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Chinese Written Language To Dominate Internet
Zothecula writes "In the beginning, the language of the World Wide Web was English. Times change though, and the United States military's gift to civilization knows no national boundaries, and growing worldwide adoption of the internet has changed the audience make-up to such an extent that the dominant language of the internet is about to become Chinese. That's not to say the Chinese are all that comfortable with this either. There has just been an official decree requiring the use of Chinese translations for all English words and phrases in newspapers, magazines and web sites. While all countries have watched the unregulated global nature of the internet erode traditional cultural values and the integrity of national languages, it seems the Chinese powers-that-be have concluded that the purity of the Chinese language needs to be preserved."
This is the year of the Chinese language!
There might be more data in Chinese, but English will still be the standard of international communication.
Be prepared for the lulz, only now it'll be mangling kanji instead of English.
It almost makes me wish I knew Chinese, just to watch it happen.
And so we're once more divided. What's the value of an international network when every country insists on their own language?
I doubt it.
I would RTFA but the summary makes it sounds like just another fluff opinion piece written by a journalist that doesn't know what he/she is writing about.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Somehow I don't think that a language made up of something like 50,000 ideograms is going to overtake a more reasonable language made out of 26 letters and some punctuation.
Keep in mind that the French are equally vehement about the purity of their language. This could be the next great war :|
I work in the middle east and EVERYTHING written has to be translated into Arabic and English. What this means at the moment is that good translators are in high demand (of which there are not nearly enough).
me no rikey
This language took me just 2 weeks to learn. It is fully expressive and totally logical- in my eyes as a programmer & mathematician it is beautiful. You can express things not possible in English even.
English speakers often forget there's this whole other world out there. Imagine how unproductive it is that many nations are all working in parallel.
Any questions? Go to lernu.net forums or #esperanto on freenode.
Esperanto is EXTREMELY easy to learn. Apart from not having any exceptions which hinder language learning, it uses a system of prefixes and suffixes. This way you can start with a very small vocabulary base and build words. Often I just invent new words on the fly to express a feeling or concept which might not have an English equivalent.
After 2 weeks of obsessive dedicated study I could speak it. A few months of occasional chatting and I use it naturally without effort in an expressive way.
Example:
sana = health
sanulo (san + ulo) = healthy person
sanulejo (san + ul + ejo) = place for healthy people
malsanulejo (mal + san + ul + ejo) = hospital (place for unhealthy people)
The vision of Esperanto is commonly misconstrued as the whole world speaking one language. This is not the goal at all. Esperanto is an AUXILLARY language- a language in addition to your native language just for the purpose of inter- communication with other cultures.
Esperanto is often labelled as 'artificial', but it is anything but. The language evolves according to usage by people. Only the core grammar/10 rules remain fixed.
Science papers, nobel nominated works of poetry and other works have all tested and used extensively the language demonstrating that it works. A century of usage has molded it.
If you believe in preserving local languages, then the obstacle is the difficulty in learning current (transient) international languages which are hard and discriminatory (Esperanto is neutral to all countries and belongs to nobody). Encouraging it's use would help promote local languages, instead of conglomerating together with huge behemoth steamroller languages.
I encourage you to approach the topic with an open mind and do some research first. Most people just like to immediately react emotionally and label it with preconceptions. Yet it's the saddest thing we're in a language extinction epoch. Here's a tool that can help us.
"""Four primary schools in Britain, with some 230 pupils, are currently following a course in "propedeutic Esperanto"—that is, instruction in Esperanto to raise language awareness and accelerate subsequent learning of foreign languages—under the supervision of the University of Manchester.[34] Studies have been conducted in New Zealand,[35] United States,[36][37][38]Germany,[39] Italy[40] and Australia.[41] The results of these studies were favorable and demonstrated that studying Esperanto before another foreign language expedites the acquisition of the other, natural, language. This appears to be because learning subsequent foreign languages is easier than learning one's first, while the use of a grammatically simple and culturally flexible auxiliary language like Esperanto lessens the first-language learning hurdle. In one study,[42] a group of European secondary school students studied Esperanto for one year, then French for three years, and ended up with a significantly better command of French than a control group, who studied French for all four years. Similar results have been found for other combinations of native and second languages, as well as for arrangements in which the course of study was reduced to two years, of which six months is spent learning Esperanto."""
Not only is Esperanto good for the 'humanrace', it's very beneficial and practical to a fully selfish person.
By learning the language you help rewire your brain in such a way as to accelerate subsequent language learning. And it is faster to learn Esperanto followed by your choice language, than just dedicatedly learning your choice language. Fact.
""In the beginning, the language of the World Wide Web was English.
Times change though, and the United States' military's gift to civilization"
The WWW was not US's military gift to civilisation. The internet =/= WWW. The author appears to use them interchangeably..
Chinese may be the biggest language, but it doesn't span the world like English does. If you write in english almost everyone will understand you, regardless if they are in northern Canada or the southern tip of South America. In the brushlands of Africa or standing in frozen Siberia. In Europe or far-off India, Australia, or Japan. English is a near-universal tongue thanks to the spread by the British Empire and later cultural dominance of the US Free Market.
In contrast chinese is pretty much confined to just China. Few people outside that country understand chinese websites.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
but porn too. Seems like porn is now dominated by chinks and their hairy bushes.
Citation needed.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
There are more and more Chinese speakers in China coming online. Shocking. I think we should all fall in a bout of hysteria. Soon all my favourite websites will be all in Chinese, and I won't be able to read them.
The data released refers to the number of people gaining internet access by country. It has nothing to do with the languages of the content they are viewing or writing online.
English has become the language of global business. and by has become, I mean ever since the East India Trading Company came to power.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'm only fluent in English and can get by in Spanish. Both are relatively easy from a typing perspective. How fast can one type a similar paragraph in a language that uses the Latin alphabet vs. Chinese? It can't be too daunting giving the large amount of Chinese that's out there but if one was fluent in both and context didn't matter, would they tend towards Chinese or English based on speed alone?
The internet does not recognize geographic borders. If China ends up having the most internet users and they remain part of the main internet (if they don't go and create internet 2) then we will need a new open standard to create webpages than can traverse different languages with ease. I certainly don't have the time to learn Chinese ;)
I can't find it off the top of my head, but I once read an article about a Chinese intellectual who argued that the ideographs would have to go for China to reach its full potential.
There are oddities of an ideographic language which do pose some difficulties. Even a fluent full-time writer can encounter new words. In an alphabetic language, if you hear a word, you can guess at how it might be spelled to look it up. In a language like Chinese, you usually (but not always) can't guess how it's written well enough to look it up. Then, if you see it written, you may not have any guess as to how it's pronounced, leaving you with the possibility of encountering a word twice in one day without even a clue that they're the same word.
That's a bit of a simplification, as in some cases you can make a pretty good educated guess as to the sound of a word, or look things up by pronunciation. Still, it's an issue, and it's not just an issue for people who learn Chinese as a second language.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
This is certain to be a winner, look how well the lnguage purity laws have worked out in France.
This sort of thing is a sign of desperation, they see their culture being eroded by Western ideas and being a dictatorship use the one tool at thier disposal, tyranny and top down rules. Thomas Friedman is probably in a state of ectasy ut everyone else should either denouce them or just hope they someday collapse like the other communist hellholes are in the process of doing.
