosity. And, I imagine, one day it will be forgotten. But that day is far off, and is not now.
Esperanto has some neat features. But it will IMHO never be a common tongue.
English seems to be this language, not because of its merits (although it *is* the most eloquent language in the world) but because it has a head start on every other language. English is already being spoken (and taught) around the world (heck, even Japan is adopting it as a second language).
I'm not saying that we should all abandon our current languages in favour of English... just that it would be nice to have one common language that we can all understand each other in.
---
He who laughs last thinks slowest.
>Canadians and Mexicans consider themselves
>Americans too.
No, we don't (Canadian's anyhow). An American is someone from the USA, period.
i don't know, when i want to write in chinese, i write in chinese, not pinyin ;)
-j
so, what you are implying by your flame is
that you can indeed speak hindi, mandarin,
or other languages extremely poorly and still
be understood? That has not been my experience.
From my reading in linguistics and semantics this is one of the key reasons for the development of english based pidjin dialects.
As for spanglish, I live in L.A. I hear it all the time. There is a fair body of spanish words that are incorporated into common everyday usage. If your linguistics 101 course teaches otherwise it is wrong.
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
For example, I have sitting in front of me the "Xinhua Zidian", which is a small dictionary generally used by students to look up individual characters as opposed to words. In the front of the dictionary is a list of radicals (ordered by stroke number, with all radicals both simplified and traditional being included) Once you find a radical you can look up a list of all the characters under this radical, and it will tell you where in the dictionary they are; however, the words in the dictionary itself are alphabetical by pinyin, so if you know how to write the pinyin you can also look up words that way. Furthermore, the dictionary also has bopomofo and a conversion table in the back so that you can look up words that way also.
I like cake
I live in Quebec so I see a lot of this. The other day, my chemistry prof was explaining how to search for the element lead in our english reference book and pronounced it "lead" as in "leader". And how are we supposed to know that the "na" in "nation" is not pronounced the same way in "national"? etc.
I don't know any korean, but I do know the japanese kana system is much more readable in this respect.
Also, Chinese pictograms are more detailed than letters, so they have to be displayed in a larger font. This partially cancels out the space savings. Also, I would guess that they take longer to write on paper, and _much_ longer to type, since you would have to select them from a menu or something.
Sorry, forgot to include these links in prior message: Esperanto.org, the Multlingva Inform-Centro, and the Esperanto League for North America, three good starting places. Now go do some research!
Thank you for your recommendation, but unfortunately the url you provide isn't working.
If it is not too troublesome for you, is it possible for you to give us the url again?
Thank you.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
a correction, but Japanese is NOT a derivative of Chinese.. Japanese comes from the Altaic/Ainu branch, whereas Chinese derives from the Sino-Tibetan family. Very unrelated families there. However, you probably meant that Japanese imported the Chinese writing system, "hanji", which were then known as "kanji" in Japanese.
I didn't say that because America is the current World Empire having English be a "world language" was right. I just gave that as the reason. And it is the reason. Consider French, Spanish, Latin, Greek, Chinese, Egyptian, etc. Each of these was, at one time, a "world language". Is it coincidence that the country of origin was also running an empire at the time?
You need to learn to distinguish between established fact and desired outcome.
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Esperanto advocacy groups say that almost every day. And almost every time they say it, they get shouted down. The world will take to Esperanto when it's ready for it, not before. You can't force people to change a belief this fundamental. Esperanto advocacy groups know that beliefs about language border on the religious--strongly held, not logic-based, and seldom changed by external pressure.
I keep hoping that the 'net will help people realize that their own language isn't universal, but judging from most of the posts on this story, that will take, um, quite some time. I'm fairly certain that an international auxiliary language will eventually be adopted; whether the world chooses to take advantage of the work already done on Esperanto, or decides to start afresh, I cannot say.
In any case, go here or here for some starting points in learning about La Lingvo Internacia.
Cannot say. Saying, I would know. Do not know, so cannot say. -- Zathras.
I understand that a minority of the people on the planet speak English. I also understand that some of the world's most powerful militaries and richest economies currently speak English.
But, one thing hasn't been mentioned: English-speakers invented the technology. C, Unix, Windows, Perl, Python, HTML, etc. are all written "in english" -- that is, they use english words as their lexical basis. Until there is an All-Mandarin programming language, OS, etc. that takes the world by storm, I don't expect computers to be programmed "in mandarin." I imagine it is simply easier to cope with computer programming if you understand at least a little English. It doesn't have to stay this way, but I imagine it will be easier to move everything to another western language than to a non-Western one, for reasons of keyboards and alphabets.
---- ----
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Eh, there's no such thing. The cajuns are from southwestern Louisiana. Hell, there's far more cajuns in Houston than New Orleans.
um, shouldn't it be Fan Qie? where did the Jia came from? a more common name for tomato is Xi Hong Shi...
