Slashdot Mirror
The Internet Shifts East
Logic Bomb writes: "The San Francisco Chronicle has an article discussing the World Intellectual Property Organization's prediction that in less than 10 years, Chinese will be the most widely-used language on the web. Assuming the Internet becomes a truly global entity, this is an obvious (and mathematically correct) conclusion. On the other hand, the implementation of the Internet in places without certain civil liberties provides an interesting challenge to typical Western (idealist) notions about what the Internet does for society. Would you even consider the average wealthy Chinese citizen with online access truly 'on the Internet'? And how is the Internet supposed to draw people together when the same old language barrier still exists?"
Isn't China west from San Francisco ?
Trolling using another account since 2005.
One can make the generalization that German is the most widely used language in Internet porn...
fp
RLC RULEZ j00!!!!! FJEERE!!!!!
And I'm thinkin' bout stickin'.
J0 3570Y 4 N371Z3N0 comeon, we're already halfway there towards a language that everybody on the planet understands equally poorly. l33t-sp33k can be the lingua franka of the digital age.
lysergically yours
One of the great Geek Goals of science fication has been on the fly translation. If technology continues to improve as quickly as it has, I predict real time, accurate (eh....relatively) language conversion for www material and perhaps even instant messaging type applications.
A growing Chinese user base and the currently massive English speaking web community would certainly create a market for such an app.
...but unless we start making a strong move towards IP6 in the not-so-distant future, there won't be enough IPs for that many people.
:) Four more Class A's left in Class C space!
The highest block released now is 220/8, which is in the hands of APNIC.
-A.G.-
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
ÚÒÚ!
(That's Babelfish's Chinese translation of First Post.)
Ni hao,
statistically speaking it might be, but I believe all the business is still being made with plain English, and a normal western surfer won't notice the difference in his daily net chores.
Maybe a lot of computers in the Internet reside inside the Chinese borders, but what I hear their firewalling policies etc. somewhat limit access and thus any cultural influence through the Internet.
So, will this only be an interesting sidenote in the history of the Internet?
__
Zarathustra.fi
Modern man has no goal, no aim, no ideals.
Since when CNN is a news site ? I see similarities between Chinese people who read the People's Daily and westerners who watch CNN.
While the content produced will increasingly come in many different languages as we move forward over the next few years, I still see little movement on the actual programming front.
.. which ends up meaning that he/she also must understand English, thereby limiting the scope of the Web to those who at least have a passing knowledge of English.
Today, 99% of all programming is still done in English which ends up giving a definite bias towards English as the language of the web.
If someone comes out with some programming language that can be programmed in local languages and which gets popular, that is when I see a real shift happening in the base of the web. Otherwise, the content producer still ends up embedding their original language content inside English HTML
China tries to wall off the internet and keep it from "contaminating" the thoughts of its people, but too often they fail. An entire nation trying to firewall itself off from the rest of the internet while simulataneously trying to embrace it? It won't work. Sooner or later I think the current chinese government is going to end, we'll soon see.
The latest UN statistics show China's per-capita income at $798 USD.
Does that sort of income enable the purchase of a computer, or the recurring costs of a phone line and ISP?
If it does, then what are the Internet applications driving this incredible influx of mandarin/cantonese users? Without the huge economic/retail motive that drove American adoption, it's hard to see the huge growth in users and services. And, obviously, there is absolutely no way this will happen by 2007, as it says in the article.
Well duh... sorry, that sounds rather america-centric. Do you really expect everyone else to learn english so you don't have to learn anything else?
SSL Certificate
..but most of the content already is, judging by how much spam I get and how much of it's Chinese.
Not to sound biased here, but isn't the Internet mostly in English already? since English is one of the most widely used languages in the world, why don't they just either learn English or get some software to convert the English into Chinese? Language is only a barrier because we don't put forth effort to express ideas.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Did you know that writing of most eastern nations is more or less similar. For example.. janapnese guy can easily read chineese newspaper.. but cannot verbaly communicate with them.
The idea that Chinese will be the predominant language on the web is absurd.
China, despite recent moves towards a more open, capitalist society, has a problem that wont go away. Saw an interesting program on PBS a few months ago that discussed how China has changed in the past 50 years. Basically, you have a situation these days where the gap between the upper class and lower class is insanely wide. The wealthier segment of the population can often afford computers, internet access and the like, but this wealthier portion only makes up a tiny, tiny fraction of China's population. Meanwhile, the bulk of China's population are subsistance farmers who aren't allowed to even BE in (let alone conduct business in) China's main citiies. In most of these rural areas, electric power and indoor plumbing are considered high tech luxuries. Infact, China's national telecom infrastructure is considerably less extensive than most states in the U.S.
China's on the move, yes, but they have a looooooooooooong long way to go before their influence on the Internet becomes anywhere near as large as Europe's or America's influence.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
This is a wonderful reason for us all to learn Esperanto. This site offers a free Esperanto course with a personal tutor.
is that Manderin or Cantonese? As far as I understand there are even more distinctions that one can make between all the variants.
There might end up being more pages in Chinese in quantity, but that isn't the same as visibility. Any page that wants to speak to a world wide audience will have to have an english version.
Aside from being a lazy american who could barely manage russian, and is quite content with only speaking english, there is a much more persuasive argument. Programming languages. Not that everyone technically needs to know how to program, but getting a computer to do anything sophisticated requires at least a pseudo-language. Take HTML for instance. While you can fill the content with any language you like, the tags will forever remain in english (there can also be hacks made of course) [counter examples to my english hypothesis are assembly language and Perl]
Besides, everyone knows that either esperanto or pig-latin will the real official language spoken by the world come 20 years.
...how far east the internet gets, they'll always be Goatse.cx
Give it time. On a Pink Floyd mailing list I subscribe to, one of the more prominent posters is an intriguing fellow from Japan who doesn't speak English and has published a book in Japan about the band. He posts through a piece of software that provides translations both ways. The software is primitive and far from perfect. Frankly, it can sometimes turn out some pretty puzzling results (I often wonder how my messages to him come out.) Despite that, I--and many others on the list--have gotten to know him and value his contribution. I can see the development of this kind of software becoming more and more worthwhile as the Internet moves east. I look forward to it actually.
--Rick
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
The Internet is perfectly capable of doing Mandarin. For example, check this out, I'm going to write "slashdot" in Mandarin without using unicode :
-+- This is
/|\ "slash"
/ \ "dot"
See ? it's called ASCII. It does a faily good approximation of Mandarin I say ...
China is growing in wealth - and is set to accellerate - remember Japan? Look at China! It's going to happen - why do you think Clinton was so keen to make friends and open trade routes.
China will be the biggest exporting economy on the planet within 10-15 years. You think they wont need PCs??
Also - China is changing. The very heart of Capitalism - the right to found and operate a business - has been granted to every adult citizen in the Chinese constitution! You can't get a better indicator of China 'going western' than that.
Rich countries have better human rights records because the people poke sticks at the government less, so get poked back less. China gets rich, China gets Internet, China gets better human rights.
China will not change fundamentally because of the internet, but because of the free market. You cannot benefit from a global free market if you are not a national free market. China is moving towards a free market - so it can make money out of the rest of us.
The 'west' has been doing it for centuries - it works - we all have laptops and comfortable pants - good luck to them.
There might be more people who can read Chinese as their first language than there are Anglophones... but what about the people who speak English or Chinese as their second language? I would say in that light that the internet would have more Anglophones using it.
Can somebody clarify this for me: isn't English one of the main second languages in India. And isn't the population of India supposed to surpass that of China within the next 10 or 20 years?
In shear mathematical terms they are right -- if they could get by all the problems discussed above. And of course I do believe that they are *still* having problems with developing a chinese keyboard (1 million different symbols). That seems to me to be more of a barrier than anything else (unless you propose to teach the entire population pinyin(?) I believe it is called - chinese language spelled out phonetically in roman characters (think Beijing,Hong Kong,Mao Zedong, etc).
At the moment most software is still english. Not M$ word but things like BIND and SendMail. These rely simply on english characters. So even though you have chinese HTML, you still have to type in your addresses in English.