China, and their pet Norks are about the last final sad devotees of their failed religion. When Castro finally starts transitioning to a more open society the great battle of ideas is pretty much over. Now if somebody could tell the sad holdouts in out current administration before they finish off our country.
Democrat delenda est
TTIUWOP
Oh, wait, this isn't Fark...
I always thought the swearing and yelling in Chinese was a realistic outcome as the world becomes more meshed. It looks like it may come sooner than later.
Be Excellent To Each Other
Yes. Pics or it didn't happen.
When the Nigerian scammers are using Chinese for their daily business, then I'll believe that it's supplanted English as a major language on the Internet.
Behold, the power of fleas...
Pretty soon the world will be just like Firefly!
Mal: Petty?
Inara: I didn't mean petty.
Mal: What did you mean?
Inara: Suo xie?
Mal: That's Chinese for petty.
China has one simple problem: It's significantly different from most other languages. It's related to Japanese, Korean and a few other east-asian languages, but it's extremely difficult to learn unless you speak one of those. English is an Indo-European language - it's related to everything from German and French to Arabic and Hindi. Thus, there's more people, by far, who can easily (for varying values of easy) learn English than there are who can easily learn Chinese. Thus, English is much better suited to being a "lingua franca" than Chinese. Sure, French or Spanish or Esperanto could do that job just as easily (being related to just as many languages), but Chinese-language dominance of the Internet is about as likely as Swahili.
This isn't even getting into the problem of "Chinese pages rarely link to non-Chinese pages". You could make the argument that the Chinese 'net is separate from the international 'net, because there's so few links between them. Really, the only pages in Chinese are intended for Chinese people - you don't see the Associated Press publishing in Chinese, the way you see Xinhua publishing in English. I would be hard-pressed to find a site about, say, Russian literature, written in Chinese - but I could easily do so in English.
Chinese people do have dictionaries, you know. Every (modern) Chinese dictionary I've ever seen have two sections - one keyed towards a Pinyin pronounciation (then arranged by accent, and finally arranged by something like the number of strokes in a character) or one keyed towards the written character itself (selecting the radical of a character and then arranged by stroke order of the word).
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
Language purity is a myth. What makes a language identifiable is its oddities and idiosyncracies. Language "mashups" tend to enrich all sides.
Proverbs 21:19
Reasonable fluency takes only a couple thousand graphs; the 50,000 you quote includes huge numbers of obsolete, historical and technical graphs, and virtually no one outside of a language scholar has that kind of vocabulary.
And while you might find that the 26 letters you are familiar with create a simple context to build words with, I assure you that the few strokes the Chinese have to learn also create a simple context - very often, a graph is a word. As a native English speaker, I found it quite easy to learn to associate Chinese graphs with their meaning -- it's not nearly as difficult as it looks. It's considerably more difficult to learn to speak the language(s), but reading isn't too bad at all.
It is also only fair to point out that English is riddled with exceptions and weird little rules that make it quite difficult to master (and as evidence, I point to the constant stream of errors here on slashdot, where, supposedly anyway, the membership is well educated.
The big advantage for English (or other easily written languages Korean hangul) is the speed with which it can be typed into a digital context; but with stroke-aware input systems coming online, that advantage isn't likely to last a lot longer.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Chinese TYPED language to dominate the Internet.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I don't see a big change in the internet's language. Rather I see more translators available for each site, either manual or automated.
I was trying to think of an amusing joke, which would no doubt be modded down by all the AC's swarming and insulting the Chinese.
Suffice to say that the fact that Chinese will be the most prevalent language used for chatter between grandma and the kids, does not make it the "dominant" language of the internet(s).
As for a fluff journalist summary on /., which means next to nothing or is downright deceptive-- welcome to /. This is not exactly new, is it? I beginning to think this is why some countries have a problem with people shooting journalists!
~
Let's call a spade a spade here: the internet as we know it would have appeared with or without ARPANET pioneering the technology. Of course, the internet as we know it is much more than ARPANET -- much more than even they could have dreamed of at the time. To imply that the internet as we know it owes its entire existence to a single military project under the control of a single government entity is -- how can I put this nicely -- absurd. What we have today wouldn't have been remotely possible without a world-wide collaboration of thousands of individuals and organizations.
Moreover, just who do you think funded the ARPANET in the first place? You act as if it's some sort of gift from god, as if they did it out of good will. In reality, the money was taken from us, by force, and used for the benefit of the US government -- NOT necessarily for the benefit of the people who paid for it. (You'd have to ask them, wouldn't you?) In conclusion, get real.
Few things could more hearten those who worry about the coming Chinese domination of the world than the news that they are taking their cue from the French obsession with the purity of their language (presumably Mandarin and not any of the others, I suspect.)
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
... remembering how to write their own language thanks to auto-completing Latin-to-Chinese. The Chinese takeover of the Web may yet happen, but I wonder how long it will be before Chinese itself is overtaken by some Latin transliterations.
Dog is my co-pilot.
when they pry the dictionary from my cold dead fingers!
Bryan
Languages myths rise and fall. If your economic value is their, people will find a way to talk to you. If not, it won't.
China has one thing going for it - numbers. That is the same, tired old argument made by my teachers to learn Spanish. Nope.
Chinese is a beautiful, ancient, language that is totally unsuited for modern life. The second China created the print, the language should have been redone. Yes, they had a poor man's printing press 500 years before Gutenberg. But they did not create moveable type because their language did not have letters, just words. That was a huge mistake.
Trying to claim that Chinese will suplement English is like claiming Fortran will overtake Java because of how many supercomputers use it.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Sure, if you go by strict "what's your mother tongue" criterion, then mandarin might outweight english when simply summing up the internet penetration of the US, UK, Canada, Australia, NZ and a couple of smaller nations. But this leaves out India and pretty much most of Europe where you simply don't exist as a conversation partner without knowing english.
Point in case, I'm a hungarian guy who leaves english comments/posts on slashdot, facebook, twitter, tumblr, stackoverflow and the list goes on. Chinese written language is nowhere near dominating the internet, it misses the mark by at least 2 billion people.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
You see, By speakers there's 330 million Spanish speakers and 330 million English speakers, there's also 240 Million Hindi/Urdu speakers. That's more then the 800 Million Mandarin speakers in itself, but that doesn't matter. Because if the Spanish want to talk to the Hindi/Urdu speakers, or the Chinese to the Spanish, they'll just use English. That is of course to the delight of everybody else who also speaks English (either natively, or as a second language, or because their countries official language is English (even if their everyday language isn't).
The question that really addresses this wrong assertion is: Why has English become the lingua franka of the internet, and not say German, Spanish, French or Chinese? The answer is pretty simple: English (as opposed to German, French, Swedish etc. of the indo-germanic/latin root) is relatively simple to learn for anybody natively speaking indo-germanic/latin root language (really many people). Chinese on the other hand is anything but simple. People who do not speak it by far and large (in terms of percentage) will never be able to gain any substantial reading/writing proficiency in it, or pick it up drive-by style (as many do English). Chinese (written) is also pretty much a dead language. It has been honed over something like 5000 years by the Chinese into the near perfect albeit ludicrously verbose set of glyphs, and as such is not amenable to pidgin (although spoken it is another story).
Experiments and other stuff
史诗失败
Will there be variants of say, SIP or HTTP where actual method names, like GET or INVITE, or header-field names like Contact: will be in Chinese? That would make parsing interesting.