Also, keep in mind that regardless of which dialect of Chinese you speak, its all qualified as Chinese because of grammar. That means the written text you see online are the same for Mandarin and Cantonese, at least in formal writing. Thus the count provided isn't acurrate.
Ya know, I bet somewhere out there is an Esperanto advocacy group saying something along the lines of "Finally! a chance to make ourselves known!"
"Rascal am I? TAKE THAT!" -- Errol Flynn
My Mandarin is quite rusty since I only took 1 year of it back in 1994. But if necessary I will be more than happy to fire up the pingyin and start typing in Mandarin, maybe then my girlfriend's parents will understand me. They only speak mainly Cantonese, but they understand enough Mandarin to converse in it. Unfortunately, I've forgotten almost all 1800 characters I did know (use it or lose it!) and I sincerely doubt that most United Statesmen (whoever coined USian missed the obvious, United Statesman is a better sounding term and most of us big egoed Americans will like the regal sound of it =) will convert to Mandarin Chinese.
Living in the US it is difficult to learn another language since so few people I converse with are willing to take the time to suffer through my Chinese, they'd rather speak to me in English since we both converse in it fairly well.
Anyway, better get back to practicing Mandarin...
Ni hao ma?
Wo hen hao xie xie nin.
Wo shuo zhong guo hua[r] (r is optional BeiJing-ism)
Ni shuo bu shuo zhong guo huar?
Bu shuo? Ai-yah!
Dan
root@foobar# shutdown -h now
System will be halted.
Or Hindi?
"English will [sic] not become the "default language" of the digital world"." English already is the default language of the digital world. You're all speaking it. Most European and Oriental users speak it passably. Are you suggesting that some time in the future this is all going to change based entirely on the relatively small amount of native english speakers on the internet? That's crazy talk! You're crazy!
Tzz
My Japanese history isn't the greatest, but aroudn the time The Tale of Genji was written, it was the first real work in Japanese, all the rest were in Chinese (because it was believed to be more educated, as the Chinese were very advanced? I think that was the reason...). So I'm not pulling it out of my ass... but maybe Asian history is a little too large and fractured for a good comparison here.
lf.o
The same thing is true in Korea, they also have used Chinese characters, after which they came up with their own set of writing which they use much more commonly just as the the Japanese eventually started using kana as well as kanji.
Basically I agree that there are too many differences between the situation in Asia and in Europe to make a good comparison here...
I like cake
>modern programming languages, so that I can write
>it in English, but if you are a Mandarin speaker
>and want to read my code you simply have to hit a
>button (or whatever) and it translates the
>results into the Mandarin version.
Simple.
Can you even IMAGINE the size of the character set for something like that? Chineese has thousands upon thousands of characters you'd need to include. But you wouldn't just need to be able to display them, and represent them in memory, you'd need to be able to TYPE them.
Imagine the keyboards. You'd need either a HUGE keyboard that encircles most of your body, or you'd have to go back to the MIT style keyboard... three shift keys with different functions, and any combination of four meta keys on top of that.
Add to this the necessity to display the characters. You need either insanely high resolution on your monitor, or to increase the size of each character beyond convinence.
Now, a phonetic language, like Japanese is much more convinent, even though it DOES have many more than English's 26 letters. In fact, Jappanese, heberw, greek, arabic (I think), and cryllic have all made it into unicode. But even WITH unicode, you need to go through some contortions with a standard keyboard to get the proper characters.
English, on the other hand, is perfectly happy with only a single byte for the entire character set, and then some. And try as some people might to eradicate ASCII, it shows no sign of going away anytime soon. Plus, with even a paltry 640x480 resolution display, you can still get 80 collums of LEGIABLE characters, a feat not possible in Chinese or even Jappanese.
So I would predict that it's unwise to bet on english giong away anytime soon.
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
The point is, there is no single default encoding for the web.
I agree that Netscape is massively broken though -- both IE and Mozilla are much better.
This is inaccurate. Never in Japanese history has there been a period when the majority of the Japanese "upper class" spoke chinese in the same sense that upper-class Europeans in the 1700s/1800s spoke French.
FYI- there is no such word as "Mandarin" in Chinese- it is a term that originated from pidgin in the Guangzhou area in the 1700s or 1800s and comes originally from either Spanish or Portugese roots, as it is somehow derived from "mandar" (to command or order). The word was originally used to refer to officials posted to the area, who gave commands. The reason that this word eventually became attached to a language is that the officials came from outside of Guangzhou, and so they spoke a different language than that of the natives (as I said in other posts, there is a lot of reason to consider dialects of Chinese as different languages), so the language spoken by the officials was referred to as "mandarin". This name has stuck around like a lot of other terms, such as the name "China", which also is not originally a Chinese word
Also, historically modern Chinese was different than middle chinese-the pronunciations used in modern chinese have only been standardized fairly recently, and many Chinese people in previous generations do not speak particularly "standard" Chinese.
