If there was an award for talking out of you're ass, you'd probably stand a good chance of winning. As an American studying Chinese, I can say almost certainly that Chinese is a far, far simpler language then English.
Chinese, as far as I know (and I have had a couple of Chinese collegues), Chinese does not posses any of the advantages: it has a very large character set, a difficult prononciation with variations in how you pronounce a word and no easy to cathegorise grammar.
Wrong, wrong wrong. I don't know exactly what you mean by 'easy to categories grammar' but Chinese grammar itself is much, much simpler then English grammar. There are regional differences in pronunciation of Chinese, just as there are regional differences in the way English is spoke. There are no changes due to grammar however. Every word has the same sound regardless of it's grammatical frame (unlike English with "drive, drove, driving driven," and worse "is, be, being, was"). Also, when using the Pin-Yin system of Romanization pronunciation is not difficult at all. Certainly not any more difficult that that of a Chinese person or any one else for that matter trying to speak English.
Finally, Chinese characters are for the most part made from smaller characters and easily recognizable/memorable subcomponents. Writing and remembering characters is like spelling on a grid rather then on a straight line. Writing and memorizing them isn't difficult at all once you get the hang of it.
Of course, getting them into computers has been a problem in the past, but, modern technology has allowed their use pretty much without problems.
unless you propose to teach the entire population pinyin(?) I believe it is called - Chinese language spelled out phonetically in roman characters (think Beijing,Hong Kong,Mao Zedong, etc
Every literate person in mainland china knows pin-yin It's a part of the standard curiculm. This isn't the case in Taiwan though, where people use bopomofo keyboards (I think) as well as pinyin stuff bopomofo is a system for encoding Chinese based on the sound, like katakana and hiragana in Japan.
Certainly in the computer language everyone uses the same protocols and standards and coding languages.
If the 'real world' becomes anything like the computer world, people will continue stay incompatibly with each other while mindless zealots crop up on either side and duke it on news groups. Witch I guess would be an improvement over the current state where we just shoot each other.
The Chinese government pretty much did "end" when Mao died. Deng Xiaoping and the others who took over made a lot of changes.
And when you add 'eventually' to the sentence... well, I don't think that there's much of a chance for this government to last more then a few hundred years. None of the dynasties ever lasted that long. I don't know why this authoritarian government would either.
The vast majority of computers in china use Qwerty keyboards. Then an intelligent layer between the raw input and the application converts it into Kanji or whatever. They even work on context (at least the Microsoft software I have does). so if you type in "shi" you might get 'is', but if you type in "shi jian" the first "shi" will be the word for 'time'.
If you have a higher-end Nokia phone you know what that's like. You can type regular English on a 9 key keyboard and you only have to hit each key once. It's a rather weird feeling, but it works.
Actually 'intelligent layers' are good enough that Trendy teens in Japan can actually type kanji on telephone keypads!
Not be an ass (like I usualy am) but I just want to point out that these marine biologiests probably have a lot more experiance with sea life and more data about this thing then some slashdotter who's read a Yahoo! news artical.
Do you have any idea how many people live in Chinese cities? Hundreds of millions. There is a hell of a lot of Zhongwen on the web already, despite "This show I saw on PBS".
Anyway, no culture or language is going to have much "influence" on the web outside of their own worlds. English speaking people are going to read English web pages and Chinese people are going to read Chinese web pages. It really makes no difference to anyone else.
Japanese cannot really read Chinese stuff. First of all, mainlanders use simplified Chinese, whereas Japanese use older style for their Kanji. And secondly Chinese use way more characters.
It's actually easier for Chinese people to read Japanese stuff then for Japanese to read Chinese. (except for the Hiragana and Katakana, of course)
Not to sound biased here, but isn't the Internet mostly in English already
It may have been at some point but it certanly isn't any more. There's a lot out there in other languages, but you just don't see it taht much. Unless you go looking for Jpop or something:P
French culture would still be french if english words were used. Well. Maybe it would lose some of it's snootyness.
But I really don't think having the rudementary english needed to get into higher education in china is really going to hurt their culture. Fuck. Mao pretty much destroyed traditional chinese culture anyway. Anything that might change is only going to be a few decades old anyway. Anything that's the same as it always was isn't going to change at all
Don't forget India. (and Pakistan). Both have large English speaking populations (as a second language for a lot of people, though) India, in fact, uses English in the government. I'm not sure about Pakistan though.