Besides, I've tried typing on a chinese keyboard and it sure wasn't easy.
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
In 10 years language translation programs will be to the point where they can be used in a production level environment. With this in mind I beleive that a standard language on the internet, or even communications in general, will not be nessary. Although this is just my opinion and I do not have any facts to back up this claim.
/. went down.
P.S. I apploigize if this post is redundant, my route to
Sanity is the playground of the unimaginative
The shift had started a few years ago...The next big internet boom is currently taking place in the far east. Pretty much a lot of the entrepeneurs that had worked on internet startups here in the US shifted their focus over to the far east. By learning from the mistakes that they made, they are able to do it more efficiently.
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
would you consider the average AOL user "on the internet?"
me neither...
This would NOT happen. Chinese is not diversified, as is English. Please check google zeitgeist. http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html
Slashdot = Sarcasm
The spoken Mandarin and Cantonese are diferrent, but the written Languages are exactly the same. And the Internet is mostly a written medium.
How many actual English words do you need to know to actually program in any languages? 20, 30 at most? Very easy to learn, much easier to learn than English, as a whole language. Indeed the vocabulary isn't the hardest stage of learning a language ; the really tough part is the grammar, and the idiomatic expression. Saying that a prgramming language is in English is meaningless.
And since kanji is a language independent alphabet, you can communicate with people that don't even speak the same language as you.
- Andreas
Contrary to the perception in North America english is actually used very little over the world. It is only 10th most popular over the world and even on the internet it comprises of only about 43% of the material. It is inevitable that english will become even more marginalized over the world and if North American buisnesses are going to prosper they are going to have to learn to serve these new market.
I stole this Sig
hahah thats funny.
yeah, too bad any linux office programs are useless.
please read THIS from wired.com about your linux OS, then face the hard truth
I did a search on Google's Image search for "Chinese Internet Usage" and this is what I got, its a global map showing how much of the Internet is in Chinese.. Quite interesting.
china-internet.gif
I'll admit this is slightly off-topic, but this story reminded me of all the times that a US standard is ignored overseas. I wonder if anyone can even begin to explain it away.
There's a million instances where a company or government essentially defines a standard before any other countries have even ventured into the territory. Simple enough. It seems that when other countries, usually European countries, get involved with that same technology, they adopt a standard incompatible with the US defined one.
The first to come to mind is voltage, AC frequency, and the type of connctor used. That's only one thing however. Everything is incompatible for some reason. Even standards organizations... IEEE802 projects rarely exactly match the currently implimented products. Token Ring, Ethernet, etc.
In networking a T-1 != E-1, and a T-3 != E-3.
This could go on forever...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Numbers alone aren't significant, if they were Chinese (which, as the article points out, has so many speakers) would be the quasi-official language of multinational business, travel, etc..Right? But it isn't...English is. My point isn't to praise English (which in many ways is a very stupid language, technically), but just point out that the numbers only tell a very small part of the story. I won't even bother to point out that many of these Chinese speakers who get on the net will be in no position to contribute much to the global economy in terms of buying goods for import, etc, due to political and economical roadblocks.
There are Cantonese-specific characters that are sometimes used in films. An example of which is Jet Li's Fong Sai Yuk I and II. While most of the written language in Southern China is formal--which is pretty much the same as Mandarin--there are differences.
the truth is revealed... wired.com even printed an article about this... *sigh* someday you all will see the truth.
Microsoft and Apple ads are everywhere, but no one is funding major marketing campaigns for desktop Linux. No one with any clout is carrying the torch for desktop Linux. Who is Linux's Bill Gates or Steve Jobs? Not Linus Torvalds. He supports desktop Linux, but does little proselytizing.
care of: this link here from wired.com
The problem has caused even Rob Malda, the founder of Slashdot, to sound the alarm. Malda, known by his nom de net, CmdrTaco, can get down and dirty himself. So when CmdrTaco's own troops provoke his disgust, you know there's a serious problem.
:)
i like that part the best haha.
hidden lil tid bit on page 3
HERE
Mod parent down.
Not true. There are Traditional and Simplified writing styles.
China is a communistic state. The base of comunism is that most things should be financed collectively through taxes. USA OTOH is capitalistic and everyone has to pay everything from their own pocket. In a communistic state there *should be* no extra charge for educaton, hospitals etc. But I'm no expert on China so I don't know if this works in practise.
Have a lookse here for current Global Internet Statistics by Language.
Man and Goat
I completely agree. While the Chinese have the obvious population advantage that appears to come to this result, they don't have anywhere near as many internet users, let alone posters. Most of China is impoverished. They're trying to get their next meal, not sitting around reading slashdot. Not only that, but how much of the population can even read? This would probably be a necessity for using the internet and posting content to it (although it seems some people here get by). I would think Hindi would have a better chance of becoming the next internet language. Really what you have to look at is not which languages have the most speakers, but which languages have the most speakers in technologically developed countries. These are the places that are actively using and creating new internet content, en masse. I highly doubt China will be making a strong showing in that category very soon.
--
Promoting critical thinking since 1994.
As most professional x-pats in the IT sector have known for the last year or so, Chinese will replace English on the net in less than 10 years. More like 5.
If you start your studies now, you might be ready.
As for me, I'm adding Chinese languages skills to Japanese and Korean.
There really are two classes of Internet citizens: those who have a fixed IP and can be information sources; and those who have dynamic IPs or are forbidden to run servers, and are pretty much restricted to being information sinks. Sure it's an oversimplification, but the vast majority of people on the Internet through home-connections, are second-class Internet citizens.
In Australia for example, it is significantly more expensive to be fully on the net - we're looking at 15 to 23 cents per received megabyte of data, and they're marketting megabytes (10e6 bytes). If one is happy with a proxied web service and a server-free presence, then for $80 a month one can download 3 gigabytes or more over ADSL.
wow. I wasn't even aware that they had electricity over there yet.
On the other hand, the implementation of the Internet in places without certain civil liberties provides an interesting challenge to typical Western (idealist) notions about what the Internet does for society. We may have idealistic notions about the Internet and all the freedom it gives us but truth is that the Internet makes it easier to take away civil liberties than ever before (Carnivore anyone?). Let's all move to Freenet and then the Chinese will have the same liberties as everyone else 'cause you can't monitor/censor it.
jin tian xue xi han yu!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
How does that work? I've always wondered that. With that many different symbols in their alphabet, how do they type things out?
I actualy had an ICQ conversation in spanish with someone, using babelfish. I took spanish in highschool so I could sort of recognize the structure of what I was sending out. It didn't work very well, but we were able to talk.
IBM's 'alphaworks' site had a english->chinese translation system (a long with other languages) online that actualy worked pretty well (or at least seemed to) Actualy working out the grammar as well as the words so you wouldn't end up with incoherent jiberish
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=china-inter net/images/usage.gif%20%20%20%
[snip lot's of %20's]
%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20&imgrefurl=htt p://www.goatse.cx
Spaces mean you don't see the goatse.cx part of the URL in the status bar... How witty.
80% of the population in India is below the poverty line. That's hundreds of millions of individuals that will never...ever be a factor involving the internet, or any other technology now known or imagined. Comparing India's adoption of any technology to China is inappropriate.
This type of assumption is indicative of how many people in the world are simply pre-occupied with their own culture. Visit India and China and then take another look at your own country. China has thousands of years of history, and has survived because they know how and why....they were here before Western civilation, and they will be here long after it has passed into history. Ignore it if you wish...it makes no difference to them.
I eat rice.
I am an ant. I am a termite. I m a yellow insect.
Mass produced people. Like cheap chinaman trinkets.
Life is Chinaman cheap says Ching Chang Chong.
I am a yellow insect. A cockroach.
I do believe (If I am wrong or if somebody knows the language better than I please correct me) that a number of basic symbols are common to the language. For instance 50% of characters contain a /, 30% containt a -, 20% containt a *, etc.
Well a chinese keyboard is made up of as many of these common components as possible (three per key I believe) allowing you to construct something like 70% of the language using 100 some common symbols. Unfortunately it's the other 30% that kills you.