So what will they decree be the Chinese equivalent of "Cumgargler"?
Really, haven't we grown up past this sort of FUD article yet?
The fact that 32% of the internet users are Chinese (and that segment is growing the fastest) doesn't ipso facto mean they're using Chinese on the internet.
Why do editors even post this crap? I'd rather see Roland linking his blog every day again.
-Styopa
I study both Japanese and Chinese and I love languages. But I can guarantee you that outside China that neither Mandarin nor Cantonese will ever become the lingua franca of the world. The alphabet is vastly superior because Chinese ideographs are very complex and require enormous memorization for basic literacy. Also if you wish to read and pronounce verbally a character you never encountered before then you must have a dictionary with you. How else could you say the syllable to someone else unless you write it to paper? You can't. The influence of the Chinese languages is due to their enormous population, not to their cultural and political influence. Everyone else in the world will prefer alphabetic languages such as English, French, Spanish and German. So don't fret too much ;-)
and apparently the author of the summary doesnt either.
The people of China do not speak "Chinese." Depending on the region they speak either Cantonese or Mandarin in varied regional dialects. While they do not differ all that much, they are still unintelligible when compared to each other in spoken form. Apart from being spoken differently, they are written differently aswell
Saying Chinese will become a new standard language is like saying "North American" is spoken around the world.
Too bad slashdot doesn't allow Chinese characters.
"Chinese"? Really? Which dialect? There is no "Chinese" as there is "English".
Except that Chinese can predict the spelling of new words somewhat. Probably at least as well as English speakers can predict the spelling of new English words.
Very few topics are shielded in as much bullshit as the Chinese language, and the Japanese language, and that holds whether it's illiterate Westerners discussing it or native speakers. You should read the book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. I also recommend Ideogram:Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning for at least some amount of antidote to the bullshit storm.
Chinese characters are not ideograms. The characters are not little pictures. They contain no special amount of semantic content compared to alphabetic word roots.
Chinese is not monosyllabic. Each Chinese character is not a complete word.
Chinese characters are not indispensible. Chinese does not have to be written with Chinese characters. Japanese not only doesn't have to be written with Chinese characters, it's hard to imagine a language for which Chinese characters would be more unsuited. Chinese characters are more suited to writing English than to writing Japanese.
Chinese people don't have to 'sight read'. Chinese characters are not devoid of phonetic information. They contain 'sound' information the same as any other writing.
Chinese characters do not facilitate some special level of intercommunication between the different languages that employ them, at least not to any extent further than the common use of the Latin alphabet conveys a special level of intercommunication between the western languages that employ it.
Tons of people will argue with me on every one of these points but one thing IS beyond dispute, however. Chinese characters are just a bitch to store, encode, print, look up, characterize in a book index, search, or do basically anything else but paint pretty calligraphy on wood boards. Whatever impediment Chinese characters are to literacy, writing ability, and legibility, they are a billiontyfold worse of an impediment when it comes to computing.
This is what prompted Unger to write his "5th generation fallacy: Or why Japan is betting its future on artificial intelligence". If you can remember way back to the '80s, there was this big wave of computer research about "5th generation computing" which was basically AI research. The Japanese saw what a bitch it was to shoehorn their abortion of a writing system into computing, and so they were grasping at straws and predicting that great advanced AI computers would come out that basically could operate on contemporary Japanese text. It never really amounted to anything, the only thing that happened was Moore's law, which allowed us to store entire multi-megabyte font sets and use 2-byte language encoding, and predictive input methods using regular old 104-key keyboards. In a way it's a shame that it happened, because it only enabled the Japanese to continue limping along with their teeth-gnashing archaic writing system rather than simply adopting one of the very efficient, superior, and easily computable 38-character phonemic syllabary scrips that EVERYONE JAPANESE PERSON ALREADY KNOWS ANYWAY.
I am happy one thousand times.
And I am joyed more than springtime for the information programmes of the Communist People's Republic of China.
I am also ten lifetimes thankful for the honesty and values of the Freedom Press of the Communist People's Republic.
One day everyone will be Chinese men. Aren't you happy? Be Good Chinese Men!
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
"United States' military's gift"
DARPA certainly contributed to the development of internet and the web as we know it today, but it is an erroneous simplification to ignore the work leading to TCP/IP and the work after that. Singling out one step in the chain of investments, research and innovations is intellectually lazy.
The notice references the National Common Language Law. Note that when the Government of China says "Chinese language", they mean Standard Mandarin. The big problem, as seen by Beijing, is not English. It's Cantonese. National policy is to migrate southern China to Mandarin, at least for written material. Policy is already to require that publications, signs, official TV, etc. be migrated to Mandarin.
The Beijing government has been trying to mandate Mandarin since 1909, and still hasn't been able to make it stick.
Shouldn't it be TTIUWP since 'without' is one word?
Referring to the existing form, 'useless' would have to be 'UL' to be consistent with 'without' as 'WO' making it 'TTIULWOP'
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
"In the beginning, the language of the World Wide Web was English. Times change though, and the United States' military's gift to civilization knows no national boundaries"
Err, I thought the World Wide Web came out of CERN, started in part by Tim Berners-Lee? And that the Internet came out of the US military / academic complex?
Am I wrong, can somebody correct me? or has the summary on slashdot confused the internet with the web?
I thought that the standard is French :-))) (Just teasing you. The standard is really different for every social group.)
Never mind. Does anybody actually really care since we have translate.google.com? I really don't. I will gladly start writing in my mother language too without feeling sorry that so many I-Speak-Only-English people might miss my bright ideas. :-)
And anyway isn't it nice that so many Chinese philosophical writings are to be found on internet in their original language...
Honestly. English speakers - are you afraid that people will abandon English or rather that you will stop understanding the rest of the world or that you will be forced to learn other language to communicate? Either one is not going to happen. Don't worry. Just the communication will become more natural to so many people while keeping the information interchange even more vivid. ;-)
Well, I've got to get back to work. When I stop rowing, the slave ship just goes in circles.
In an alphabetic language, if you hear a word, you can guess at how it might be spelled to look it up.
That's much more true of languages with a closer relationship between orthography and pronunciation (e.g. Spanish) than languages that are loaded with loan-words that have kept their historical pronunciation (e.g. English and French). For example, how well would you have guessed the spelling of schadenfreude if you had no familiarity with German?
In a language like Chinese, you usually (but not always) can't guess how it's written well enough to look it up
I'm a native Chinese speaker and that's simply untrue. Mandarin Chinese has a small number of unique sounds, so the real difficulty is picking the correct character once you do a lookup by sound. Also, many 'words' are really two- or three-character combinations, so if you simply type in the pronunciation of both words the correct word will likely be near the top.
Also, most characters are composed of a few radicals arranged next to each other and literate people can easily tell one another how a character is written in words.
Purity of language is just about as absurd as purity of race.
Hope your mandarin is up to par!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It is highly unlikely Chinese will displace English as a lingua franca, in the near future. There will be more Chinese pages or more Chinese internet users, perhaps, but that will not make the dominant language of the "internet" Chinese. For the rest of the world, English will remain the dominant language. Chinese users wanting to speak to most non-Chinese will need to resort to English or another third language.
As for "preserving the purity" of the language, that's just bullshit. TV shows and such are subtitled in Chinese for two very simple reasons: first, many Chinese
don't speak Mandarin Chinese, the official language! Most Chinese dialects are mutually unintelligible. Only the written language is common to the whole of China, and allows communication between users/people who don't speak the same (oral) language.
