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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.
Judging from the submitted text of this story, English isn't [sic] the language of the web now.
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...what's Mandarin for first post, then?
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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.
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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
From my gut level impression of the current state of the net, I don't agree with you. Most of the major backbones for the global 'net go through the US (feel free to point out some backbone points which don't).
If all the US backbones collapsed, the net would break into many individual regional networks, with some very slow links between each region. Over time, the regions would rebuild high-speed links between each other, but given the level of investment that has been expended inside the US for the current network infrastructure, at least a few years to bring the net status back to its current state and performance.
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.
_____
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Dude, your .sig rocks :)
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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?
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.
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.
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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!
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.
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
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.
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Or Hindi?
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!"
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?
æÈç
Andrew van der Stock