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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."
There might be more data in Chinese, but English will still be the standard of international communication.
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).
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.
And so we're once more divided. What's the value of an international network when every country insists on their own language?
Well, the scientists refused to use COBOL because its a wee bit lacking in the numerical analysis area, and the bean counters refused to use FORTRAN because they don't like expressing bean counts using floating point... Its not exactly a new problem.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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?
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?
""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..
Yes, that's true. The internet >> WWW.
And, on behalf of the US military, you're welcome.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
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.
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Beyond that I'm not sure why it would be Chinese. China has a huge number of people, but they don't really speak the same language, the words are written more or less the same way, but good luck using the same dialect all over China. Same reason why India won't use any of their languages as the default.
I fully expect them to fail as between India and the US you've got nearly a full quarter of the world's populatation there alone, and we both use English as our language for government and such.
French or Spanish could do that, but it's a pretty long shot that any of those could over take English for such matters. Considering how English is more or less the official language of quite a few things these days, whether or not that was a wise decision in the first place.
original article in chinese:
http://www.gapp.gov.cn/cms/html/21/508/201012/708310.html
gizmag quote from TFA: The General Administration of Press and Publication web site announced last week that the mixing of foreign words in Chinese language publications without an accompanying Chinese language translation has been banned. The ban is all encompassing and includes the names of people and places, acronyms, abbreviations and common phrases, all of which have become increasingly common over recent years. /endquote
by now, i have been waiting for 10 minutes for that chinese page to load and it still hasn't finished loading the title of the page. If they expect to become the dominant language on the internet they better stop that damn Great Firewall and get some wide internet tubes over there.
root@127.0.0.1
Chinese (pinyin) is easier to learn and understand than English. I'd be surprised if the next 20 years didn't see a move towards the international language being Chinese (pinyin). The only issue with it is that pinyin is ambiguous (homonyms are numerous) and that the language itself is simple enough to cause confusion. It's entirely free of conjugation, and the grammar is much more open.
Of course, spoken language and hanzi are harder than English, but if people learn it for written communication only, pinyin would be easy, and natively understood by what will quickly be the largest economy on the planet (by far).
Learn to love Alaska
Yes, that's true. The internet >> WWW.
Sorry, but appending The Internet onto the World Wide Web requires root privileges.
#DeleteChrome
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.
... 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.
A decade ago when I was looking for documentation for ruby I found lots of sites in Japanese.
Fortunately the code snippets were clear enough that it I survived not being able to read the commentary around the code.
In my little corner of the world, I only find Chinese language content when I go out of my way looking for it. With some regularity I run into Dutch, German, Japanese, and Russian sites when looking for various information.
I suspect that there is more to my not running into Chinese websites than just because they are not in English. Then again, my internet usage may be a sufficiently unusual pattern to be meaningless in the big picture.
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You might start by learning the difference between Kanji and Hanzi.
Lesson two is how not to be a stupid gwailo and tattoo yourself with it.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
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.
With some regularity I run into Dutch, German, Japanese, and Russian sites when looking for various information.
Heh, "various information".
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Every language you know boosts your brain's capacity to learn, to think, to grow and to survive the ravages of age. So those who are divided die young and stupid, whilst those who are united - not by a single common tounge but by a thirst for flexible communication - will be the supplanters. I don't see the problem.
Do you use a single language on the computer? Probably not. Your OS is likely written in C, you'll have applications in C++ and C#, possibly Java. If you've high-power numerical apps, there's a good chance Fortran will be there as well. The web apps you use will be in Java, Javascript, ASP, PHP and Ruby. Is this a problem? No. It is a strength. Those developers get to pick the best language for the task, they aren't limited and closeted.
The French find that rock music is best sung in English because the word structure and phonemes are perfect for very biting sounds. The French language doesn't have those harsh sounds, so other styles have developed there, which are themselves superb and could never be achieved in English. German is also good for rock, which is why Doro Pesch is rightly considered a Heavy Metal Goddess, but it's also better for brief speech, which may be an advantage if Internet traffic is charged per packet. Internet Telephony using English would be far more expensive than using German.
Variation is a strength, not a weakness.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Minor difference.
Having a site in a language different from English is one thing. Having a state policy to enforce the language on all websites is another.
In any case, the first to try to put a policy along these lines are not the chinese. If my memory serves me right the first country to try a national language policy for the internet and mandatory translations are actually the French more than 10 years ago. AFAIK they did not get very far... Plenty of sites with mixed language and plenty of English language sites under .fr.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
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.
A strange amount of php info is in Dutch, and Nginx still has a lot of documentations in Russian.
KDE has a fair amount of things in German. There is a strong FreeBSD community that posts in Japanese.
Not exactly a normal set of searches.
Work bio at MMWD
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.
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Error 500: Internal sig error
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.
Yes, that's true. The internet >> WWW.
Sorry, but appending The Internet onto the World Wide Web requires root privileges.
I believe OP was stating that the internet was shifted-right by the World Wide Web, clearly resulting in an internet that is less great than the original.
India has no defined national language. The two official languages for the entire country are Hindi, and... English. English is preferred in some situations because it does not disadvantage any specific culture where Hindi is not the dominant language in a region.
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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?
It's related to Japanese, Korean and a few other east-asian languages...
Japanese and Korean are not related to Chinese (they are drastically different from Chinese on pretty much every level you can think of!), although Japanese makes use of Chinese characters in its written language (albeit in a highly idiosyncratic way). North Korea has apparently done away with Chinese characters, and in South Korea their use is limited.