Actually, after Mao died the Deng Xiaoping and his cohorts were pretty freaked out by what happened and they began to liberalize (in the British sense of the word... like free markets and the like) both economically (Deng actually had a slogan "It's not bad to get rich") and politically. But the Tiananmen Square massacre scared them shitless, especially when people other then students began to get involved. It was suppressed. And given the background (having experienced china in the 1940s and through Mao's crap... Deng had to endure a couple of struggle sessions himself) It's easy to see why they might have been afraid.
The problem is that when China looked around them to see what was successful they saw the Authoritarian capitalist states like Singapore, Korea and Taiwan. And they figured that it worked well. Taiwan has become a real democracy now though.
I think after the shock of Tiananmen wares off and things start to calm down again the restrictions will once again start to come off. Well I hope. Unlike Singapore, it's a pretty big country to hold with an iron fist.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Language barrier? What language barrier? With the web truely going global, we can all cheer "WASSSSSUUBBIIII" together!! "Dude, that was sooooo last year."
yeah right.
Sure, Chinese may very well be the native language of most Internet users in 10 years, due to the giant size of the Chinese population, but any claims that this will cause some great shift in how the world uses the web is pretty silly.
That pretty much nails it. Think about food: Some journalist may report that a huge percentage of the meals cooked in homes around the world are, guess what? You got it. Chinese food. Does that mean that you have to start learning to like Chinese food? No.
India produces more movies than any other country in the world. Have you (Indians please pardon me,) had to learn Hindi to enjoy the movies that you watch?
Same probably goes for books...
Here in my office, I am the only American - I am also the sysadmin, so I get to see what sites people visit. I know that if I see google.com logged, it was probably me who hit the site.
The people over here have their "own" internet in effect - one that in no way influences or limits an English speaker's ability to have an "All-English" experience.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
Look, you can learn what 'color' and 'font' mean without knowing the rest of it. And almost all localization schemes still allow you to type in the roman space.
.. as a package name).
So while yeh, some things will be intuitive for English speakers, particularly things like APIs. while "font" might be easy javax.crypto.EncryptedPrivateKeyInfo (of course, Java does in fact allow Unicode for variable and class names, so you could have like
So, for a while I think most actual coding will be done in English, but that doesn't mean most website content will be. You could always have one web guy and one content guy as well. Or, for example you could use off the self software and fill it with localized content, (for example slashdot.jp).
And lets not forget, Ruby, a programming language quickly gaining popularity was actually crated in Japan, where it's now more popular then Perl.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
how??? (OK I know how it could be done, but still...lame)
Language is a protocol, the sooner we all speak the same language, the better and whether you like it or not, English is that language.
Deleted
Most of the Commodity PC stuff we Americans get comes from Taiwan, witch is run by the legitimate Capitalist Chinese government, witch fled there after the country got taken over by the Communists. and by "Legitimate" I mean "Liked by the West". They still call themselves "The Republic of China" (Even though they didn't have elections until the 1990s.) In fact, up until the 1970's they actually got to sit in on the UN security console in the "china" spot. Now they're not in the UN at all.
Someone else mentioned making knockoffs of Taiwanese hardware, though. But I don't know about a PC clone for $9, even in mainland china. I'd bet you could make a decent 'console' type machine with that much there, though.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
China hasn't really been a 'communistic' state since Mao died. Nowadays they're trying to emulate western Europe's 'socialism', but with out that 'intellectual freedom and democracy' stuff that might cause them to lose power.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
is not that chinese will become the dominant 'langauge' (after all communication is what the Internet is all about), its that all the patent/copyright/DMCA bullshit will make me have to learn chinese just so i can get on with earning a living.
? = yi (one)
? = gang (post, as in "position" or "job")
What you want is (I think) di-yi kan (publish) or perhaps di-yi yan (word)... Anyone else know for sure?
Sorry, I can't supply the GB codes, as I don't have xcin on this machine. And, after multiple tries, I can't get Slashcode to accept your originals (cut-n-pasted) without converting them to question marks. (How'd you do that?)
--jrd
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
This is unclear. Many many more Chinese speak English than other people speak Chinese. Just as Latin continued to be the main Church language, even in areas where it was not otherwise widely used, English may dominate on the internet whether or not the majority of current users are native English speakers.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Don't forget India. (and Pakistan). Both have large English speaking populations (as a second language for a lot of people, though) India, in fact, uses English in the government. I'm not sure about Pakistan though.
Of course, unlike the US, England, etc, India has lots of native languages as well.
Oh, one other thing. All Chinese students need to have minimum competency in English in order to get into collage. More people may speak Chinese well, but English is really starting to become a sort of lingua fracia. Of course, soon enough instant translation will take over and the idea of learning another language will be a quaint little hobby.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
From: gascan@dcst16.pt (Bill Gascoyne)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: The dangers of extrapolation (was Re: Speed of Light
A cautionary thought on the dangers of extrapolation.
It is reported that in 1977 there were 37 Elvis impersonators in the world.
In 1993 there were 48,000. At this rate, by the year 2010 one out of every
three people in the world will be an Elvis impersonator.
:-)
French culture would still be french if english words were used. Well. Maybe it would lose some of it's snootyness.
But I really don't think having the rudementary english needed to get into higher education in china is really going to hurt their culture. Fuck. Mao pretty much destroyed traditional chinese culture anyway. Anything that might change is only going to be a few decades old anyway. Anything that's the same as it always was isn't going to change at all
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Even though Chinese might become one of the big languages on the net, I don't think it will ever become the mainstream language. That role, my friends, I see reserved for English.Let me explain.
First of all, I want to stress that I myself am not a native English speaker.
If one looks at the general evolution of languages in Europe (and by extension in America(?)), I think you can notice there is an overall trend to simplicity. I do not think this has to do with the education level or intelligence of the people speaking the language (as some might imply), but by having a clear way of communicating.
If I remember correctly, Celtic had conjugations at the end of a word AND in the beginning. Latin had it only in the end. In the middle ages, most conjugations were dropped from languages or (in the case of English) evolved to some kind of simple mixture.
At this point, English has little exceptions, very little conjugations (or simple, as well as for the verb as for the nouns) AND it uses a simple character set to write (no umlauts and other things). And it's alive and spoken by a good deal of the world population
Let me put this in perspective. I myself am Flemish (a Dutch variant). The smaller half of the country speaks French (Belgium), and we got French before we learnt English. A good portion of the Flemish has studied German (another language in this country). Everyone of these languages has a grammar far more intricate than English (not to speak about the accents French has on e's).
Still most of the Flemish clearly prefer to use English in a professional environment even considerig the demographical composition of the country... Why you would ask? Right.
I think it is relatively safe to hope that English will become the language in the Western World.
Now, if we come back to the Chinese, as far as I know (and I have had a couple of Chinese collegues), Chinese does not posses any of the advantages: it has a very large character set, a difficult prononciation with variations in how you pronounce a word and no easy to cathegorise grammar.
I guess the step to Chines as a e-language is just to great for the rest of the world and I guess this is a good thing, considering the alternative...
Genius doesn't work on an assembly line basis. You can't simply say, "Today I will be brilliant."
Japanese cannot really read Chinese stuff. First of all, mainlanders use simplified Chinese, whereas Japanese use older style for their Kanji. And secondly Chinese use way more characters.
It's actually easier for Chinese people to read Japanese stuff then for Japanese to read Chinese. (except for the Hiragana and Katakana, of course)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
robot: "what is thy bidding, my master?"
Most of the population already do know pinyin. It's the phonetic transcription system used in Chinese schools to teach little Chinese kids how to read and write. The literacy rate (hard to judge accurately in a police state) is listed by the CIA World Factbook as 81%.
BTW, they have nowhere NEAR a million symbols in Chinese. Some estimates range as high as 80,000 but the average college grad only knows about 6~8 thousand. Basic literacy is considered to be 3,000 or so...
That said, I agree with the general attitude that the article is way off-base. It's going to be a LONG time before Chinese "takes over" the 'net!
--jrd
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Do you have any idea how many people live in Chinese cities? Hundreds of millions. There is a hell of a lot of Zhongwen on the web already, despite "This show I saw on PBS".