Second, it also promotes integration into mainstream society by ethnic minorities. Some call it cultural genocide, but in America we (the American government) promote ESL and only offer most classes in English, just as Germany promotes German language education. Hardly preserving the purity of the language; it is more directed and cultivating a sense of national character, by everyone having a common language, and also making sure everyone can understand what's being said. Dialects (and people who can't understand English) are far too common not to demand translations and subtitles.
So what is the author saying? Inferring that whichever language group has the most users, dominates the internet? I'm sorry, but Chinese users aren't anywhere near a 50% majority, much less any sort of "overwhelming" majority. English has a huge number of users; many of the users who speak Spanish, German, Japanese, Russian, and even Chinese are also part of the English hegemony. And the participation of these groups in the English internet is what makes it dominant, not its number of users.
http://www.definitionary.com/ ? We could have Internet that is written with the help of all native languages, yet is unambiguously and easily intelligible to all.
Perhaps...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
"While all countries have watched the unregulated global nature of the internet erode traditional cultural values and the integrity of national languages..."
There is no such thing as integrity of language. Any linguist (especially the cunning sort) will tell you that language is constantly evolving and changing, and always has been. The "proper" way to speak/write a language merely refers to the dialect of the dominant class.
That only helps if you see a word written somewhere, not if you hear it. In English, if somebody talks about their new hobnobmacfoogle, chances are you'll be able to look up the word even when you haven't seen it written down: you can infer the spelling from the sound to a certain extent, and know that it's not spelled "xachamakenchie" instead.
Similarly, if you see the word "hobnobmacfoogle" written down, you'll have a pretty decent idea of how it should be pronounced, even without consulting a dictionary first (which I'll grant would at least be possible in Chinese).
And of course, if you HEAR the word "hobnobmacfoogle" from someone, and then READ it a little later, you'll know it's the same word even without looking it up, whereas in Chinese, it would likely completely escape you.
China has one simple problem: It's significantly different from most other languages.
Did you know that all languages are significantly different from most other languages? That's why we consider them separate languages!
It's related to Japanese, Korean and a few other east-asian languages
It's unrelated to Japanese or Korean. It's related to a couple hundred languages, most minor.
English is an Indo-European language - it's related to everything from German and French to Arabic and Hindi.
Arabic is not Indo-European. Also, the fact that two languages are Indo-European also doesn't automatically make it easier for speakers of one to learn the other.
You are very wrong. Lookup Hanyu Pinyin. You can spell any word you hear in pinyin and check it using a dictionary (it's not a guess). If you see a word written, you can use the strokes of the word to check the dictionary. A Chinese dictionary can be sorted in pinyin order and it usually has a index at the start with words sorted by number of strokes.
this is more about control more than preserving language integrity. the state routinely censors chinese language media and web, but at times leaves foreign language counterparts untouched. the politburo wants to control the populace, and to ensure outside language knowledge is restricted to a smaller number educated elite.
A billion blogs, forums and social sites in Chinese is not likely to be of any higher quality than our English versions of these sites.
But the kernel source is arguably in English.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
You seem to look at Chinese words from Japanese perspective. Correction:
1. Chinese characters are logogram.
2. Classical Chinese is mainly monosyllabic, while Modern Chinese is mainly disyllabic for disambiguation purposes. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den
3. Chinese characters *are* indispensable. Pinyin or other romanization techniques (plus tones) simply cannot convey the same meaning as the original characters, though you can guess. Remember that Chinese language is tonal and tones for one character can change depending on the other word(s) it is paired with. Even with the tonality marks, there are still ambiguities remain in the romanized version of the words. The same problems occur in other "simplification" or "phonetic abugidas" (e.g., bopomofo). Tonality does not exist in Japanese. See the wiki URL above.
4. Since Chinese characters are indispensable, you have to sight-read them. Yes, some phonetic clues do show up, but not always lead you to the right one. Also, there are false friends, alternative spelling (even worse in Japanese), and one dot or one slash difference may make dramatic differences in sound.
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
This language took me just 2 weeks to learn.
Esperanto is often labelled as 'artificial', but it is anything but. The language evolves according to usage by people. Only the core grammar/10 rules remain fixed.
Core grammar and rules are stupidly easy to pick up, in any language - and for that, two weeks makes Esperanto sound hideously difficult.
It's always vocabulary that takes time. (And, depending on your inclination, writing systems - kanji's a bitch. ;))
Since they are gaining the advantage by translating English publications, then we need to write some software to translate them back! That way, for every document they translate, we will gain an equal number of documents back!
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
As long as the Chinese govt keeps its citizens segregated from the Internet as a whole I don't see how "Chinese" (Mandarin? Cantonese? Shanghainese? etc etc) can become its dominant language. Maybe Arabic (on the back of Islam) is more likely to become the dominant language?
Yep, and that's so much easier than: "It's spelled how it sounds, and the dictionary is ordered by how it's spelled".
Ideographs are full of fail. The only advantage they have is information density (it takes less characters to convey the same ideas). Under all other circumstances it's better to use an alphabet of a small number of repeating characters.
Kung Fu, in computing!
LMAO!
(That is what the problem is... since you asked "Whats the problem?" - by arcite (661011)
on Tuesday December 28, @01:56PM (#34689640))
See - I say this, merely because I need better competition than the communist states are showing me, because every day online? I block out TONS of known malicious sites' data written by malware makers, coming straight from out of .ru, .su, .cn etc./et al domains in my custom HOSTS file (coming up on a million blocked known sites/servers/domain-hosts names)... & what I can't touch? Cannot touch me... or, others, such as this /.'er recently & for 5 yrs. now or more:
---
"Ever since I've installed a host file (http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm) to redirect advertisers to my loopback, I haven't had any malware, spyware, or adware issues. I first started using the host file 5 years ago." - by TestedDoughnut (1324447) on Monday December 13, @12:18AM (#34532122)
FROM http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1907528&cid=34532122
---
That my friends, IS the ULTIMATE Kung-Fu online - I've got it, in being totally unassailable security-wise against malware b.s. & more (via more than just HOSTS though, ala -> http://techtalk.pcpitstop.com/2007/09/04/pc-pitstop-winners/ (see JANUARY 2008 WINNERS) also, & by yours truly of course), & F A S T E R online also, by a mile + even a bit more "anonymous" via evasions of DNSBL &/or DNS request logs, for instance - just from something you already have, the HOSTS file (albeit, "customized")!
APK
P.S.=> To our malware making friends from over there - the normal folks online are just users there, i've been there MOST of this summer in those communist nations (loved Prague, not sure if they're communist or not though) in fact... it's only for these malware making losers from those communist nations that not only prey on their own, but us in the USA as well?
Well, I can only say this: "KNEEL TO THE LORD OF HOSTS"... & "yea, though I walk in the Valley of the /., I will fear no evil trolls - for thou art with me"... lmao @ malware makers, worldwide - I OWN YOU BOYS & clearly, based on testimonials above alone? So do others...! apk
As someone or other has said, defending the purity of the English language would be like defending the purity of a cribhouse whore
That would be James Nicoll, back in 1990 on rec.arts.sf-lovers; the complete quote is
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary
English did not necessarily draw from other languages, it was not always voluntary. Germanic tribes conquered England, the vikings invaded and settled in some regions, and then the French (Normans) conquered England. All these invaders forcibly altered the english language. To illustrate the effect of the norman conquest one professor claimed that french words in the english language tend to be those of the ruling class and not so much those of the folks down on the farm. However during the imperial era English did voluntarily draw words from throughout the british empire and the quote is more accurate.