I like cake
How many Europeans can travel 2000 km and still be in the same country, with people speaking the same language?
For example, travel from Madrid, Spain to Bonn, Germany. That is 1115 miles, about 1794 km. How many countries did you pass thorough? At least Spain, France and Germany. You could have gone through the Belgium also. You will also be rather close to the Netherlands and Luxembourg. That is at least 4 languages. (OK, I assume there are a few other regional languages somewhere along the route, but as I am a dumb American with a deficient geography education I am not sure what they are.)
Now travel from Richmond, VA, USA to Topeka, KS, USA. That is about 1130 miles, or about 1821 km. How many countries did you go through? One. (In fact, you're not even halfway across the country.) You may have passed through 8 states, but most of the people in Virgina, West Virgina, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas speak American English as their native language. (hey, that's not my route, it's MapQuest's) None of these states is anywhere near a border, other than the fact that Virginia is on the coast.
Go to California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, southern Texas or Florida and you will find a fair number of Anglos that do speak Spanish. These are border states.
In other words, while there may be good reasons to learn more than one language, it is practical in most of the US to speak only American English. In Europe it is not nearly as practical to speak any single language.
To email, do the obvious.
Your logic is not very good. Miami has a lot
of refugees from Cuba and it is normal that there
are a lot of Hispanic and the language isn't dying
out as it is in other areas of the country. In most areas of the country most immigrants and that
includes Hispanic don't speak the language much
after two or three generations. Recent immigrants
speak their mother tongue of course but look at
the age. The kids born in this country speak
both English and Spanish, english is learned in
school and in the street.
Following your logic we would expect all of the
US to become very old quickly because of Florida's
high old folks population.
If I had a choice between Spanish and English I'd
rather have Spanish since it is much more similar
to my mother tongue which is French but reality is
that the English language is the majority language.
A minority doesn't dictate the language of the
majority. Anyone who believes that english is
in trouble in this country has manure for brain.
Both languages have a whole lot of faults when you look at their literacy system...in English, you've got the advantage of phonemes, as in, anyone who can read the alphabet can pronounce a word, even if he/she has no idea what it means. You can read a newspaper out loud while clueless about what ithe words mean (this is true of a lot of languages with phonetic script...hebrew, arabic, greek, cyrillic just for starters). The problem with this is that words with many syllables are well...LONG. Chinese is not phonetic. There are certain root characters that hint at the pronunciation of a pictogram, but other than that, the only way to recognize a word is to have it memorized. There are two advantages of a pictographic language: first, the word on paper is a definition unto itself. If the root component of a pictograph means "mouth", then you can be fairly sure the whole word is related to speaking, eating, dentistry, etc. Second, the overall size of script falls dramatically. This entire comment could be written in Chinese characters in far less space...while disk space would probably be the same if not larger, the reading time for a passage is usually shorter in Chinese.
Is there a common ground? Is there a script in the world that combines the phonetic advantages of an alphabetic system with the reading speed and pictographic nature of Chinese? Sure, it's Korean...not a lot of people know this, but those odd, curvy characters are both pictorial AND phonetic. With a few minutes of work, you can learn to read Korean newspapers or street signs out loud, having NO idea what any of it means. Some mathematicians have decided that the Korean script is the most perfect writing system ever devised (invented by one man apparently, but don't take this at face value. Some Korean schoolbooks claim that a Kim or a Song invented the car and telephone, too)...too bad the majority of the world speaks Chinese or English or both (like me), and has no idea how to speak Korean (also like me).
This should appeal to all you Slashdotters out there who are part of a minority of computer users with a superior OS, one who's usefulness is crippled by the fact that no one else can understand it.
Esperanto is an entirely new language, vaguely related to the Romance languages. It does not have an established group of people ready & able to take advantage of it. And let's not forget that languages are a tad more important to us than computing platforms.'
I am fairly certain that Esperanto will never amount to much. It's possible that it will, but it's not bloody likely.
The last line doesn't take into account the structure of the internet. The issue of what language is the standard in the digital world has more to do with how many internet sites are created in that country/language, not how many people in the world speak it. The United States has been a pioneer in the digital world and on the internet and that is why it is most likely moving towards english as a standard. If it is moving in any direction at all....
AFAIK [sic] is an acronym for 'spelled in context', and is used to indicate that something that looks like a typo is being presented as it was in the original material. (See also NMF)
How many of these Mandrin, Spanish, and Hindi speakers also speak English? How many of them view their language as an impediment in their business?
English is the default language of the business world.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Yes, I mean it.
In the same way that English overpowered French even though it was highly entrenched, Han Chinese will overpower English.
The main reason people learn another language is not interest, or because it's cool, but because it will help them make money. The way it can do that is by helping them to sell to someone who speaks that language.