Anyway, no culture or language is going to have much "influence" on the web outside of their own worlds. English speaking people are going to read English web pages and Chinese people are going to read Chinese web pages. It really makes no difference to anyone else.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The internet is already popular in lots of places where English is not the primary language, yet English is still the primary language for (guesstimate) 90% of the internet. I'm speaking primarily of places like Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway... The people there speak English online.
Besides, ASCII (or ANSI) is already pretty basic to the way the internet is structured; it would be pretty hard to implement Chinese pictographs into all our software. (Yes I know it's been done, but that's hardly an elegant solution any way you look at it.)
Anyone in a technical field is going to have to speak English anyway, to read the error messages and RFCs if nothing else, and generally the techies are on the internet before normal humans anyway.
Given all this, and probably more points I haven't thought of yet, I imagine the main effect of internet in China will be more Chinese learning English than workarounds to support their unsupportable language structure.
Are you sure it will? Two words: machine translation. It is starting to get good now and by the time most Chinese people have unrestricted access to the net, it should be much better. I'm not saying that the software will translate Shakespeare perfectly but do human translators? My guess is that it'll help cross the barrier better than people who speak a language as their second but aren't professional linguists.
We will have the same problem we've had for millennia but soon we will have a means to solve it. How good was machine translation 10 years ago?
Accenture -- formerly Andersen Consulting -- reckon this will happen by 2007. It's worth a read... especially the links at the bottom talking about cultural pollution (not necessarily in a negative sense!)
They're not often wrong.
The figures reckon that one billion people in China will be connecting to the Web by the year 2007. It sounds a it optomistic to me, and what exactly does "connecting to the web" mean. Someone who owns a PC and is connected... or just someone who uses a CyberCafe? I wonder if in China "people per IP" would be much higher than in Europe or America.
There are other systems where you type keystrokes which map to character elements, such as individual brush-strokes or radicals, which helps sort through the list. Most people use the phonetic methods, since they're easier to learn, but "professional" typists are trained in the other methods because they're faster if you've got the skill to use them.
Even with the phonetic systems, you can type most characters with 5 or 6 keystrokes. Intelligent "context sensitive" systems make it even easier...
--jrd
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
"Do you have any idea how many people live in Chinese cities? Hundreds of millions."
Mind if I move your bong, Sherlock?
The largest city in the world only (Tokyo) contains about 28 million people, followed by New York with about 20 million, not the "hundreds of millions" you're hallucinating about.
Here, ride the snake with some stats, ya moron:
Top 10 Most Populated Cities On Earth
Bowie J. Poag
like &12345; where '12345' is replaced by the character code. I usually use M$ word, save as HTML and then cut out the produced HTML entity codes.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
<A HREF="http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=chin
You don't see the goatse.cx bit in the status bar, because the spaces push it off the right of your screen. Pretty clever, even if it is stealing an idea from another story!
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
The vast majority of computers in china use Qwerty keyboards. Then an intelligent layer between the raw input and the application converts it into Kanji or whatever. They even work on context (at least the Microsoft software I have does). so if you type in "shi" you might get 'is', but if you type in "shi jian" the first "shi" will be the word for 'time'.
If you have a higher-end Nokia phone you know what that's like. You can type regular English on a 9 key keyboard and you only have to hit each key once. It's a rather weird feeling, but it works.
Actually 'intelligent layers' are good enough that Trendy teens in Japan can actually type kanji on telephone keypads!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
And what language would that be?
ppl in Peking don't speak the same language as the people of Canton. Although the china government might want to dissagree with me the fact remains that china is still divided by language. It is a country of many languages with one army that says there is only one language.
hook
The Chinese government pretty much did "end" when Mao died. Deng Xiaoping and the others who took over made a lot of changes.
And when you add 'eventually' to the sentence... well, I don't think that there's much of a chance for this government to last more then a few hundred years. None of the dynasties ever lasted that long. I don't know why this authoritarian government would either.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Not Waid-Gails. I mean, that has gay (phoneticaly) right in it? I mean you don't even have to alter it much.
It's all about the pinyin. but without the tone indicators. Tone indicators are for posers and real Chinese people.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Certainly in the computer language everyone uses the same protocols and standards and coding languages.
If the 'real world' becomes anything like the computer world, people will continue stay incompatibly with each other while mindless zealots crop up on either side and duke it on news groups. Witch I guess would be an improvement over the current state where we just shoot each other.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
And how is the Internet supposed to draw people together when the same old language barrier still exists?
one word: babelfish.
Actualy, newer versions of bind support some sort of internationalization. even though it totaly violates standards.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I was speaking in the context of the original theme, which talked about Chinese displacing English as the predominant language of the Internet.
Interpreting my phrase 'will replace' as meaning English will be taken down and substituted with Chinese is taking my comment out of context, as it relates to the thread.
No one would expect English to be literally replaced.
English will be around for anyone that wants it. But if your interest in the Internet is more than passing or passive, you should be prepared for other forms of linguistic communication.
Just like money... Right now, you can use at least three forms of currency inside China. The USD is one of them, because it is a dominant currency. But if the dollar was not dominant, you would need another form of chattle...you would need whatever currency was popular.
If there was an award for talking out of you're ass, you'd probably stand a good chance of winning. As an American studying Chinese, I can say almost certainly that Chinese is a far, far simpler language then English.
Chinese, as far as I know (and I have had a couple of Chinese collegues), Chinese does not posses any of the advantages: it has a very large character set, a difficult prononciation with variations in how you pronounce a word and no easy to cathegorise grammar.
Wrong, wrong wrong. I don't know exactly what you mean by 'easy to categories grammar' but Chinese grammar itself is much, much simpler then English grammar. There are regional differences in pronunciation of Chinese, just as there are regional differences in the way English is spoke. There are no changes due to grammar however. Every word has the same sound regardless of it's grammatical frame (unlike English with "drive, drove, driving driven," and worse "is, be, being, was"). Also, when using the Pin-Yin system of Romanization pronunciation is not difficult at all. Certainly not any more difficult that that of a Chinese person or any one else for that matter trying to speak English.
Finally, Chinese characters are for the most part made from smaller characters and easily recognizable/memorable subcomponents. Writing and remembering characters is like spelling on a grid rather then on a straight line. Writing and memorizing them isn't difficult at all once you get the hang of it.
Of course, getting them into computers has been a problem in the past, but, modern technology has allowed their use pretty much without problems.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
China has had these issues for thouands of years and remained a consistant whole for almost all of that time. Who knows what'll happen in the future, but I seriously doubt a long term breakup is in the works
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I didn't say they all lived in the same city, dumbas. There are hundreds of millions of urban americans yet by your logic we would only have 30 million or so (going by that list, only two of our cities are listed)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I think more americans (at lest geeks) are familiar with "kanji" then "hanzi". Besides if I wrote "hanzi" they would go off saying "han-zee" like a bunch of morons. That problem is not as pronounced kanji
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
And don't forget that all new websites will be named by throwing silverware down the stairs.
>Would you even consider the average wealthy Chinese citizen with online access truly 'on the Internet'?
As I see it, there's also a lot of censorship in the USA. Children in schools are really on the Internet? People who use AOL are really on the Internet?
Also, nowadays, people with only a 33.6k modem are really on the Internet?
Think about it.
Seu -
Oh Man, do I smell a market for pop-up ads....
.25% of the USA-Europe traffic. Unless..
Imagine the bandwidth/backbone need to handle 100,000,000,000 stupid pop-ups a day...forget the data/language.
First off though, I don't image much traffic comming out (non-chinese, going to chinese web sites. Second, if most chinese don't speak English, they will not surf outside chinese ("China") websites. I can't see the traffic to china being much greater than
Unless..the equivelent of the "Wall Falling" happens in China, like it did in the USSR..which a few are saying is likely to happen by 2010-2020 or so...
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
"places without certain civil liberties". You mean like the USA? DCMA + offspring..
And someone also predicted that men will be obsolete soon. So I guess all we have to look forward to is a bunch of chineese speaking women on the internet. But wait, aren't there more men than women in China? Wouldn't that mean that more than 1/2 of the population is obsolete and will be phased out? If so, then that will reduce the number of people speaking Chineese by 1/2 and so it won't be the most common language! Of course this will only happen if a computer based AI doesn't take over the world first and turn us all into batteries.