With more people than any other country, obviously china will deliver more of their language than will any other nation. But will any other nation speak chinese? No.
As the economic iinfluence of the japanese rose during the 1980s, pundits foretold of the rise of all things japanese. They were wrong, not just in outcome but in premise.
It isnt economic power alone that influences and pervades world culture, its innovation and ingenuity. The US had these things for the past 150 years, largely due to the economic and political opportunities this culture afforded to those insanely motivated immigrants who could not break through the glass ceilings in their home country. That culture most certainly does not exist in china, not now, not ever before, and not for the forseeable future.
TFA confuses supply with demand. Today's China is all about supply, but is a great big zero when it comes to demand.
I dunno. I've always used "w/" or "w/o"
The TTIULWOP variation is conspicuously absent from: ... but it's not like I'm trying to be correct or even pedantic about it 8,]
http://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/TTIUWOP
"Lingua franca" is Italian, and means "Frankish language". According to my book (I'll copy the paragraph out if you ask), the Arabs used to refer to all Europeans as Franks, and the language they used to communicate was Frankish -- some kind of minimal common vocabulary for all the people from various countries.
It sounds like they were referring to latin. The Franks may have been the successors to the western roman empire to some degree but the most common language across all of Europe would probably have been latin for quite some time after Rome's fall, at least for the educated and those engaging in international commerce.
They need to get the message about purity of the Chinese language out to themselves first. Guangdong might be a good place to start..
Uhm Hindi is the official language of India.
My understanding is that there are so many regional dialects and official languages that many Indians from different regions speak English to each other in India. It is often the most practical common language, after their regional dialect many are most fluent in english. Is this accurate or have I gotten a mistaken impression from my university classmates?
When did being able to distinguish these basic technologies slip away as the kind of basic criterion necessary to get a story posted on /.?
When I lived in Beijing a program on their TV network was a talk show and the topic was something like "Can their parents understand their texts?" And the cellphone text messages were nonsensical to any adult. Not only a mix of English and Chinese, but pictures and symbols like elephants and bubbles ... well, whatever. I can't see how their govt is going to stop the changes although at least one city there has a "no English signs" law.
A new language designed to "compile" or streamline translation in to many different language. One that contains the meaning structures needed to output English, Mandarin, Spanish or any other language on the fly..
I could easily see how you could import a doc from your native language and have it ask questions from the operator to clarify ambiguities in meaning that would effect translation.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
Phlugh. Chinese is a crummy written language. Ideograms, etc. make it hard to learn to read. Korea had the right idea to eschew the thing and develop a very nice easy to read phonetic language which ended up giving them the highest literacy rate in the world.
If the Chinese want to saddle themselves with that sort of nonsense, fine. But I'm not going there.
The default language of the internet should be APACHE. :)
If it is good enough for the s
In a way it's a shame that it happened, because it only enabled the Japanese to continue limping along with their teeth-gnashing archaic writing system rather than simply adopting one of the very efficient, superior, and easily computable 38-character phonemic syllabary scrips that EVERYONE JAPANESE PERSON ALREADY KNOWS ANYWAY.
Except that Japanese has so many homonyms that it's almost impossible to quickly relay information without providing extra detail for context.
The closest we have in English is "I wound the bandage around the wound."
Also they have a weird aversion to spaces.. knowwhatimean?
Yep, and that's so much easier than: "It's spelled how it sounds, and the dictionary is ordered by how it's spelled".
Whoa, which language are we talking about now?
Its translations software that will become standard.
HAHAHAHAHA!
Who cares.
I remember a story about a sweet fellow named Genghis Khan.
He was such an inspiration, I vowed to be just like him. Pffft!
I partly agree with you on all points.
Also: ghoti.
Tonality does not exist in Japanese.
I call bullshit. Tonality is not used in all Japanese syllables, but it is used to distinguish homophones.
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
Memo to China: You may have 1,000,000,000 people in your country, but you're still only about one-sixth of the total world population. If you're ever at least 51% of the world's population, then we'll discuss this so-called "decree" of yours seriously. Until then, enjoy your little walled garden.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Chinese characters are more suited to writing English than to writing Japanese
I don't know about this. The morphology of Japanese verbs falls into predictable patterns, which means you can have the stem of the verb written in a Chinese character and the rest written in Hiragana. Try doing that with write-->wrote-->written.
And English is surely the most extended second language no matter how numerous native Chinese-speaking people are.
--
El Guerrero del Interfaz
About a decade ago you say?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Have you ever tried to read The Tale of Genji in its original form (hiragana)? It may be because it's written in centuries-old Japanese, but it's a bitch to read even when translated to the modern equivalent. Try parsing a modern Japanese article from kanji/kana to all-hiragana and you'll start to see parsing issues because now you can't distinguish words from particles. For that matter, fire up your IME and put in a commonly-used word, like seishiki or kenshou-- you'll see several possible distinct words in kanji, so right there you've got another problem.
I take it you haven't lived very much in Japan-- if you try to change the society there to excise kanji from the language, I guarantee you that nothing will change for generations, even if the government mandates it; the best you'll see is a few puzzled looks, and at worst you'll be treated like a lunatic. There's simply too much invested in kanji, and the creative use of kanji is only increasing. Take, for example, Bleach-- the word bankai as written in the manga exists nowhere else in Japanese, cannot be understood without the context of the manga or the accompanying kanji, and represents a newly invented word that is starting to see common use. Heck, many manga are pairing kanji with unusual or ironic readings to enrich the meaning of the dialogue. One can call that abuse of kanji, or artistic discretion, but either way, killing off kanji would force the manga writers to abandon that route of expression or ignore the mandate. Guess which one they'll pick?
I submit that (1) your conclusion is flawed because human language (context-sensitive) is inherently poorly-compatible with machine language (context-free), (2) you are imposing an unrealistic expectation on a language that is far more complex than its syllabary, and (3) the half-assed "script reform" that was done because of a stupid panic attack when typewriters (and American occupation) were introduced is far more responsible for the mess than any traditionalist influences in that culture.
Now, the apparent inability of the Japanese to learn proper English decades after its educational ministry imposed a requirement from primary school is another can of whup-ass that both of us would doubtless love to dish out to the language council... Even though it's a fully-operational part of the world society, they are still way too insular in this respect.
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
First, I think ideas, like language, should be able to stand on their own merits, not needing to be legislated.
Second, I travel between the US and P.R. China (US citizen, Chinese resident). I have actually found it quicker to send text messages on my phone in Chinese than English. The words, typically, require less characters and the pinyin > Chinese quick lists work quite well.
All the same, I see legislation as a silly approach. That being said, I can see why it is being done. Frequently, in conversation, an English word is substituted, even by native Chinese speakers, were there is no easy Chinese substitute. This leads to conversations that have a fluid mix of Chinese and English being spoken.
While I see no problem with this, I can see how it could perturb a purist of either language.
And here I was trying to shift the language used on slashdot by attempting to post something in Chinese...