Of course, unlike the US, England, etc, India has lots of native languages as well.
Oh, one other thing. All Chinese students need to have minimum competency in English in order to get into collage. More people may speak Chinese well, but English is really starting to become a sort of lingua fracia. Of course, soon enough instant translation will take over and the idea of learning another language will be a quaint little hobby.
China hasn't really been a 'communistic' state since Mao died. Nowadays they're trying to emulate western Europe's 'socialism', but with out that 'intellectual freedom and democracy' stuff that might cause them to lose power.
Most of the Commodity PC stuff we Americans get comes from Taiwan, witch is run by the legitimate Capitalist Chinese government, witch fled there after the country got taken over by the Communists. and by "Legitimate" I mean "Liked by the West". They still call themselves "The Republic of China" (Even though they didn't have elections until the 1990s.) In fact, up until the 1970's they actually got to sit in on the UN security console in the "china" spot. Now they're not in the UN at all.
Someone else mentioned making knockoffs of Taiwanese hardware, though. But I don't know about a PC clone for $9, even in mainland china. I'd bet you could make a decent 'console' type machine with that much there, though.
Look, you can learn what 'color' and 'font' mean without knowing the rest of it. And almost all localization schemes still allow you to type in the roman space.
So while yeh, some things will be intuitive for English speakers, particularly things like APIs. while "font" might be easy javax.crypto.EncryptedPrivateKeyInfo (of course, Java does in fact allow Unicode for variable and class names, so you could have like.. as a package name).
So, for a while I think most actual coding will be done in English, but that doesn't mean most website content will be. You could always have one web guy and one content guy as well. Or, for example you could use off the self software and fill it with localized content, (for example slashdot.jp).
And lets not forget, Ruby, a programming language quickly gaining popularity was actually crated in Japan, where it's now more popular then Perl.
Actually, after Mao died the Deng Xiaoping and his cohorts were pretty freaked out by what happened and they began to liberalize (in the British sense of the word... like free markets and the like) both economically (Deng actually had a slogan "It's not bad to get rich") and politically. But the Tiananmen Square massacre scared them shitless, especially when people other then students began to get involved. It was suppressed. And given the background (having experienced china in the 1940s and through Mao's crap... Deng had to endure a couple of struggle sessions himself) It's easy to see why they might have been afraid.
The problem is that when China looked around them to see what was successful they saw the Authoritarian capitalist states like Singapore, Korea and Taiwan. And they figured that it worked well. Taiwan has become a real democracy now though.
I think after the shock of Tiananmen wares off and things start to calm down again the restrictions will once again start to come off. Well I hope. Unlike Singapore, it's a pretty big country to hold with an iron fist.
I actualy had an ICQ conversation in spanish with someone, using babelfish. I took spanish in highschool so I could sort of recognize the structure of what I was sending out. It didn't work very well, but we were able to talk.
IBM's 'alphaworks' site had a english->chinese translation system (a long with other languages) online that actualy worked pretty well (or at least seemed to) Actualy working out the grammar as well as the words so you wouldn't end up with incoherent jiberish
I guess my 'subtle' commented didn't get noticed. This guy, who's username is "gayrod" has a post at +5 simply because he claimed to be a lawyer and inserted a fake URL in his sig.
I mean, I know slashdot mods can be stupid, but this is just unreal.
Palm patented graffiti themselves, so its not like anyone else could use it before this. Now other people will actually have a chance to use the technology.
There was a slashdot article a couple years ago about a guy suing M$ over multithreading witch he patented in the 80s. I don't know what happened, but I suspect the guy lost. It's also possible that M$ just paid him off.
This probably won't hurt palm to much. The most likely outcome actually is for Graffiti to be ported to winCE machines for the same price, witch use a somewhat inferior glyph recognition system (they didn't change the way any of the letters were shaped or draw with a regular pen).
I tried to lookup the actual story, but slashdot seems to post a story with the strings: "microsoft", and "lawsuit" just about every day...
Slashdot Mirror
If there was an award for talking out of you're ass, you'd probably stand a good chance of winning. As an American studying Chinese, I can say almost certainly that Chinese is a far, far simpler language then English.
Chinese, as far as I know (and I have had a couple of Chinese collegues), Chinese does not posses any of the advantages: it has a very large character set, a difficult prononciation with variations in how you pronounce a word and no easy to cathegorise grammar.