I am afraid your stat is a bit incomprehensive. In terms of biggest metropolitan area, you are right. Many agree that should be the greater Tokyo region, somewhere under 30M.
n a
While China does not have a single metropolitan area as big as 30M, it does not invalidate the fact that it has well more than 100M living in cities.
http://www.citypopulation.de/Country.html?E,Chi
If you just count 24 province centres, the total is already 75M. Many provinces have more than 1 cities. Officially, non-rural dweller is about 300M in China.
The most misleading thing is many cities are misclassified as rural towns. No one really cares about changing the designation. A friend of mine's grandfather is living in "town" in GuangDong, which has got a population of close to 1 million. It was largely a farming area 20yrs ago. But, it is now a major manufacturing base in the region....
in the future, the Internet will not be accessed by computers, it will from mobile users whether it may be from mobile phones, wireless pda, watches, and other gadgets.
in an article from CNN China cell-phone use hits 140 million there are 140m cellphone users beating US with 118m.
so if everybody uses their 3g phones to access information and majority of the mobile phone users are chinese, then indeed chinese can outbeat english in internet use in less than 10 years.
let say that 4m people are added every month in 10 years, 4m x 12months x 10 years = 480m. the current population of the us is only around 286m according to US census. although the us population will grow, the us mobile phone usage is around 50% so after 10 years, the mobile users of china will definitely be more than internet and mobile users.
and if you say that most of there population is at the country side, i will say it is correct. but the number of people living in the urban areas also reache hundreds of millions. a small province in china has population more than most countries in the world.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
Would you even consider the average wealthy Chinese citizen with online access truly 'on the Internet'?
What typical elitist crap.
This is just another way of saying You may have the same advantages and access as me but you will neve truly be one of us. Why? Because they won't share your English-speaking, Amero-centric, left-of-center, hamburger & apple pie world-view? Give me a break.
This is exactly the attitude that the Aristocracy take with the Nouveau Riche once the lower classes start to gain money and power in any society : "You can dress like us, haunt the same places as us, own the things we do, talk like us but you will never be us"
We are the Tech-savvy aristocracy of the 00's, we must accept that we represent a tiny, tiny proportion of world-society and that our place in the Internet world order will become increasingly eroded and yes, irrelevant, as the masses pile in. If you thought AOL's introduction of the hoi-polloi to the internet changed the internet forever you ain't seen nothing yet.
Get over it. There'll still be places like /. where we can gather to whine about it.
Assuming the Internet becomes a truly global entity, this is an obvious (and mathematically correct) conclusion.
Only if you're talking about first languages. I think if you look at the numbers of persons who use a language as their first or second language, there's a statistical tie between English and Chinese, or English comes out slightly ahead.
See David Crystal, English as a Global Language, which has the exact statistics.
Don't put too much hope in machine translation. Eventually, machine translation will end up working like Graffitti on the Palm or older voice recognition software: in order for something to be translated properly, you'll have to write in a style that the translation engine will understand.
I understand that grammatical word order in Chinese is pretty close to that of English. It's pronouncing those tonal shifts that's the hard part for us gwai-lo. If they made it work with translation to and from Japanese (or even Klingon, which intentionally had a fucked up word order), then you'd have something.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
The San Francisco Chronicle has an article discussing the World Intellectual Property Organization's prediction that in less than 10 years, Chinese will be the most widely-used language on the web.
English and English-like variants will stay on top for a long time.
Accusations of U.S.-centricity (I hope that's not a word) are frequent in Europe. However, if the issue of language and culture is avoided, then I've found most people will use English when working with foreigners. In international projects, participants will insist on English just to keep the French^H^H^H^H^H^H other groups under control or from gaining too much advantage. English is a second (or third or fourth) language for a great many people and using it puts the group on more or less equal footing.
autopr0n already mentioned India where English is the least common denominator among the educated. Education and / or money being key prerequisites for Internet usage. China has a similar situation with so many mutually unintelligable spoken languages and use of English among many of the educated.Then you have technological inertia; most systems and programming langages are derived from ASCII-based ones making it difficult to use even Western European languages. Odds are that unless there is a lot of coordinated effort and investment to recreate a Chinese Internet, Chinese that know English will find it more convenient to keep using English-variants as the de facto language standard.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
I'm sure MS will somehow manage to force us speak in a natural language counterpart to MSIL (Microsoft Intermediate Language) that's extensively used in Visual Studio .NET as the "lowest common denominator" between the languages in the .NET platform.
Like this:
method public hidebysig instance class System.Object Hello_Slashdot() il managed {
// Code size 43 (0x2b)
.maxstack 4
.locals ([0] class System.Object V_0, [1] int32 V_1)
IL_0000: ldarg.0
IL_0001: ldfld int32 Stack::m_size
IL_0006: brtrue.s IL_000e
IL_0008: newobj instance void ['msnaturalcomm']
IL_000a: ldint GENERIC_GREETING_PHRASE
IL_000e: ldstr "Slashdot"
Would be just another milestone for their strategy to conquer the world.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
The Ethnologue language name index list the 6,800 (not a typo) langauges in use today.
Check it out.
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
how is the Internet supposed to draw people together when the same old language barrier still exists?
That's easy. We'll all just have to learn Chinese.
We might discover what the rest of the world feels like having to learn a foreign language just to use the 'net.
Well, for starters ... I work for a chinese import/export/do anything else for money - type of company in Markham, Ontario, Canada. We do a great deal of our business in chinese as well (i am a gwai lo) and most of our customers are chinese. Lately we have been mostly exporting computer equipment rather than important, as the market has taken a massive twist -- they will pay us *any* price for the very hardware that was made in china in the first place ... but that they could never afford. Pentium and 486 computers (especially linux compatible ones) are bought up by the container load as fast as we can get them... and they want them badly! That is where the internet growth is. The internet grew in big business... yes. But the internet really caught on through email, even before the internet ... fidonet.
... culturally normalizing effect, because it actually *stifles* the free transit of ideas because people jsut don't know what alot of the words are ... and the majority of chinese can barely read or write whatever language they do speak. The key to wealth in china is through education. This is partly the problems behind the Cultural Revolution and various other things at other times in China ... in china, both information and the spread of information have a massively destabilizing effect.
... Like other countries with poorly developed and highly regionalized languages, especially those who rely so heavily on cultural and systematic tradition there is little to no new communication and even basic human function can be stifled.
... because translation via automated means to chinese is basically impossible, and even then only the rich and elite could ever udnerstand what is actually *written*.
... henry ford was right on the money when he said that workers needed to be able to afford whatever they are making!!!
There are two major problems with Chinese internet.
1) The chinese language is extremely effective at keeping people under the control of the nation. The chiense language from a linguistical standpoint is incredibly primitive and basically useless. Its chief advantage is that chinese are proud of their language and assume that other languages are equally hard to learn.
The issue here is that it is an evolved symbolistical character set which is *very* difficult to use effectively on a computer
also, it has a
2) Chinese people do not communicate (no hong kong people)
So what I am sayign is, legions of identical chinese language websites will do very little to change the status quo in china. Access to outside information is of little use either
Additionally, remember how many people had to suffer for that plastic toy or television set you just bought. Underpricing through inhumane labour has destroyed our ability to sustain our markets, and it has created a general hatred of the US outside of china
The long term solution here is to 1) destabilize the chinese economy to prevent it from becoming reliant on handouts and technology-indebtedness
2) encourage the use of real languages like Hangeul (check it out, its amazing) Russian, English or any other decent alphabetic language
3) Provide content that is easier to read, i.e. less buzzwords, shorter words, less crap.
4) Provide translated websites with limited content to give "hints" and get people excited, i.e. giving them incentives to learn a decent language.
My analogy of china is a bunch of people who each know about 1% of the cobol language, walking around doing the dirty grudge labour for the masses of the world who know C++, Perl, etc.
Anyways, that is my flamebait for today.
RageMaxis
--- ask me about nihilism, I will have nothing to tell you.