It is the size of the US market which drove the growth of English as a second language.
China will overtake the US in this sense (in total, not per capita) some time in the next 20 years, and as it approaches that we'll see progressively more of the internet and of content production in general in Chinese.
No one wants to type Chinese.
English will be the dominant language for worldwide communication. Especially on the Internet, which we (Americans) developed and contribute to more than any other culture.
Refrag
I have a website. It's about Macs.
English is not my Native Language, but I (amongst many other people, I'm sure) would prefer it as the standard.
Don't look at Native speakers, look at largest common language.
It's difficult enough searching the web already.
And more to my post Subject: Why specifically American? Who on earth trusts people who cannot even use metric? And spells colour as color!
-shiver-
Dom.
(A previous-British-Colony ist.) ?
I was able to pick up the fundamentals of Esperanto within a few weeks using a free correspondance course I found (search for "Free Esperanto Course" in your favorite search engine. Also www.esperanto.org has some good resources.) Esperanto is a handshake language, where both parties must exert a little bit of effort, but they are both on equal terms.
Recently, I promised myself to start recreating my personal web-pages in Esperanto, and new web-pages will be created in Esperanto first, then English.
Personal rant coming. I apologize in advance.
So, dear geek-friends, do yourself a favor and learn a second language.
Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
Decent reason: the nations that have developed the Iinternet and are still developing it speak English (mostly).
Excellent reason: Mr. and Mrs. Yahoo Pushbutton can't buy a Hindi, Mandarin, or Spanish keyboard from Future Shop, Circuit City, Dell, HP, Micro$oft, etc., etc. QWERTY (and thereby English) wins by sheer numbers. (And yes, other languages can be done on a QWERTY keyboard, but do YOU really want to learn extended character sets?)
Mr. Ska
By McCrum, et al., gives a great summary on why English has spread so far, and why it will continue to spread.
Given the story the book tells, I don't expect "The Queen's English" to be the world language of the future, but some evolved version of it will.
I'm originally from Ireland. I speak French and Japanese, as well as English, and can read Latin (not useful in itself, but I can usually get the gist of Romance language documents). I don't look down on Americans for only speaking one language, I congratulate them on devising a political system that has the world trying to break down the borders to get in.
You know, this is larger than English, as such. It's more a cultural thing. I mean, as a small example, this summer's movie blockbusters in France are all Hollywood-produced. This success is predicated on giving the consumers what they want, not what some self-involved, navel-regarding type thinks they need.
When people want internet services, Americans will be there to give them what they want, and payment will be negotiated in English.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
To me (not having a dictionary ready) lingua franca does not mean the language most spoken, but the language most understood.
This has a huge impact on the discussion. First of all, most europeans of a younger age ( Second it means that a simple language should be found of all the available ones. And having studied my share of languages (only european: german, french, italian, english and hungarian; german as mothertongue) a learners of english are rather quickly able to express themselves.
Now, only as third comes the assumption, that a language should be widely spread.
With those three assumptions/statements/opinions you can say that english is rather a good choice, since because of 3 it is rather wide spread and because of 2 it is easy.
As for mandarin, the additional problem arises: should everybody learn 15'000 pictograms just to be able to read a basic text? Changing everything into vocals is not really a solution, because then, everybody would have to learn a foreign language (some speaking and some reading (since in my understanding the chinese don't read vocal)).
actually, a canadian invented the phone before Alexander Graham Bell. He just didn't have enough money to actually publicize it (as he lived in Canada). Bell, OTOH, was in US and, (i forget the details), somehow made oen too.
The US is not the only speaking nation out there, you know, Australia, Canada, England, Ireland all use it as well (funny that, England/English... )
That said, I don't think anti-US sentiment is really relevant when speculating as to which language will dominate in terms of content in the future.
For e-business, it'll come down to, as many have pointed out, the language that dominates the world's purse-strings. Given that precept, until the US economy collapses or is eclipsed, for a prolonged period of time, by another non-english speaking country, the commercial e-language will most likely remain english, due primarily to the language's existing momentum.
For personal site content, especially as computer literacy and access rates increase in the second and third world nations, people will most likely insist on using whatever language they are most confortable expressing themselves in, or which ever language best suits their target audience (I don't think a French lawn bowling asociation will really want to reach an english speaking audience, but a French LUG might...)
This, to me, is one of the most interesting questions about the direction of the Internet right now.
If we continue to see progress with tools like Babelfish and Babylon, the question may be moot, which would be a very interesting outcome indeed. (I wonder: if these tools become good enough that large numbers of people start using them for everyday media consumption, will major media portals dumb down their writing so the automatic translators can parse it better?)
Mandarin will not be a contender until the Chinese government gets less jittery about free expression. Who wants to create content you can get arrested for?
Hindi could be significant if Internet penetration in India makes real strides. There are several efforts being made in this area. But for the time being the Indians with enough money for access almost all speak English anyway.