Even if the volume of pages in Chinese is 10 times the volume of pages for all other languages combined, that does not mean that English pages are not relevant. It also does not mean that there is more original content in Chinese than in English. Part of the issue with Chinese language is that there are over 47k characters. To me, it seems that English is easier, more elegant, and more synthetic way to express thoughts. There is a reason why English is the international language of choice. The Chinese government can legislate to a certain point - after that, the idea will just not work for them, and will only isolate their country and people from the rest of the world.
Armchair discussions on language efficiency, convenience and so on are really fun. Plenty of people argue that Japanese would be better without kanji. But the actual results is what matters.
We're collectively lazy, and our languages tend to become reasonably efficient over time. You can see how word length roughly corresponds to usage frequencies, how phoneme distribution and spelling tends to strike an efficient balance between brevity and redundancy so errors are minimized. None of this is consciously decided by anyone; instead people tend to gravitate over time toward usage patterns that minimize errors, redundancy and effort.
Japanese has, as you say, not just one but two syllabaries in addition to kanji, and has had them readily available for more than a millennium. A century or so ago there was an official drive to reduce the usage of kanji, with an eye towards abolishing them altogether. There has been lots and lots of time, and lots and lots of opportunity to move away from kanji in other words. So what happens?
People are using more kanji today, not less. Not from a sense of tradition, or from some official decree, but because they like to do so. They add expressiveness, and are another resource for punsters and jokers. The culture and education department recently acknowledged this trend and added another two hundred characters to the list that people are required to study at school.
Part of the reason use is increasing is because of electronic communication. Many of the drawbacks of kanji - it's difficult to remember how to write a rarely used character, for instance, or remember a rare pronunciation - are mitigated with cellphones and computers. It's much, much easier to recognize a character than two write it by hand, and with modern input methods that's all you need. And an unfamiliar word is easy to look up directly on the same device you're reading it on.
People are voting with their feet, as it were, and moving towards more kanji, not less.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. I speak both Japanese and Mandarin and I find that Chinese characters are absolutely essential to both languages. A full length technical article on any college-level topic would be completely incomprehensible if it were written purely in Pinyin or hiragana without any Chinese characters.
Yes it is true that you can represent both languages in a purely phonetic alphabet. But what you will end up with is a dozen words spelt the exact same way even with tonal markings. Imagine if 90% of English words were spelt with 4 or fewer letters. How can you expect to create enough unique words to describe the world? This problem is even worse in Japanese because it lacks formal tone variations (although they technically still exist).
The only thing I will agree with you on is that Chinese and Japanese are not languages suited for computing. In printed form, they deliver data with an excellent compression rate and allows very compact printing and fast reading, but this advantage is negated when it comes to data storage due to the more complex charset. But frankly if people were serious about solving this problem they should be switching to a more suitable language for applications where the drawbacks matter.
Chinese characters *are* dispensable (whether or not they. The accuracy of Pinyin, and the meaning it conveys, is the exact same meaning conveyed when speaking Chinese. To suggest that this is insufficient is to suggest that Chinese is a written only language or that every Chinese conversation is fraught with problems.
the United States' military's gift to civilization
OBJECTION!!!!
From wikipedia.com:
Although the basic applications and guidelines that make the Internet possible had existed for almost two decades, the network did not gain a public face until the 1990s. On 6 August 1991, CERN, a pan European organization for particle research, publicized the new World Wide Web project.
Don't let american patriotism blind you, the basis of the internet we are using today isn't an american invention! The summary is misleading, surprise, surprise!
No, no, no. Your mistake is using absolutes when you should have used "some" instead.
1) Some characters are ideograms. According to my handy shelf of Chinese reference books, it's around 10% or so. On top of that, most characters have a clue to their 1) meaning and 2) pronunciation in the form of radicals. Put the woman radical next to the sound radical for ma (horse) and you get "mom" (pronounced like horse, except with a different tone). A great deal of Chinese characters are either direct ideographs or partial ideographs.
2) Older Chinese words (and a lot of commonly used words) are monosyllabic. 'I' 'You' 'Is' (wo3, ni3, shi4), etc. are all monosyllabic. The trend toward using two syllables to represent a word is a modern trend (relatively speaking). If you knew anything about the Chinese language, as you claim to, you'd know this.
3) The reason the Chinese didn't ditch characters for pinyin as Mao wanted them to is because characters really are indispensible. With the 400 or so possible syllables in the language, there's a lot of overloading of meaning. You need to know which character something is. That's why you'll hear Chinese people asking each other, "Which Ma is it? Mother-ma? Horse-ma? Marijuana-Ma?" etc.
4) *Some* Chinese characters contain pronunciation guides. Not all of them. And a lot of the pronunciation-guide radicals are wrong. They're either for the wrong dialect, or they're from the way people spoke things back a thousand years ago.
5) Chinese characters do facilitate a small degree of interoperability between languages. Korean, Japanese, and to a lesser extent the other Asian nations utilize Chinese characters.
>>Chinese characters are just a bitch to store, encode, print, look up
Eh, well the looking up bit, I'll give you. It can be really annoying using a Chinese dictionary sometimes if you don't know the pronunciation... searching by radical and stroke count takes forever. I use the similar characters method via the website at www.zhongwen.com (and have their book as well, which was invaluable when I was in China) - it lets me look up new words by looking up words that kind of look like it.
But it doesn't take much more time to type things in Chinese than it does in English, once you get used to the tools.
Given the way the Chinese butcher English, they are the last ones on the planet I would look toward for a universal language, sanks.
an ill wind that blows no good
In ten years of many distant we are having change to different speech by fast comparison and through air will hit mark.
I am work by center and by side and ALL THINGS are using writing to become Arabic and English. Interpret this now that understandable new words are asked for many times.
Author seems to be interchanging the Internet and WWW. Although the US govt may be responsible for some of the foundings of the internet, we have CERN to thank for the WWW.
i'd much rather have atcs referring to a jet than to l'avion d'le reaction;-)
Basque has this "particle building" structure, and there are native speakers. Esperanto simply uses Latin word roots instead.
Does anyone have any critical reading skills anymore?
The article says "written Chinese". Written Chinese for Mandarin and Cantonese and Fukien and etc. etc. is the same (in China). The exception is traditional used in Taiwan and Hong Kong but once you go beyond the subset of characters that is simplified Chinese, guess what, it's all traditional. And in many cases you can recognize the simplified if you already know the traditional as it's usually obviously and predictably simplified from the traditional form.
And what do web sites use: written or spoken language? Oh yeah, written. So only written matters much for the web. This whole discussion about spoken Chinese being different is a bizarro Red Herring.
And what does the article actually say? There will soon be more web pages in Chinese than in English, which given the population and economic power of China isn't even surprising or suspect as a claim.
Does this mean that you will not find any (or even as many as today's) English language web pages? Of course not.
It certainly might mean that you could in the near future miss something relevant or important that was only published in Chinese if you can't read Chinese. This happens today if you don't read English. This is simply true based on numbers.
So it wouldn't be a bad idea for a (wàiguó rén) to (xué) some (Zhngguóhuà) if you want to be economically relevant in the future (/. only UTF-8 apparently?).
Yes, I know. I have several of them. Have you used them much to try to look up unfamiliar words you've heard but not seen written? I've found it pretty difficult. Certainly orders of magnitude harder than doing the same thing in, say, English, where I can usually guess the first few letters of a word in a couple of tries, and I probably get it in one try more than half the time.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Hey, I lived there for a year or so, I can still dream in Chinese. I do have some exposure to this.
