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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"."
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.
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
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.
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)
...what's Mandarin for first post, then?
Find funky gifts
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.
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)
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
(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.
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
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.
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
... 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?
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.
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.
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.
--
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;) ..
I just ran a poll with a few of my buddies on IRC. It appears that l33t speak has several hundred million speakers.
..................................
Cunning linguists
A second language, except for possibly Spanish, isn't that useful in the United States. If I wanted to talk to my coworkers in their native languages, I would have to learn Mandarin, Cantonese, Thai, Korean, Vietnamese, Russian, Hindi and probably others. Every one of them can speak English.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
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.
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!
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. .
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Or Hindi?
>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...
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....
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
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
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
You're half right and half wrong. There are several standard systems for transcribing tonal languages. The most common ones for Chinese are the Wade-Giles system and the Pinyin system. Similar schemes exist for Vietnamese, Thai, and just about any other language that doesn't use the Latin alphabet. However, each langauge has its own transliteration system, and some languages vary significantly. Two books on teaching Thai may use completely different punctuation to express the same tone. Hence the importance of learning the actual alphabet. A lot of translation systems are outdated, weird, or just bloody minded. Both Chinese transliteration systems seem to go miles out of their way to be counter-intuitive, representing Engligh d sounds with t and English t sounds with d.
As for ASCII limitations, any transliteration system can be put into ASCII, from Chinese to Pali. And Unicode makes it possible to put a lot of non-ASCII characters into a standard representation. I'm not sure what the current system for representing Chinese is- I was pretty sure that there were some systems based on a reduced character set, but don't recall much else.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Yes, this is a conflict of standards, because the quoted section of the RFC (or its later revision, RFC2616, page 26) says
(Thus the HTML spec, strictly speaking, is in error: the HTTP protocol doesn't "mention" ISO-8859-1, and it's default use isn't a "recommendation" - it's a MUST. But it is certainly right in calling it "useless".)
IMHO the correct way to proceed is for HTML authors to use a meta http-equiv tag to specify the character set. Of course, an even better solution is to use XHTML, since the encoding is specified in the XML declaration; and the XML specification is clear on the subject:
Even better: write XHTML, use an XML character set declaration and add a meta http-equiv tag just to make sure...
...and just use ASCII :-)
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.
Guess what: Learning Dutch might even be easier for you. :) Given the fact that both English and German belong to the family of Germanic languages, this is not at all surprising.
However, you may be able to imagine that, say, a Chinese native speaker will not profit from the fact that English and German are (grammatically and lexically) so close to each other that they would be regarded as dialects using the same standards that people apply when calling Mandarin and Szechuan "Chinese".
Apart from that, English is a horrible language to learn as a second language. Spelling is nowhere near being phontetic grammatical stuff like articles is simply unnecessary. The reasons why English became the current "world language" have nothing to do with it being "easy". It's the economic and political power of the US, nothing more.
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
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
Very low, only a tiny portion of china has internet access. Most people in south america don't have getting online as a priority. The people that do get online are of the upperclass, meaning that they probably had education and maybe even learned english.
....... etc.
That doesn't mean that there's no room for more than one language. Take dutch for instance (disclaimer: I'm dutch), compared to english or mandarin, it's a tiny language. Yet there's plenty of content in dutch. It coexists peacefully with content in english, french, german, swedish,
Only americans and people in third world countries are limited to one language. Arguably, this is no problem for americans since their economic power causes others to adopt english as a second language.
Jilles
There is no problem. ASCII is an outdated, obsolete standard. It is unsuitable for modern requirements. Get rid of it. All of it. It sucks. The only reason it's still here is because U.S. Unix geeks can't be arsed to learn something new and better.
Everything should be in Unicode. EVERYTHING. Filenames, partition names, variable names in code, EVERYTHING. DNS should support Unicode, SMTP, HTTP, FTP all these protocols should support any text being unicode. Microsoft understands this, Unix doesn't.
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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?
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Andrew van der Stock