Since XHTML is "extensible", and Unicode based, someone can easily invent a XML definition of a "chinese-based HTML", then allow the definition itself to do the translation back to english tags. But to the coder, the ENTIRE "CXHTML" code and content will be in Chinese...yet any XML-enabled browser can display the page correctly.
It's not HTML that enables a true WORLD-WIDE web, but rather, the extensibility of XML.
one. Yah! Go team! And people say that the internet is making life easier.
but what do you expect from the country that produced dan quayle?
Would you even consider the average wealthy Chinese citizen with online access truly 'on the Internet'?
Maybe I wouldn't, but I bet 2 million American homeless people would.
In more detail, Mexico City officially has 25 million people, but there are 5 million or more native Americans who live in Mexico city, but aren't "officially" there.
And, about the flame war, some thoughts:
- Don't get overly emotional when posting here.
- I think having a web not dominated by English would be a good thing.
- SamThe secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
And how is the Internet supposed to draw people together when the same old language barrier still exists?"
Because on the Internet, we can communicate through the universal language of pr0n. Well, unless you're in one o' them loser countries that filters it out.
~Philly
John "MadDog" Hall made a prediction during his speech this year at ApacheCon that Mandarin Chinese will be the dominant language in the world by 2006. He suggested that we all learn it now.
I'm planning on learning it after I've mastered Russian.
and ppl wonder why (and make fun) when i tell them i am learning mandarin (i'm still not consistant with the 4 tones).
just look how far western cultures have come in the past 100 years, and the chinese dont even have to invent stuff, just buy it. (not entirely true but they have an easy ride until they catch up)
10 years might be hard, but 50 is easy, there is a good chance i'll be a live, but to old to learn it right, and my kids (when they happen) will have a lot of mandarin and will fine with the new global language
didnt france veto esperanto because they figured french was already the global language (and it was at the time) but they were proven wrong in less then 30 years?
-rev
First off, I am little troubled by the implications of the question "And how is the Internet supposed to draw people together when the same old language barrier still exists?" This question seems to suggest that the internet is supposed to draw people together. The internet in my understanding isn't a philosophical project with an underlying message, it's a data conduit. I imagine the Chinese will find it quite useful for transmitting data. The unity thing may be a nice side effect, but I don't think the global infrastructure is having cash dumped into it at this rate for a sense of community.
As for the "truly on the internet thing", I'm not sure what that means to you, but if I get your drift you are having a philosophical issue with content filtering. In that case, I am not convinced that AOL users are truly on the internet either, or for that matter students, library users, or the customers of many ISP's. Is one truly on the internet if they are blocked at port 80 to prevent webservers, or if a University blocks Napster, or a company blocks XP terminal services? Australians have content filtering as well, in my understanding. In fact, Americans are restricted legally from viewing content that is acceptable in Scandinavian countries.
I am not sure if the Chinese charectar system provides more or less data density per byte than my alphabet, but that could be a factor in the future concerning linguistic conventions. If it's more efficient to transmit the concept "my dog has fleas" in Chinese charecters than in this alphabet, no worries. If the byte count is significantly higher in Chinese then English might become their standard.
I have read on Slashdot before that the Chinese are big fans of open source in principle if not in practice. I would think a billion Linux users would be a boon to the internet.
I suppose in my opinion the long and the short of it is this. If you are connected to the internet, send your data through it. Welcome. What that data is and the political ideology behind it is is none of my concern. There are a ton of webpages out there right now that I can't read and it doesn't diminish my enjoyment and use of the resource.
Carpe Deez
I disagree with both methodology and the result of the prediction. As to methodology - I cannot offer anything better ;-)
But result is also wrong. AFAIK (sorry, no URL) India is the second population/growth-population wise country in the world. Therefor "indian" is then supposed to be the second language to be used on the web in the future. But the problem is that there is no such language as "indian". There are plenty of dialects instead, which make English a unifying language for India. Now, I guess we should add all those native English speakers to all those Indian netters, then we add all those who consider English to be international language, and I would say that English is the winner over Chineese.
Also, Chineese is difficult to learn, multi-byte, different direction language, which makes it absolutely not convinient for Internet usage.
Taking "real--time cool translators" unknown out of equation, my bet would be on English.
Leonid Mamtchenkov
Most of China is impoverished.
Been to China in the last 25 or so years? Apparently not.
This, again, is clearly from the mouth of someone with a Western/CNN/Today Show molded point of view.
Stop watching the world thru someone else's eyes and go there and find out for yourself. Just because the streets aren't (yet) crowded with BMW's does not mean a country is poor.
There are other measures of wealth and well-being besides how many stoplights you have to run to get to the next Star Bux.
Compare your families geo-political history to someone in Beijing...lacks a bit of longevity, no? Are you surrounded by an infrastructure that has been moving millions of people and mega-tons of goods for tens of hundreds of years? No.
China is measured by a different set of rules than upstart North America.
Ignorance of something different doesn't mean it's not there.
Your high doubt is founded on nothing more than your limited experience in the real world. Get out from behind that keyboard and find out how many other different cultures that are on this planet...then look back on your own, and still see if you think the world revolves around you.
Great thread, folks! Obviously language will be a tense issue until we get together and figure it out.
For more fun ideas on what it will take to live in a truly global civilization, check out The United Nations: http://www.un.org The World Federalist Association: http://www.wfa.org and for those of you with a spiritual streak, check out the Baha'i Faith: http://www.bahai.org
DanI really hate to respond to my own post but I was wrong about Michelle Kwan. I think it was the CNN showing of Time Magazine's Man of the Year interview with AIDS researcher David Ho did they mention something about his dad or uncle being one of the pioneers in Chinese character encoding. The article I just linked to doesn't mention it so I guess it was edited in before broadcast. While doing some digging, I also found this article about displaying Chinese under ASCII code.
too bad i submitted this two weeks ago...
Plastics and translation software, my boy, Plastics and translation software. These technologies are going places I tell you.
I think the karma police are after me
It will be good to know both, so start loading your browsers with the Chinese language fonts and browse a few sites, even with the idea of "knowing your opponent." Get your Chinese language tapes here and start ripping to MP3 so that everyone will benefit. Americans are good at adapting to these things, so let's not fall down on it now. English may be the language of business, but look at what has happened when we ignored Arabic. It has been predicted that within the next 20 years there will be a conflict between the U.S. and China over Taiwan. Could be self-fullfilling, but don't be caught sleeping.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
The parent post had no links in it at all...
Besides, there'snothing wrong with this link at all.
Would you even consider the average wealthy AOL subscriber with online access truly 'on the Internet'?
Well before that happens, if ever, I think we'll see other more progressive language groups migrate to the public internet with disposable incomes. I have a feeling that we'll be seeing a lot more Spanish language (optional or primary) internet resources before we'll be seeing Chinese.
Speak truth to power.
There is a considerable size of Chinese population here in North America (YES, I am part of it), I have seen report saying that in couple of years, there will be more Chinese speaking population in Canada than the French speaking (an official language).
The point is, the 10 billion mainland Chinese people are not the ONLY Chinese, there are MANY Chinese that have un-censored Internet out here, such as Hong Kong, Taiwan....
Different languages material on the web should co-exist on the web without any problem, just as they do in real life. Here in Toronto, there are two Chinese Newspapers and countless Chinese signs all around the city and it never seems to poses any problem. The web should work the same.
In fact, there are already tons Chinese materials on the web, due to the lack of understanding of Chinese by most "westerners", most websites are not visited by most "westerners" for obvious reasons so it does not seems a large community on the web.
People claim that Chinese will be the language of the 'net within five years. This is easy to understand when you consider that roughly 25% of the World's Population is Chinese.
But only 5-10% of that population has access to the resources to make net use possible. By these numbers, the mainland chinese can only hope to comprise 2.5% of the potential net users. Tight government restrictions and a largely uneducated populus are crippling china's entrance into the world online community.
Contrary to the government propaganda, a large segment of people in china are uneducated.
This is a direct result of Mao's policy of ransacking universities and persecuting the educated chinese during the "cultural revolution". My father's friend (a professor) was put into the fields to be "re-educated" by the farmers.