Here's the thing. Many characters have a phonetic component. Not all, but many. There's not necessarily any way to tell, looking at a character, which of its components will be phonetic, or if a given component is phonetic, how it's pronounced (some are pronounced a couple of ways). But if you know how something is pronounced, that doesn't give you a clue as to which of many characters it'll be. As a result, if you haven't seen it written, you can't easily guess which of many things starting that way to look up; you can spend quite a while looking through a dictionary, and find a handful of words which might or might not be the one you heard.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
I have seen people speaking Chinese resort to air-writing characters on multiple occasions.
Or, if they're witty, finger-writing a character on their palm and then showing you their palm. But it's funny because the issue comes up often enough to be instantly recognizable.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Yes, I know. I have these dictionaries. I have tried to find things on multiple occasions and gotten stumped because I couldn't figure out which subset of the character was officially "the radical" that was being used to index it. And yes, I've used pinyin too. The pinyin section of the dictionary for a syllable might have a dozen or more characters for that syllable, each of which has multiple two-character combinations that give other meanings, so I have to check every character to see whether one of those combinations is the one I'm looking for... It's not a very effective technique. It's doable, but compared to an English dictionary, it's unduly painful.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Chinese characters *are* indispensable
total bullshit, just ask any pair of the growing number of Chinese who happen to speak another language.
this fact, by the way, is behind the shitstorm that is ultimately responsible for TFA.
Yeah, funny site. And Ian Dury once again shows his lyrical genius...
First sentence I plugged in was "Hit me with your rhythm stick" (don't know where that came from in my sub-conscious!).
The instant "equilibrium" was "Hit me with your rhythm stick".
Ian Dury scores the identity property for Japanese-English translation equilibrium - woooooaaaaaah ...
Everything about the parent is wrong. Rather than a serious comment, it should be considered a monument to the inane things that people write when they're horribly misinformed.
The Learner's Progress: A Journey out of Ignorance
Read a dictionary <---------------------- YOU ARE HERE
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V
Read a Wikipedia article on the subject
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V
Read an introductory text on the subject
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V
Read an advanced text on the subject
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V
Read current articles on the subject
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V
Correspond with experts on the subject
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V
Perform research on the subject
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V
You are incorrect about tonality and Japanese. There are a number of words in Japanese that, when written without the Chinese characters, are identical except for the tone. Some examples are 'hashi' (bridge or chopsticks), and 'kami' (god, paper or hair depending on the tone).
Wait, are you saying that two people speaking Mandarin can't really understand each other properly without writing things down? That's ridiculous. Languages (other than sign languages) are first spoken languages, and then written languages. If you can write down what was spoken (including tones), you should be able to understand as much as was spoken.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
It was Adolph Hitler, who, in the 30's, mandated to keep the German language pure by removing all common words whose origin was a language other than German.
That's probably because although people from different regions use the same written language, they pronounce the characters completely differently.
This is similar to strong regional dialects (although with much greater differences).
Spoken Chinese actually comprises of four major regional varieties: Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu, and Min. These are basically different languages that just happen to be written down exactly the same. So when people from these regions meet, they often use writing to do the translating.
It was Lu Xun: "If the sinographs are not destroyed, China will certainly perish!"
Even before him, people have been trying to abolish Chinese characters in favour of a phonetic script. It worked in Vietnam and Korea, and worked to a point in Japan. So far, it has completely failed for the Chinese language, though.
BTW, they are not ideographs, they are phono-semantic compounds.
Your perspective is so incomplete, western and biased that I can only laugh at your post.
While I don't claim to have published original research in linguistics, I am at least capable of making and defending claims based upon facts and personal knowledge...
When a read of slashdot objects to something in a comment, there are the following levels of response one can make:
1. Anonymously attack the comment's author in a generic personal attack, devoid of context
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7. Make a specific claim of factual error
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13. Politely, publicly, cite specific fallacies, offering references to to back up a counter-claim
I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader where Anonymous Coward's comment fits in.
I stand by my comments (with exception to my *previously posted* correction)...
it seems the Chinese powers-that-be have concluded that the purity of the Chinese language needs to be preserved.
French?
Have gnu, will travel.
Does anyone really believe that the despots running Beijing are all-that interested in "preserving the purity of the Chinese language?"
More likely, they feel the need to keep their people under their thumb by further restricting communications with the outside world.
Regards;
increasing the amount of Chinese content on the Internet will not cause it to be any more "popular" than it is now. Most non-Chinese speaking people probably wouldn't even notice the increase in Chinese language content.
I have had no exposure to learning Esperanto. However, I do speak (in varying degrees of fluency) English, German, Dutch, French and a smidgen of Spanish and Italian.
With this, I can actually read Esperanto! Not every word, but enough to get most of the meaning of a text. I'm sure that just by reading enough text, I'd become passable in an hour. There is a very large bias in Esperanto to the mid-European languages.
One of the great ironies of history is that Hiragana is (post some reform in I think the 1950s) one of the most phonetic writing systems around - you can look at any word written in it and immediately read it. The Japanese have one of the best alphabets in the world - and it's used almost exclusively by schoolchildren.
I am trolling
I stand corrected, but no need to be inflammatory.
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
If you look at the wiki URL I cited, you'll immediately notice the problem. Chinese language IS a very terse and highly economical language with many symbols, sounds, and tones. In speech, people *disambiguate* words by pairing the words with "word-complements" (I don't know what they're called) to achieve the intended meaning. HOWEVER, the pairings are limited to daily use. Even then, there are still ambiguities. Take, for example, the word "shishi" in Pinyin. You get 23 matches. Even if you add tones, you STILL have ambiguities. If you look at the word list, they're not rare, right? If I say (in Pinyin) "shi4shi4 nan2 liao4", what does it mean? Is it "affairs of the world are hard to guess"? Or "everything is hard to guess"? Or "the state of the affair is hard to guess"? Or "affair of this world is hard to abandon"? In this situation, people disambiguate even further by putting in more "word-complements". Note that the phrase is a common complaint! It is so context specific.
Also, languages are NOT limited to spoken language. How about poems? Stories? Formalities? Jokes? Puns? If the words are written, especially in poems or terse narrative, they can be paired in almost every way and can create a very very powerful poem or narrative. Or puns! Oh man! There are so many puns based on this very fact.
Now, can you say that Chinese character is dispensable again?
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Error 500: Internal sig error
No, not just dialect. Pairs of Shanghai or Mandarin speakers fall back on writing characters to resolve ambiguities in the spoken language. It's not something you'd see several times in a single conversation or anything, but I saw it happen "several" times while living there for a year. Sometimes there's simply no way to tell which of two words is meant without resorting to that.
Same thing happens in English, though more rarely, because most of our homophones aren't easy to confuse in context, but you still see it sometimes. Though we can, of course, just spell it out. Thus, "meet with two Es", rather than writing it down.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Ultimately, it doesnt' matter if China reaches its full potential - provided it's able to dominate everyone else.
That, at least, is how history has gone. The Khans could have done oh-such more had they used different methods of (say) construction and/or labor concentration/slavery, but they didn't... but they were still unarguably successful.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
It sounds to me like what you're saying is that because the written form has more information than the spoken form (i.e., the large number of potential homophones are disambiguated), that there has developed a sort of literature-culture, which takes advantage of this fact to be more concise when written. Because that information is missing when spoken, it cannot be properly translated into spoken language or pinyin.