Wrong, wrong wrong. I don't know exactly what you mean by 'easy to categories grammar' but Chinese grammar itself is much, much simpler then English grammar. There are regional differences in pronunciation of Chinese, just as there are regional differences in the way English is spoke. There are no changes due to grammar however. Every word has the same sound regardless of it's grammatical frame (unlike English with "drive, drove, driving driven," and worse "is, be, being, was"). Also, when using the Pin-Yin system of Romanization pronunciation is not difficult at all. Certainly not any more difficult that that of a Chinese person or any one else for that matter trying to speak English.
Finally, Chinese characters are for the most part made from smaller characters and easily recognizable/memorable subcomponents. Writing and remembering characters is like spelling on a grid rather then on a straight line. Writing and memorizing them isn't difficult at all once you get the hang of it.
Of course, getting them into computers has been a problem in the past, but, modern technology has allowed their use pretty much without problems.
Actualy, newer versions of bind support some sort of internationalization. even though it totaly violates standards.
unless you propose to teach the entire population pinyin(?) I believe it is called - Chinese language spelled out phonetically in roman characters (think Beijing,Hong Kong,Mao Zedong, etc
Every literate person in mainland china knows pin-yin It's a part of the standard curiculm. This isn't the case in Taiwan though, where people use bopomofo keyboards (I think) as well as pinyin stuff bopomofo is a system for encoding Chinese based on the sound, like katakana and hiragana in Japan.
Certainly in the computer language everyone uses the same protocols and standards and coding languages.
If the 'real world' becomes anything like the computer world, people will continue stay incompatibly with each other while mindless zealots crop up on either side and duke it on news groups. Witch I guess would be an improvement over the current state where we just shoot each other.
Not Waid-Gails. I mean, that has gay (phoneticaly) right in it? I mean you don't even have to alter it much.
It's all about the pinyin. but without the tone indicators. Tone indicators are for posers and real Chinese people.
The Chinese government pretty much did "end" when Mao died. Deng Xiaoping and the others who took over made a lot of changes.
And when you add 'eventually' to the sentence... well, I don't think that there's much of a chance for this government to last more then a few hundred years. None of the dynasties ever lasted that long. I don't know why this authoritarian government would either.
(you're supposed to run any non-ascii java source through the "native2ascii" tool supplied with the jdk before passing it to javac)
Really? javac -encoding seemed to work fine before.
The vast majority of computers in china use Qwerty keyboards. Then an intelligent layer between the raw input and the application converts it into Kanji or whatever. They even work on context (at least the Microsoft software I have does). so if you type in "shi" you might get 'is', but if you type in "shi jian" the first "shi" will be the word for 'time'.
If you have a higher-end Nokia phone you know what that's like. You can type regular English on a 9 key keyboard and you only have to hit each key once. It's a rather weird feeling, but it works.
Actually 'intelligent layers' are good enough that Trendy teens in Japan can actually type kanji on telephone keypads!
like &12345; where '12345' is replaced by the character code. I usually use M$ word, save as HTML and then cut out the produced HTML entity codes.
Not be an ass (like I usualy am) but I just want to point out that these marine biologiests probably have a lot more experiance with sea life and more data about this thing then some slashdotter who's read a Yahoo! news artical.
the chinese language isn't spoken by non-ethnically chinese people, only by emigrants from china.
Ni shuo shen.ma?
Do you have any idea how many people live in Chinese cities? Hundreds of millions. There is a hell of a lot of Zhongwen on the web already, despite "This show I saw on PBS".
Anyway, no culture or language is going to have much "influence" on the web outside of their own worlds. English speaking people are going to read English web pages and Chinese people are going to read Chinese web pages. It really makes no difference to anyone else.
Japanese cannot really read Chinese stuff. First of all, mainlanders use simplified Chinese, whereas Japanese use older style for their Kanji. And secondly Chinese use way more characters.
It's actually easier for Chinese people to read Japanese stuff then for Japanese to read Chinese. (except for the Hiragana and Katakana, of course)
Not to sound biased here, but isn't the Internet mostly in English already
:P
It may have been at some point but it certanly isn't any more. There's a lot out there in other languages, but you just don't see it taht much. Unless you go looking for Jpop or something
French culture would still be french if english words were used. Well. Maybe it would lose some of it's snootyness.