Spanish could make a real challenge to English hegemony on the Internet and we're seeing more of this already.
Someone else made the astute comment that ASCII kind of screws non-Western languages in this department. The support for non-Western character sets in a lot of software in non-existent to poor. We're seeing more and more Middle East-based Internet portals now, but most at least default to English and some don't even offer Arabic. The software solutions for Arabic are varied and don't all play well together. A few months ago PC World/Egypt shipped with a CD from a vendor trying to get their Arabic browsing solution better exposure. Until that battle is settled 180 times around the world, Western languages will have an unfair advantage.
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Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.
Tv shows that are broadcast to >200 countries and cause the rivetting attention of the audience lead to the dominance of the english language as to often, there are no equivalent words in the dubbed language and the english word or phrase is used. Net result--english speach begins to permeate the language and culture of the viewing country with little discrimination by wealth as most people have access to TV's but not internet connections.
Duh
no sig.
I remember hearing that the UN was building some universal language (lets call it X). Where everybody would have to write a translator to and from X, so we have a linear problem instead of a factorial problem of translating every language to and from every other language.
Now this would give us the power to write all pages in whatever language we wished and get them translated easily but it still sounds rather babel fishy.
Most desirable (and as a result least possible) solution is to write every page in language X (or write it in English and have it translated to X but end result is that an html document would be in X) and then each person's browser would need only one translator.
Hopefully people would actually slowly learn X (for tweaking purposes when the translations to don't quite work) and then the whole world can speak it (impossible dream.)
Because while I can't speak any other languages after doing AI I know what a urked up language English is for AI and translators.
1984's new speak is much more pratical.
It's turtles all the way down.
One factor favoring english for the future is that it absorbs new words, regardless of origin, so easily.
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You were a moderator with 5 points. You should have read the moderator guidelines before you did any moderating
The term Mandarin, was used by the British and other Westerners to refer to the educated, courtly classes in Asia. This term comes from the Sanskrit Mantri, which means Minister (in a political and religious sense). Interestingly enough, the word Hindi itself is of Persian origin, as Hind was the Persian name for the area beyond the Hindu(i.e. Indus) river.
"English will [sic] not become the "default language" of the digital world".
Left shift 1 for e-mail...
5000 (or 1000) languages spoken in India is like saying that 500 languages are spoken in America. Both are correct, since the large figures refer to many languages with small number of native language speakers (e.g. most Native American languages). In reality, there are about 25-30 Indian languages with more than one million native speakers. Out of these, there are two main language groups, the Indo-Aryan languages (North), and the Dravidian languages (South). Hindi is the most widespread of the Indo-Aryan languages, while Tamil is the most widespread of the Dravidian languages. These two families have a completely different grammar, and mostly different words, the Dravidian languages having borrowed a lot of words from Sanskrit. Hindi and Urdu (Pakistan's national language) are mutually intelligible, except for differences in script and formality. Hindi retained more words and its script, of Sanskrit, whereas Urdu borrowed alot of words, and its script from Persian and Arabic. Also, due to education, and language similarities, many of the people of India can easily learn Hindi. About 80% of Indians can understand Hindi to a certain extent, and the other languages of North India, Bengali (150 million native speakers in India and Bangladesh), Punjabi (most Pakistanis), Marathi (70 million), and Gujarati (40 million), are similar enough to make it relatively easy to learn Hindi. However, the Indian language with the most presence on the net appears to be Tamil. Even though it _only_ has about 65 million native speakers, the literacy rates of South Indians, is much higher than that of North Indians (80% vs 55%), and a relatively higher percentage of the "Great Indian Diaspora" are South Indian speakers of Dravidian languages. It is relatively simple for speakers of Dravidian languages (300 million worldwide), to learn it. Also, South India is well off compared to North India (ever heard of Bangalore?). Telugu (a Dravidian language which has more native speakers than Tamil), and Gujarati (an Indo-Aryan language) also have a growing net presence, though less than that of Hindi. In the long run, Hindi will do quite well, but there are other languages, even in India which enjoy growing currency in the net world. It's just that Netscape and other web browsers don't seem to support them yet.
Uh no. Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Ja, je nei snakker Norsk. Y yo no hablo Espan~ol.
-russ
p.s. nor do I speak enough Turkish to be able to deny that I speak any.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Look at where most of the technical students are getting their education and look at what language most technical journals are published in and you can see the trends. Will English become the official language of the world? From the irony of the phrase lingua franca used to describe the common language, really meaning the Tongue of France, we can see the 'official' language fluctuates and will continue to fluctuate. But do to the way the world interacts, as long as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK, Ireland, US, South Africa, and India remain economically powerful and continue to use English as the language in schools, we won't see English disappear as a dominant language any time soon.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
Murdoch concentrates only on how many speakers there are, as if languages competed for superiority by pitting speaker against speaker. This neglects two important factors: What language is, and how language changes. English is not merely the language of old Anglo-Saxons. One of its strengths is that it has adopted and adapted many words from many languages. English has many more words (in common use) than other Romance languages. (I'm not sure about others.) Even if a monolingual English speaker knows fewer languages than a bilingual person, they may know more words.