As you may imagine, many of the educated chinese have left for other countries. (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vancouver Canada, etc...). It is no suprise that these areas have done so well. They represent the best of chinese culture.
Chinese will never be the dominant language on the net. Not so long as the Communist government is in power.
Maybe (relatively) few Chinese speak English ..
.. :-)
Actually, there are more English-speaking people in China than there are in the United States!
Of course, China has a bit of a population advantage
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Here is your post, courtesy of machine transalation (english->chinese->english)
And how should the Internet together attract the person when the similarly old language á pass still had?
You will affirm it? Two words: Machine translation. It are starting the now change well and when the time most Chinese people can enter the non- limit the network, it should be good. I were not saying, software perfectly will translate Shakespeare but behaves as one should the translator? My guess is, who will it help the cross this barrier comparison to be just like people say the language because their second but will not be the specialized linguistics. We have us eat thousand years similar question but we very quickly have the method solve it. Many machines translate 10 years ago?
Kilroy was here!
What about the so called "Great fire wall of china"? Can they even view sites that aren't chinese (made in china :P, not just written in chinese)?
Carpe meam simiam!
For all of us that missed out on the Dot-com bubble, now is the time to get ready for China...
Think about it, an entire repressed people hungry for e-porn... and willing to put up $$$ for amonimity... I can see the cash truck backing up to my door right now.
OK so that is just wrong, but hey, so are most other get rich schemes.
Well, I can't seem to get GB to work here either, but I'd say "first post" should be shou3 tie1 -- BB posts on the Mainland are commonly described as tie1 (stickers) and shou3 is a common pre-fix meaning initial or first, e.g. shou3 che1 (the first bus of the day on a bus route).
For those of you that think Chinese is hard to learn. The Chinese that are being used nowadays is already consider to be easy to use.
In early 1900's, there was a movement to simplify the sentence structure and grammer. That really make Chinese much easier to learn. This would be like the old style of english (Thou, Thy, Thee..) being converting to the english we use nowdays. From my experience, it should take about 10 years of constant pratice to master the new style and another 10-15 to master the old style.
Another major change is much more recent, the Chinese government decided that it is too difficult to read and write Chinese characters which are based on symbols so they simplified a lot of the characters. This version of Chinese (usually under GB encoding on the web) is widely used in China. Most other Chinese speaking places, like Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore still uses the Normal non-simplified version of Chinese.
Because of the massive movement in China to teach it's children English, there have been a few estimates that say there will be more English speakers in China than there are in North America and Europe combined, by the year 2010.
... but I can pretty much guarantee that the majority of people with Internet connections will have basic English skills. Only the priviledged and educated classes have regular access to computers, and that's a pretty miniscule percentage of the Chinese population.
... only the people doling out the cash seem to band together and spend all the money in one place at a time .. like Bejing, for the upcoming olympics in 2008. It's basicaly a capitalistic, entrepenurial country, and it won't surprise me if the Internet floodgates spring open in the next five years.
After traveling around China, I'm somewhat skeptical
As a slightly off topic side node, what really surprised me about China was the lack of Communism. Sure, there's a good amount of government subsidising, but it's basically the same as it is in the United States
>this is an obvious (and mathematically correct)
>conclusion.
It is neither obvious, nor mathematically correct. And since when is "chinese" a language? Does he mean mandaring?
The simple and relevant mathematical fact is that more people speak english than any other language, and taht gap is likely to widen. English will increase its dominance not because its spoken in the U.S., but because it is the language of commerce.
Yes, there's probably in the neighborhood of a billion mandarin speakers. As you point out, this doesn't mean that they can all use the internet. Furthermore, guess what second language those that can afford the internet are more likely to speak?
hawk
Or at least, it is only a speedbump. I know no
Chinese to speak of, but I chat up the college
girls from Guangzhou to Haerbin on a regular basis
using OICQ and Babelfish. Eventually they all
start to learn English, which takes the bloom off
the rose for me, and I dump them.
Funny thing is, that Chinese-speaking majority
is going to be spending most of its free time
learning English, so they can get out of China.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
China will never willingly change that much toward the ideals of the west. If even 50% of the Chinese in China are going to get on the web, there'll need to be a war, in which the People revolt against their current government, demanding freedom. It worked for America (though it still took a long time to get onto the internet... ;) ).
Now you get into this question: would you rather have complete freedom for another billion people to have the theoretical possibility of getting on the net, or would you rather have peace? I take peace.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
Just watch kids in Taiwan (with one input system) and the Mainland (with another) send e-mails or chat -- they ZOOM. Inputting characters simply isn't the hurdle a lot of Westerners imagine it to be. The software's intelligent and guesses, fairly accurately, what characters are being input, even though theoretically there may be dozens of possibilities, and also permits a lot of shorthand. To be honest, there's immense naivete in the West about the level of development in Mainland China, and not just in the computer field.
Perhaps a better way of saying it would be, "The Chinese will account for the highest percentage of users of Internet technology".
Take away unimpeded access to content, and all you have is a giant socio-capitalist WAN.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Damn, you've cracked my 1024 bit encraption scheme.
Looking at it, a lot of the mistakes are words not in its dictionary (net -> network), asymmetric synonyms (same problem -> similar question) ie. both phrases are probably the same in chinese but different in english, and general word order problems. I could *almost* understand it though.
How did eat get in there?!
Maybe this stuff won't get really practical until the software understands what you're saying, ie. rudimentary AI.
Hopefully, they will mature in the near future and be less abusive of the 'net. For now, I have to filter them out with sendmail to maintain my sanity :-).
It's a virtual certainty that before 2010 most operating systems -- including the one in your "phone" -- will have a language translation module built-in, enabling anyone to communicate with anyone else in their native spoken and written language (if for no other reason, it's good for business).
"Universal Translators" are hardly science fiction...
--
Power to the Peaceful
And how is the Internet supposed to draw people together when the same old language barrier still exists
A better question, and no, this isn't a troll, is why would I want to be drawn together with the Chinese? The barriers between western and eastern societies are too difficult to overcome, and for good reason. American Democracy/Corporatocracy and Chinese Communism are radically different ideologies that can never coexist together.
I for one am glad that there is a language barrier.
if translation software continues to improve, and also content providers start using intelligent methods of authoring (like using XML types of solutions) allowing content to be 'known' not just read, then yes Chinese has a chance. However, considering the syntax of chinese I doubt it. I think Chinese and Japanese are fascinating languages, but they do not lend themselves well to modern, much less future intercommunications. The recent alphabets do indeed help, however. I just hope that people do not adopt the attitude that lead to the extinction of languages out of misuse.
In five years, everyone will have China firewalled just to keep from drowning in spam. Lots of people already do.
How about Newspeak anyone?
I do really like English for its expressive power. I don't know Chinese that well but I have a feeling that even if I did I still wouldn't be quite as 'flowery' with my language as in English.
One thing that always bugged me about these 'synthetic' languages is that they all try to be super-logical and easy to learn. I always thought it would be cool to create a language optimized for complexity and expressiveness of connotation.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
WTF? Taiwan was created when the capitalist government fled as Mao's CCP took over the mainland. In fact the Republic of China on Taiwan claimed to be the legitemate government of all of china for a long time. Up untill the 1970s they were recognized by the UN as such.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The internet can help overcoming the language barrier. In fact, most of my english skills are from the internet. If it wasn't for web pages, usenet and mailing lists I wouldn't have had the opportunity to exercice written english that easily from Germany. Reading and writing kept my enlish alive, and it really pays off when visiting english speaking countries: I still have a German accent, but I have hardly any problems constructing and understanding even complex sentence structures.
I normally use Opera, but for this I had to switch to IE6: the Fish outputted the right codes and IE6 could copy and paste them, in their original Japanese form, straight into the text box.
Give yourself a universal translator and it don't matter what language you speak or use.
"You give my cousin a ball." is impossible, without context, to correctly translate to German (one of English's closest relatives, linguistically.) German has no word for cousin - Vetter, Kousine are for male, female cousin, respectively. "You" translates to either "Sie" if you aren't good friends, or "du" if you are.
