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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.
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
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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Yes, that's true. The internet >> WWW.
Sorry, but appending The Internet onto the World Wide Web requires root privileges.
#DeleteChrome
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.
In ten years time we will have....
In the 1950s, we were only 10 years away from having flying cars. The same was said about AI, voice recognition and a million other things in 1990. There have been gradual improvements, but nothing remotely "perfected", to use your words. The first 90% is always the easiest to obtain, the last 10% of perfection is often never achieved. That might be "good enough", but it is never even close to "perfected".
The whole story seems overly sensationalized. In 10 years, China may be poorer than they are now because of imports from yet another 3rd world country being cheaper than theirs. Or they may be the overlords. Or they may be in a nuclear war with the USA. Or Russia. In 2000, if you would have told me that the US government would have created the current semi-fascist state we are in, I wouldn't have believed it either. Your best for 10 years from now is not to bet at all.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
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.
200 years ago French was the language of world diplomacy, and for centuries before that Latin was the common language of Europe.
Don't get complacent.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
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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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.