This rich vocabulary gives English a greater ability (not always used) for subtlety, precision, art, humor, and even local/cultural dialects. English attracts speakers based not just on how many speakers it already has, but what its features are. It is powerful and flexible.
That brings us to the second factor, how language changes. If Spanish is an up-and-coming language, English will suck it in. English already uses plenty of Spanish words and will readily absorb more. A language does not have to win by taking over speakers; it can also win by taking over speakers' languages.
Absorbing a more distant relation, such as Mandarin, might be more problematic. But a third factor enters here: China has kept itself relatively isolated from the rest of the world. Mandarin may have more speakers, but the language will not win the "war" if its speakers do not enter battle. Perhaps somebody more knowledgeable can comment on the vocabulary and grammar of Mandarin and compare it to the features of English.
The dominance of a single language (be it english) is a sign of cultural poverty. Every country should promote its native language as the language of choice for its media. The native language is what gives every people in this world access to its culturel heritage. By forcing a single language you take away that cultural heritage.
I wonder about English being the language spoken by the most people including those that speak it not as their primary, but second language, third and so forth. How many people the world-over "know" English, although it is not their primary language?
Also, one would think that English is spoken over a broader area geographically than other languages (not sure about this, anyone know for certain.)
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
OK, here's a Sunday cartoon:
Dog: "Why does Bucky do these things? I mean,
the plant didn't do anything to him."
Man: "Well, you have to understand that Bucky
comes from a long line of proud and very
stubborn ancestors."
Dog: "Geez, I didn't know Bucky was French."
Man: "No, no, he's a cat! A cat, do you hear?"
An aside - France will probably manage to prevent European Common Market growth for about 10 years. They're so conflicted that they'll be tripping on their own shoelaces for at least the next decade.
As for China and India/Pakistan, they're so into ripping off American software that there's not a chance they'll develop native language software. Yeah, they'll translate stuff, but all their good coders read/write english - it's required there. Don't forget, they have to sell any new software back to the moneyed world - usually in english.
The article author is indulging in wishful and self-serving thinking, but it's not happening...
Yanks and Brits really need to get their history right. Anyone who was anyone from 500BCE to 1600CE spoke Chinese of some description. In fact 97% of all printed matter was in Chinese up until the 1800's! Besides anything from your so called Pythagoras Theorem to Postmodernism was first and foremost Chinese. But of course, all we ever hear from BBC and CNN is the bloody Romans this and Romans that. Geez. Using the same logic as some of these Americans - Chinese invented paper, books and printing (not some Gutenburg fellow) and so Chinese have the right to demand all books be in Chinese. Oh and some Chinese inventions for all those who think the Chinese only invented gunpowder for firecrackers (the following are from a fraction of Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China): Flamethrower, multiple warhead, multiple stage rockets, deep drilling, civil service exams, the modern spacesuit (NASA didn't tell you that did they?), the paddleship etc etc.
The reason English is spoken in india is because it was ruled from 1858 - 1947 by the British Crown.
True, but irrelevant. This is the reason English is spoken anywhere in the world, outside of England itself. The result is the same: English is the language of commerce throughout India (and the world) -- largely due to the economic influence of the US, itself a former British possession.
And as for that very cheeky reference to How many of those Mandrin people do you think are still living in huts, with no electricity or running water?
I agree -- the reference was somewhat "cheeky".
The fact remains, however, that Mandarin speakers have always outnumbered English speakers -- or speakers of any other language. This is not some new development the author of the article somehow "discovered".
That fact notwithstanding, English is still universally taught throughout Asia and the world. The demand for native English speakers is so great, not only here in Taiwan but throughout Asia, English cram schools are in a perpetual hiring mode. My institutes are experiencing severe shortages, and my teachers are universally overworked.
Conversely, I see very few English speakers demanding to learn Chinese, despite the fact that China possesses the world's second-leading GDP.
The author of the article seems to be of the opinion that the Internet exists in some sort of vacuum, insulated from the rest of the world.
Just as in the "real world", however, sheer numerical superiority doesn't necessarily translate into linguistic dominance. There are other factors at play.
At one time, English dominated on the Internet because America dominated the Internet, technologically and numerically. Even once Mandarin speakers surpass English speakers numerically, America will still hold the technological edge. And as the Internet becomes increasingly commercialized, America's economic dominance will also come increasingly into play, and English will remain the dominant language.