It's obvious that this sort of literature-culture, like the poem you linked to, cannot exist without the written characters, because, as you point out, you lose information.
However, what percentage of the actual language as used takes advantage of this? Spoken language outweighs written language probably by a factor of thousands to one (if not more). Even of the written language, how many signs, or instruction manuals, or websites, or textbooks, or even novels even use it? And of those that do, how many would be just as good without it?
Consider it as a cost-benefits analysis. The benefit of having the different characters include (1) that it's cool, (2) that it enables this more concise "written-only" language, which I'm sure is an enjoyable art form for those who know it.
Now consider the cost: rather than learning to write 20-some odd letters, children have to grind through learning to read and write thousands upon thousands of characters just to be able to read a newspaper. Not everyone who has the cognitive ability for pinyin has the cognitive ability for the characters, so that has to have a major impact on literacy rates. And even for people who can grind through and manage a decent amount of characters, how much does that turn them off to reading and learning? And even for those who can learn 10,000 characters, consider what else that time could have been spent learning, rather than learning the characters. And consider the barrier-to-entry for people trying to learn Mandarin and travel in China. Is being able to make a poem of all "shi" really worth all that?
So, is the Chinese character dispensable for this written-only literature? Of course not. Is it dispensable for Chinese as a whole? Absolutely.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
I always assumed that emoji would become the dominant internet language, no?
Languages are often tied to sets of stories and world views and cultures. So, there is more to learning a language in a broad way than knowing how to say basic things in it like "Can you direct me to the American Embassy?". :-) A diversity of cultures might be an important thing. A diversity of languages and their subcultures might make communications less efficienct in some ways, but it might make things more efficient and more interesting in others (the benefits of variety). For an extreme example of that cultural link to stories, see the Star Trek: TNG epoisode "Darmok". Or search on "One rice thousand gold". :-)
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Give a man a ghoti, and he'll eat for a day...
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Although efficiency in learning a writing system is important, it isn't the only factor of importance in continuing to use a writing system. A more important factor is cultural literacy. If the Chinese and Japanese were to fundamentally change their writing system there would be several generations of struggle with re-writing everyday things in the new system. Imagine everything around you, newspapers, signs, food packing, etc. and then imagine all the work it would take to convert to a new writing system. However, once the conversion was complete there would be a problem for those people only literate in the new system if they wanted access to something in the old writing system that wasn't translated into the new system. Although a lot of material would be translated, a great amount of old material would be left out. Imagine if you wanted to read your grandfather's poetry or your grandmother's diary but were unable to.
I haven't read Unger's books, but I read an editorial he wrote about Japanese search and his suggestion was very out of touch with the realities of information technology.
This article is practically a troll. Along with the data being somewhat doubtful, the claim that 'all countries have watched the unregulated global nature of the internet erode traditional cultural values and the integrity of national languages' has no basis that I know of. Is there a single language for which the integrity has been eroded?
Nicholas Ostler has written two books on lingua franca which discuss the role English is currently playing as one. One of the interesting bits of data he points out is that while there are more native speakers of Chinese than English, there are more second language users of English than any other language in the world. He also mentions that there are more people learning English in China than the rest of the world combined. He discusses what it takes for a language to become a lingua franca, and currently Chinese is not in the right conditions to become one, at least not world wide like English has become.
To be fair a lot of Unger's writing suffers from being written a 'long' time ago, in computer terms.
It's kind of funny; in one of his books he is explaining how burdensome storing Chinese characters is by pointing out that storing even a chopped-down Chinese character font set would require 2 megabytes. He emphasizes that "that's TWO MILLION BYTES".
Of course 2MB is insignificant amount of storage for many (but not all) computer applications, but it certainly doesn't compare to good old 7-bit ASCII.
Chinese characters are just completely unwieldy for anything but writing calligraphy on wood blocks (and I do admit that they can be read handily once you learn them). It's more storage, more memory, more font scaling issues, more trouble categorizing and searching text due to lack of good alphabeticalness, harder to OCR (I assume), and either harder or impossible to fit into things like typewriters, dot-matrix printing applications, and 7-segment LCD/LED displays. What about Morse code? Care to try to learn a 2000-character version? Most people have enough trouble with the regular <40 character version. What about those handy rubber stamps that are capable of being encoded to any word in the English language just by turning the little wheels? What about those nice, cheap 7-segment LCD/LED displays that can display the whole English language with a handful of simple blinkenleds? I can buy my daughter a set of 26 magnetic letters and she can instantly write anything on the fridge using them. If English was spelled phonemically like Japanese kana, she could spell any word she knows and write any word she hears with just the 40 or so syllabic characters they already have.
As I said before, it's almost a shame that computer technology advanced, because it didn't force script simplification that would have had great benefits everywhere, not just in storage space, or even in computers. For example, at work I do high-powered laser marking for industrial products. My scanner controller only needs ASCII to mark the entire English and many other languages, and all numbers I might need. I don't even know if it would be possible to make a laser marking machine like mine capable of marking Chinese characters, or an OCR system capable of reading them. So what do the Chinese do? They probably use the Latin alphabet in situations like this.
If you, as a society, continue to use Chinese characters except for those areas where they are unwieldy (that is, nowadays, practically everywhere that matters), then why are you using them anyway?
It is doubtful that this phrase will ever reach equilibrium.
Yes, I know it repeated a set of 4. That's not equilibrium.
I think you should learn a bit into Chinese language and characters to understand how indispensable the characters really is. Consider English example of "bat", "bet", "bad", "bed", which are voiced very similarly. If spoken by non-native speakers with heavy accent, these words may be confused with "pat", "pet", or "pad". (Even in English, some accent-heavy people pronounce "pen" and "pin" identically!) A Chinese analog would disambiguate with "baseball bat" instead of just "bat" and so on. The problem is that such situation is much worse in Chinese than in English and it occurs even in daily use. This is why that most words are represented by two characters. Note that the pairing does not introduce new characters and thereby not adding to the "grinding". It's just adding new complexity to the language. Reading newspapers would require only about 4,000 characters (out of about 100K total) with about 300 tone-syllable combinations, giving about 13 of each left for disambiguation. Knowing about 2K is enough for daily conversation. Mind you these are still common use, including in formal signs or speeches. This is NOT uncommon as you've claimed.
Also, in Chinese, using more refined characters would show your erudition, politeness, or even social status. Politeness can mean everything for Chinese. So, you see, language isn't restricted for informational purposes only. It can also convey mood, politeness, formality, etc.
Note that new words are formed by juxtaposing two or more characters in an unusual way. With each character giving its individual meaning, the people could guess the meaning of the new word. If the people are deprived of the character and, say, have to read the pinyin, the meaning wouldn't be as obvious. Example: Xi3 yi1 = laundry becomes xi3 yi1 ji1 = washing machine. If the people don't know the characters, the meaning of xiyiji isn't immediately obvious. This fact makes Chinese language very intuitive and even facilitates learning. Children in China cope with this complexity pretty well. Their literacy rate is 97% in 2010.
The barrier of entry is as much as East Asian people learning English. Chinese and English are two completely different languages. For East Asian people, such barrier isn't as much, akin to the barrier of entry for learning French for English-speaking people.
Therefore, Chinese characters are indispensable.
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