As a further note, even human translators (which don't have to worry about the hard AI problem) don't do perfect translations everytime. There's dozens of translations of the Iliad to English, because the translator felt the previous one's hadn't been good enough. Translation relays are done, and the results are just like the game telephone - at the end, the message bears little relation to the start.
the same technology can and will be used to translate human languages into programming language
Why do mathematicians use mathematical notation instead of writing it in a human language? Because a human language is too imprecise, too clumsy and too hard to read for what they need done. There are and will be improvements in programming languages, but massive precision is necessary in programming. It's easy to write a word processor or a web browser; it's hard to get all the features specified exactly in a standards compliant manner.
I used the internet in Beijing over the summer (over several dialup lines and an ISDN line), and had no problems viewing websites like CNN, Voodoo Extreme, AnandTech, or Astalavista, or telnetting to my university's server.
It is expanding, and that's a good thing for the community as a whole, since more varieties and choices.
I don't see the notion of majority would make much sense on Internet. If eastern audiences don't like the way Internet works, they would eventually come up their solutions. If western audiences are interested in easter information, translation services will prosper. It they don't like each other, well that hurts nobody.
I'm in the process of being punted from MediaOne/Road Runner to Comcast. I just got my new contract. I can't host shell accounts, run a web server, e-mail server, ftp server. In fact, I'm not allowed to run any kind of server! So am I truly 'on the Internet' anymore?
Most Americans don't know latin--even those studying medicine and law. Yet the technical terms are all in latin. People learn the jargon and ignore the underlying language. I see foreigners taking the same approach to "English" computer languages. It is not such a great obstacle.
I've noticed a recent increase in spam with odd character encoding, mostly Chinese I think. Good thing my spam filter is running well.
Remember Lexington Green!
With language-centricity as our blindfold, we must fuck like rabbits!
See The Free Voyeurweb for inspiration.
?sp
For those of you interesting in reading about the current work being done on resolving Foreign Characters. See the work that the idn group is doing IDN
Genuine Software Engineering (genuine computer science) as in what has yet to be done, rather than having been distracted by the carrot of money since the mid 1950's.
There have been other slashdot articles in the past addressing one or more aspects of this money distraction of computer science research.
----
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN - Sept. 1994
Article - "Software's Chronic Crisis"
The article also goes more into solution efforts with software development on large scale projects. But finding consistent solutions are still hard to come by.
Mary M. Shaw of Carnegie Mellon University, observes a parallel between chemical engineering evolution and software engineering evolution. However, this evolution has not made the connection between science and commercialization required to establish a consistent experimental foundation for professional software engineering.
----
Translation? If I only explain ideas in rants, they are not real?
Rants? is this related to opinions or judgements or physics and nature? Sender or receiver perspective?
"I see similarities between Chinese people who read the People's Daily and westerners who watch CNN"
What a foolish statement. Sometimes people actually believe things like this. Other times, they resort to it thinking they can fool others.
It's really just another example of "for every number you can find between zero and a million I can find a number between zero and one, so one and a million are essentially equal" reasoning that is all the rage on the political left. There's good and bad on both sides, so therefore both sides are *equally* good and bad. If you counter with "well, what about..?", I'll match you with a counter example. So there. Equal.
It's utter nonsense to claim that a publicly-owned commercial news broadcast that knows its audience regularly listens to its competitors and compares stories is essentially equal to the official voice of a single party regime that uses violence to suppress contradictory reporting.
Ah, but you didn't say the news organizations were equal, you protest, you said you saw "similarities" between the viewers. Yeah, and I can find "similarities" between any two things, so either your statement is content-free or it meant what it implied but didn't say, so I'll react to the implication.
I'm in a clear minority, but I almost always reject claims of the basic form: I can come up with minor complaints about X to match every major complaint you have about Y, so we have to conclude that one is no better than the other.
That's nonsense.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
It is in SiChuan. it is called chongqing. (on the yangze river)... it is a municipality the size of austria with 30M+ people.
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
I grew up in china (a white guy) and have stayed in caves with peasants whos sons are off in the local town/city working and then buying their parents VCD players and TVs. Computers in the cave? no. but he has a motorcycle and a lot of chickens.
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
English to Chinese to English again:
Since Chinese becomes occupies the superiority on-line language in ten years, so what? This is the true assurance -- before includes that in 2010 operating systems " -- has the language in yours " telephone translates the module inlays, causes any person to pass the credit with any person their local speech and the written language (if for other reasons, it has not been is good for business). " universal translator " nearly is not the science fantasizes... -- the " politics is the swing and ±©Õ stimulates in anarchy by the permanent rejuvenated illusion Ú. "
I think the "universal translator" has a ways to go.
---
I didn't want to leave this space blank.
You know, it's pretty impressive that the Chinese can adapt to all that, while here in the English-speaking world we're still stuck using QWERTY keyboards.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Determining the number of Chinese characters is just like determining the number of English words in that regard.
/usr/dict/words because the latter is so uselessly incomplete), says that there are 173528 words in the English language. However, let me pick a few at random:
ENABLE, a public-domain word list for English (which I have installed over
inulase, euglenoids, riprap, smarter, dilatancy, hebe, staff, thrombosis, upwaft, superintend
A couple of these are absolutely familiar (smarter, staff). A couple have meanings which could be figured out fairly easily but which aren't especially familiar (upwaft, superintend). As for the rest, does anybody know what a euglenoid is?
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
No plurals, hardly any tenses, much more regular vowels, with katakana or hiragana a decent spelling sytstem (though Korean would claim to have the best spelling system in the world) :-(
It's just a pity about Kanji
Thus speaks someone who obviously has never tried to convert an arcade game. 250,000 lines of assembler with japanese comments... not much fun (luckily for me, I wasn't the one who had to do it; the guy eventually wrote an automatic translator/partial emulator). Do you really think that all those programmers in Tokyo and Kyoto write in English for your benefit???
But then, this is a linux web site, and they are not aware of the existance of video games... (apart from Quake).
The world has moved on...
it seems that non native english speakers are forced to learn it due to the fact that the majority of the content atm is in english surely this is and ever i ncreasing spiral?? whats to say the chinese arent simply learing english from using the net?? Anyway in 10 years time itll be the browser software whiuch will translate input and output on the flie for us and the internet will not be anything like we know it now due to the crapness of the 20 year technology
Learn chinese. The US has pretty much forced
the rest of the world to learn English and
doesn't even require its own citizens to learn
other languages! Maybe this will force a change
once a half way decent portion of the chinese/asian population is on the internet.
"Color" came from Latin. That's how it's spelled in Latin. All Latin-based languages spell it that way...except one: French. The Brits have always been culturally cowed by the French. Not so the Americans, to the outrage of both Brits and French.
As for why American standards are replacing British standards far more than the reverse, it's not some sort of cheating. It's the natural result of greater economic, technological, and cultural significance. It may not please you to hear that, but it's a process that has driven linguistic change for millennia.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
One world language, simple. It's bound to happen - progress has been made in this area for years with the near-global adoption of English as a second language.
Of course, this just meshes perfectly with the One World Government, Language, and Religion that's been prophecied for years... quite a few years.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Interesting you should say that. I agree with everything you say until your final sentence, which I'd like to comment on.
I work for an American company that's quite interested in making more money from the Chinese. As a result, we're putting a lot of effort into sinicizing our products and Web apps.
I know many other US companies doing likewise. As you said, speak the customer's language.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
While it is true that not many China people speak english well, the web does not depend on speech. There are many, many Chinese people who read and write VERY well - they just have trouble speaking.
Also, "east" refers to Asia in general. India has 1 billion people, most of whom speak, read, and write english fluently. If you add, Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and Indonesia into the equation, we are probably totaling about 1 billion people who are English literate.
So statistically speaking, the web will probably move "east".
Before Chinese starts taking over the net, I hope someone will have the decency to teach them proper web design and the importance of good signal-to-noise ratios. I've often bounced around foreign-language sites in search of specific information, relying on babelfish. Most asian sites I've been to are just awful: piles upon piles of jumbled links that lead to more piles of links. My old netscape bookmark page was easier to navigate than these things. Even the commercial sites are incredibly hard to decipher.
-Billco, Fnarg.com