Lee Kai Wen - Taiwan, ROC
I speak two languages (French/English) for em the combination of two have been very usefull when traveling. French gives me access to Spanish/Italian/Portuguese... and English comes in handy for Swedish/Norsk/German. Sometimes the help knowing more than one language provides is not the ability to understand immediatly but sometimes it helps pronounciation a great deal!
I would expect the english Language to remain dominant for some time mainly due to economic and political positions English Speaking countries enjoy.
I also ask myself if english will not suffer the same fate as other languages (French in my experience) that is, an influx of people suddenly speaking english will probably pressure the language in some type of evolution that may well make it evolve into something else ? 1 billion Chinese suddenly using Mandrin and English might make a new fork in the english language that cannot be overlooked ???
What you are claiming is nonsense. Spanish isn't
likely to take over anytime soon. Spanish language
is alive and well in California, Texas and a few
other states but it is not the language of the
majority and as with many other languages the
language disappears after the second or third
generation.
Unfortunately the English language has taken over
this land much like the whites have taken over the
land of our natives ancestors but that is reality.
American english (not the brit dialect) is the
language of business and will likely remain so
for a long time.
Only morons and ignorants really believe that
english is in any danger in this country.
...because they may not have a clue on how to apply them correctly.
People have been saying about India for the past 20 years that it is a sleeping (technological) giant about to awaken. Well....I see no reason for that statement to change. The relationship between India and the US is not likely to change in the near future : the US will still be the leader, and India will still be the follower.
Why is this relevant? Because right now, barely .5% of the Indian population (this is an optimistic figure, I think) are on the net. And unless, India wakes up, this figure is unlikely to increase beyond 2% over the next 10 years. I've been there recently, and other than the recent dot-com mania affecting it too, there were no fundamental changes taking place that would awaken India.
The dominant language in any culture will be the language used by the largest segment of the population. So what does this say about whether Hindi should be treated as a more "popular" language than English?
I dont have any feel for how many people in China use the web. Anyone of Chinese origin care to enlighten me?
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
Most of the posts that I am reading on this topic just plain worry me. It seems like a lot of people here are very sensitive to the possibility of English losing its pre-eminence on the internet. Some attack the very idea as absurd while others have long arguments (complete with documentation) on why Mandarin/Spanish/Hindi will never supplant English.
My question, I guess, is: "What does it matter?"
Assuming (let's say for the sake of argument) Spanish becomes the dominant language on the internet. This won't happen overnight. A change like that would take years before it even became noticeable. How would this affect me when (if) it does occur, though? No, I don't speak Spanish. I speak English, and pretty poorly, too, I should add. Am I going to have to learn Spanish? Probably not (that isn't to say that I shouldn't learn Spanish). By the time this theoretical shift takes place, I am going to be (theoretically, of course) too set in my ways to give a damn and too near retirement to care. Should I make sure my children learn Spanish/Mandarin/Hindi? Well, sure.
And perhaps that's the rub. I suppose many of us don't like to call into question (or have the question called for us) the idea of our culture's supremacy. For some people, the very idea that he/she (or his/her child) should have to learn a language other than English is an affront to his/her cultural identity.
The world changes, and all the wailing and gnashing of teeth won't make it stop.
There are several other reasons why English dominates the globe.
1) We're the clean-up crew. Every time there is UN intervention anywhere in the world, the US is the main blunt force instrument of choice. This introduces people to our language and culture. Until China or India starts funding such missions and sending their soldiers out there, the US has a great platform to build on. If you want to deal with the "peace" keepers, you'd better know English.
2) While English may not be the biggest PRIMARY language in the universe, it is the most widely used SECONDARY language in the world. Which is easier? Getting 800M Mandarin Chinese users (about 1/2 of which already know English) to use English? Or making ~5 Billion people learn Mandarin?
3) Just like in Aviation, English is suited to the web. It is easy to learn and in fact is usually already taught at most schools (except those in Los Angeles of course...)
4) Most Americans do not learn a second language well enough to ask where the bathroom is, much less do technical work in it. Many of them have enough problems learning English! And I'm not talking about the native Spanish speakers on the Left Coast, I'm talking about Billy Bob, Jimmy Joe, etc. etc. that you find in most of small town America.
- No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades really cramps his style.
I've read a couple of sources on languages that claim that English is the most descriptive language and also have the largest vocabulary while having the simplest syntax and one of the easier phonetic sets. Has anyone else heard this? No flames, this is a serious question. I think it would make sense that the more powerful language would become the dominant technology language. If think that given English's prowress in the Internet community, it'd be like claiming COBOL was better than C++ just because there's more of it out there (at one point, not now obviously).