But I really don't think having the rudementary english needed to get into higher education in china is really going to hurt their culture. Fuck. Mao pretty much destroyed traditional chinese culture anyway. Anything that might change is only going to be a few decades old anyway. Anything that's the same as it always was isn't going to change at all
Don't forget India. (and Pakistan). Both have large English speaking populations (as a second language for a lot of people, though) India, in fact, uses English in the government. I'm not sure about Pakistan though.
Of course, unlike the US, England, etc, India has lots of native languages as well.
Oh, one other thing. All Chinese students need to have minimum competency in English in order to get into collage. More people may speak Chinese well, but English is really starting to become a sort of lingua fracia. Of course, soon enough instant translation will take over and the idea of learning another language will be a quaint little hobby.
China hasn't really been a 'communistic' state since Mao died. Nowadays they're trying to emulate western Europe's 'socialism', but with out that 'intellectual freedom and democracy' stuff that might cause them to lose power.
Most of the Commodity PC stuff we Americans get comes from Taiwan, witch is run by the legitimate Capitalist Chinese government, witch fled there after the country got taken over by the Communists. and by "Legitimate" I mean "Liked by the West". They still call themselves "The Republic of China" (Even though they didn't have elections until the 1990s.) In fact, up until the 1970's they actually got to sit in on the UN security console in the "china" spot. Now they're not in the UN at all.
Someone else mentioned making knockoffs of Taiwanese hardware, though. But I don't know about a PC clone for $9, even in mainland china. I'd bet you could make a decent 'console' type machine with that much there, though.
Look, you can learn what 'color' and 'font' mean without knowing the rest of it. And almost all localization schemes still allow you to type in the roman space.
.. as a package name).
So while yeh, some things will be intuitive for English speakers, particularly things like APIs. while "font" might be easy javax.crypto.EncryptedPrivateKeyInfo (of course, Java does in fact allow Unicode for variable and class names, so you could have like
So, for a while I think most actual coding will be done in English, but that doesn't mean most website content will be. You could always have one web guy and one content guy as well. Or, for example you could use off the self software and fill it with localized content, (for example slashdot.jp).
And lets not forget, Ruby, a programming language quickly gaining popularity was actually crated in Japan, where it's now more popular then Perl.
Actually, after Mao died the Deng Xiaoping and his cohorts were pretty freaked out by what happened and they began to liberalize (in the British sense of the word... like free markets and the like) both economically (Deng actually had a slogan "It's not bad to get rich") and politically. But the Tiananmen Square massacre scared them shitless, especially when people other then students began to get involved. It was suppressed. And given the background (having experienced china in the 1940s and through Mao's crap... Deng had to endure a couple of struggle sessions himself) It's easy to see why they might have been afraid.
The problem is that when China looked around them to see what was successful they saw the Authoritarian capitalist states like Singapore, Korea and Taiwan. And they figured that it worked well. Taiwan has become a real democracy now though.
I think after the shock of Tiananmen wares off and things start to calm down again the restrictions will once again start to come off. Well I hope. Unlike Singapore, it's a pretty big country to hold with an iron fist.
I actualy had an ICQ conversation in spanish with someone, using babelfish. I took spanish in highschool so I could sort of recognize the structure of what I was sending out. It didn't work very well, but we were able to talk.
IBM's 'alphaworks' site had a english->chinese translation system (a long with other languages) online that actualy worked pretty well (or at least seemed to) Actualy working out the grammar as well as the words so you wouldn't end up with incoherent jiberish
jin tian xue xi han yu!
I guess my 'subtle' commented didn't get noticed. This guy, who's username is "gayrod" has a post at +5 simply because he claimed to be a lawyer and inserted a fake URL in his sig.
I mean, I know slashdot mods can be stupid, but this is just unreal.
Palm patented graffiti themselves, so its not like anyone else could use it before this. Now other people will actually have a chance to use the technology.
There was a slashdot article a couple years ago about a guy suing M$ over multithreading witch he patented in the 80s. I don't know what happened, but I suspect the guy lost. It's also possible that M$ just paid him off.
This probably won't hurt palm to much. The most likely outcome actually is for Graffiti to be ported to winCE machines for the same price, witch use a somewhat inferior glyph recognition system (they didn't change the way any of the letters were shaped or draw with a regular pen).
I tried to lookup the actual story, but slashdot seems to post a story with the strings: "microsoft", and "lawsuit" just about every day...