Also, I think it's unfair to pick on Americans for not learning another language. The VAST majority of Americans have no need to learn another language. In Europe you've got a bunch of smaller countires each with their own language. So to be German, you have to learn at least French and English to even do business in Europe. In America, everyone speaks English and our largest neighbor (Canada) speaks English also (sorry Quebec you're not a country). Mexico is coming along there was Spanish, but most of the business people in Mexico speak English . Why? Becuase to do business with NAFTA you have to speak English. I know many people from college who were excellent at multiple languages. I had one friend who probably spoke French better than many native French speakers. But the point is most Americans have no cultural need for a second language due to geographic size and location but many Europeans (And other countries) do. I don't know one person I've ever met in my professional career that English wasn't their primary language OR spoke it excellently. If I had to interact with a huge amount of Germans or Russians, you'd better believe I'd be learning those languages quick, if for not other reason than a good business practice. I'd like to find out how many Mandarin speakers know a second language given China is such a geographically large area. I'll bet it's only a small percentage.
Some people take their .sig way too seriously
Hmm ... I'll have to disagree somewhat here. I live in Taiwan, though, so my mileage may vary.
I'm typing this from Chinese Windows 98, and while the menu systems and online help are in Chinese, I see English all over the place. Microsoft Word still announces itself in English as "Microsoft Word". The file structure on my hard drive is 98% English. And Chinese Windows fully supports English. I doubt the converse is true.
Most tellingly, CWin98 does not natively provide a facile method for typing Chinese. It still relies on the QWERTY keyboard. If I wish to type in Chinese, I have to rely on third-party software. And even the best of that is tedious and laborious. It is nowhere near as easy as typing in English. The only exception is the various handwriting recognition technologies that exist; but of course those aren't typing at all.
You are correct that I could type in PinYin, but that's of little use. While pinyin is commonly used to render Chinese phonetically using Roman characters, I don't know any native Chinese speaker who actually "reads" pinyin -- that is, who could read a book, a magazine, or even a short article rendered in pinyin without exerting some measure of concentrated effort. And few people I know could do even that.
The analogous situation would be to ask how many Americans can read English rendered using the international phonetic alphabet.
Of course, here in Taiwan, as you mentioned, the schools use bopomofo (what you refer to as the "Mandarin phonetic symbols") to teach kids to read until such time as they've acquired a sufficient written vocabulary to get by (just to read a daily newspaper takes a vocabulary of between 2000 and 2500 characters). But by the time most Taiwanese reach adulthood, they've largely forgotten bopomofo. And even in children's books, bopomofo is always printed only alongside the Chinese character; it is never used on its own, so children are never taught to use bopomofo as a written language in its own right. I suspect the same is true of pinyin in mainland China.
Lee Kai Wen - Taiwan, ROC
Take Hindi as an example. There are 300 native Hindi speakers in the world. Most of these are in India. Urdu speakers ( in Pakistan) can communicate with Hindi speakers in Indi. The languages are similiar.
However, in India, English is the language of Education, of Law and of Business. I've spent some time in India, and although Hindi is the official state language, English is the defacto one. People in the south don't learn Hindi, so north and south tend to communicate in English.
Could some Indian's comment on the above?
Id be interested to know which language South American countries communicate in. Spanish or Portugese?
-- hjw http://puzl.info/
By several orders of magnitude! And Latin is a rather logical language as well. I say we go back to Latin!
I think you're a fool if you bother to learn Esperanto.
Blar.
This joke was written by someone who didn't know
shit about America. We have only two close
neigboors where the language is different, meaning
Québec and Mexico. You will find people on the
borders of these countries who are bilingual.
As for the rest, highly educated people will often
know more than one language.
The majority of the population has a hard time speaking one language, don't ask them to learn
another language. The fact remains though that
there are millions of Americans who speak more
than one language.
I for one speaks French and English. I can
read French, English, Spanish, Catalan, Italian
and Portuguese and am learning to speak Spanish.
Where I live there is no need to speak any other
language than English.
I am an American and proud to be one.
If Europeans didn't have many neighboors most
people wouldn't speak more than one language.
The only reason that the numbers of bilingual
people is higher is that that have no choice
in the matter. Most people are lazy and will not
learn another language unless forced into it.
Stupidity and ignorance are well spread among
humans, it is not something that is purely
American.
I'd like to see the statistics of Literacy Rates between Mandarin and English. Is it possible that even though more people speak Mandarin there are fewer literate Mandarin speakers. You have to remember that Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese have identical characters and they are written identically) is not a phonetic language so the time to become literate is much greater than that of English. This should be a much larger concern than how many people actually speak the language.
Try this as an exercise. Insert some Japanese or double byte language into your favorite web site, such as slashdot. It wont work. The text at the bottom of my post says "Sayonara". Not hard, and I'm even using an encoding that fits in UTF-8. But I bet myself $0.05 that it will not show up correctly and may even stuff the rest of the posts. I managed to mangle the linux-kernel mail list archives at kernel.org. Bring on language DoS!
Now, you probably can't read Japanese, but why should code break because I don't use an ASCII encoding?
æÈç
Andrew van der Stock